MEXICO: A mysterious message has been found in an underground cave which turned out to house the remains of a Jewish ritual bath, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said Wednesday.
Found during construction work for a nursery in Jerusalem, the ritual bath, or mikve, dates to the first century A.D. and features walls treated with ancient plaster.
Encoded in symbols and inscriptions, the puzzling message was written in mud, soot and carvings.
The inscriptions are in the ancient language of Aramaic — the language spoken in the time of Jesus — and written in cursive Hebrew script, which was customary at the end of the Second Temple period. This era spans about six hundred years, beginning in 530 B.C. and ending with the destruction of the second Jewish Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D.
“Such a concentration of inscriptions and symbols from the Second Temple period at one archaeological site, and in such a state of preservation, is rare and unique and most intriguing,” Royee Greenwald and Alexander Wiegmann, IAA excavation directors, said in statement.
Among the symbols that are drawn on the bath’s walls are a boat, palm trees and various plant species, and possibly the Jewish seven-branched candelabrum known as menorah.
Experts are trying to decipher the message — so far without much success.
“At this point in the research the inscriptions are a mystery,” the archaeologists said.
While some of the inscriptions might indicate names, the symbols appear to be common elements in the visual arts of the Second Temple period.
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