Searching for hidden medieval stories from Iceland

 

The island of the Sagas

Hidden and forgotten traces of Iceland’s history can be found in ancient, reused parchments.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

 

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“I follow Latin traces from Icelandic manuscripts, but the Latin written material in Iceland has been forgotten. Previous research has focused mostly on texts in Old Norse in Icelandic manuscripts,” said PhD research fellow Tom Lorenz.

 

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Credit: Tom Lorenz/NTNU

Iceland has a long and rich literary tradition. With its 380,000 inhabitants, Iceland has produced many great writers, and it is said that one in two Icelanders writes books. The literary tradition stretches all the way back to the Middle Ages.

“Previously, the theory was that Iceland was so dark and barren that the Icelanders had to fill their lives with storytelling and poetry to compensate for this. But Icelanders were certainly part of Europe and had a lot of contact with Britain, Germany, Denmark and Norway, among others,” said Tom Lorenz, a PhD research fellow at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU. He is hunting down hidden and forgotten pieces of the island of the Sagas’ literary history.

“The Icelanders were part of a common European culture, and Iceland has been a great knowledge society for a long time.”

Royal lineage

We can thank the Icelanders for our relatively good overview of the royal lineage in Norway, right from the early Viking Age up to the death of Magnus V Erlingsson in 1184.

Icelandic skalds were skilled and sought after, and Norwegian kings engaged skalds to ensure that their story and their feats would be told and passed on. Skalds were poets who composed one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry in alliterative verse, the other being Eddic poetry. Skaldic poems were traditionally composed to honour kings.

In the Middle Ages, the Icelanders wrote down these oral traditions both in Latin and in Old Norse. Snorri Sturluson was the last and most important in a long line of saga writers who wrote down the kings’ sagas in the 13th century.

This is how the kings’ sagas were preserved.

“In addition to sagas, eddaic poems, and skaldic verse, scientific literature and political treaties were also written in Iceland during the Middle Ages,” said Lorenz.

Valuable vellum

Books and texts from this period were written on parchment, which is animal skins that have been carefully processed so they can be written on.

In Iceland, only exclusive calfskin was used to make parchment. Calfskin parchment is called vellum, and it took dozens of calves to create enough vellum for one book.

Vellum was a very valuable material. If a book became worn out or obsolete, the parchments were reused. Among other things, some were used to make tools, and one fragment that has been preserved was made into a mitre – a type of headgear worn by the bishop of Skálholt in Iceland.

In addition, many parchments were reused as covers for new books.

Unique to Iceland

A common method for reusing old manuscript pages was to remove the original text by scraping and polishing so that the parchment could be used to create new books and manuscripts.

This is called a palimpsest.

“Palimpsests were common in the Middle Ages across Europe, and were particularly widespread in Iceland. Although literarily rich, Iceland was a poor country. The supply of expensive parchment was limited, while the demand was high because the Icelanders had much they wanted to communicate,” said Lorenz.

In Iceland, parchment was also reused for printing books after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century.

“The fact that there are printed palimpsest books in Iceland and not just handwritten palimpsest parchments is unique in a European context, and this has not been studied before!” Lorenz emphasized.

Abandoned Latin in favour of the vernacular

In Iceland, as elsewhere in Europe, texts and books were written in Latin during the Middle Ages, especially liturgical texts used in ecclesiastical contexts. Latin was the predominant written language of Catholic Europe.

But then came the rebellious priest Martin Luther, the man who started the great protest movement against the powerful Catholic Church.

In the wake of Martin Luther and the Reformation in 1517, many northern European countries converted to Protestantism, including Iceland between 1537 and 1550.

The Reformation brought an end to ecclesiastical manuscripts and books being written in Latin. The language of the common man was now to be used.

Latin script was scraped off existing parchments so they could be used for new texts written in Icelandic, and these became palimpsests.

The old text shines through

“In documents and books made from palimpsest parchments, fragments of the old, original text can sometimes be seen beneath the new text,” said Lorenz.

The texts and words that have been scraped away can also be retrieved using modern techniques, such as infrared rays, but quite a lot of the old text can often be read with the naked eye.

And it is in the hidden remnants of old Icelandic parchments written in Latin that Lorenz is searching for hidden and forgotten pieces of history.

He examines the preserved fragments from these ancient books and also studies the different forms of parchment recycling and reuse.

“My goal is to create virtual reconstructions of some of the ancient fragments that have survived to shed new light on previous eras’ culture and society,” said Lorenz.

However, this involves finding the remnants of the palimpsests, and they are few and far between.

“Hardly any Latin books from medieval Iceland have survived. Due to their rarity, recycled parchment from disassembled Latin books is one of our most important sources in the history of medieval Icelandic books,” said Lorenz.

Drained Iceland of medieval literature

“I follow Latin traces from Icelandic manuscripts, but the Latin written material has been forgotten. Previous research has focused mostly on texts in Old Norse in Icelandic manuscripts,” he said.

From the 17th century onwards, Old Norse texts became important in the building of identity, national pride and power in the Nordic countries.

In Denmark, the Icelander and archivist Árni Magnússon (1663-1730) was tasked with collecting medieval documents from both Iceland and the rest of the Nordic countries. At this time, Iceland was under Danish rule in the absolute monarchy of Denmark-Norway.

Árni Magnússon was particularly interested in texts about Icelandic history. He scoured the market, almost draining Iceland of medieval literature, and built a large collection of handwritten books, the Arnamagnæan Collection.

The collection is now part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme.

Tracking down unknown text fragments

However, Árni Magnússon was most interested in books written in Old Norse, not in Latin. He used parchments from the Latin books as covers for the Old Norse books.

In the early 20th century, the book covers were removed and stored separately, and few people have shown much interest in them – until now.

These ancient book covers are among the parchments that Lorenz is studying in his search for hidden and forgotten fragments of history.

Between 1971 and 1997, half of Árni Magnússon’s book collection was returned from Denmark to Iceland, and half of the original collection of 3000 manuscripts is now back in its country of origin.

However, some medieval manuscripts are still located in archives and museums in Norway, Denmark, and also Sweden. So, Lorenz’s search has taken him on a journey through the nooks and crannies of many archives.

“I have identified several previously unidentified Latin fragments related to Iceland. These new discoveries contribute to greater knowledge about which theological and liturgical texts were in circulation in medieval Iceland. The texts show that medieval Icelanders followed and participated in European intellectual culture,” said Lorenz.

The text fragments he has found include hymns, prayers, sermons, hagiographies and church music.

It started with the Vikings

Lorenz is from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, which used to be part of Denmark-Norway. He developed an interest in the Viking Age and saga literature at an early age, which led him to study Nordic languages in Kiel.

He is now a PhD research fellow at the Department of Language and Literature at NTNU’s Centre for Medieval Studies. He has also chosen to learn Norwegian Nynorsk in addition to Norwegian Bokmål.

“I am fascinated by small phenomena and therefore chose to learn Nynorsk when I started my studies in Norway. It is probably also why I became fascinated and intrigued by the fragments of history that might be contained in the small, hidden and forgotten palimpsests that have remained unknown until now,” said Lorenz in fluent Nynorsk.

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Journal

Gripla

DOI

10.33112/gripla.35.1 

The ancient copper industry in King Solomon's mines did not pollute the environment

 

New study refutes scientific hypotheses about environmental pollution from ancient copper industry

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Tel-Aviv University

 

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Dr. Omri Yagel recording the precise sampling location.  

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Credit: Tel Aviv University

A new study from Tel Aviv University overturns prevailing scientific beliefs that King Solomon’s Mines not only harmed the health of workers in the ancient copper industry but also pose risks to the health of modern residents living near the site.

In the new study, researchers conducted geochemical surveys at copper production sites in the Timna Valley, dating back to the 10th century BCE and the era of the Biblical Kings David and Solomon. They found that the environmental pollution resulting from copper production was minimal and spatially restricted, posing no danger to the region's inhabitants either in the past or today. Additionally, TAU's archaeologists reviewed previous studies and found no evidence that the ancient copper industry polluted the planet.

The study was led by Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, Dr. Omri Yagel, Willy Ondricek, and Dr. Aaron Greener from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and Archaeology, Tel Aviv University. The paper was published in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports by Nature.

“We inspected two major copper production sites in the Timna Valley, one from the Iron Age and King Solomon’s era and another nearby that is about 1,500 years older,” says Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef. “Our study was very extensive.  We took hundreds of soil samples from both sites for chemical analyses, creating high-resolution maps of heavy metal presence in the region. We found that pollution levels at the Timna copper mining sites are extremely low and confined to the locations of the ancient smelting furnaces. For instance, the concentration of lead — the primary pollutant in metal industries — drops to less than 200 parts per million just a few meters from the furnace. By comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines industrial areas as safe for workers at 1,200 parts per million and residential areas as safe for children at 200 parts per million.” 

The new study contradicts a series of papers published since the 1990s about pollution caused allegedly by the ancient copper industry. “We demonstrate that this is not true. Pollution in Timna is very restricted spatially, and it’s likely that only those working directly at the furnace suffered from inhaling toxic fumes, while just a short distance away, the soil is entirely safe. Moreover, the match we found between the spatial distribution of copper and lead concentrations in the soil further indicates that the metals are ‘trapped’ in slag and other industrial waste - which keeps them from leaching into the soil and affecting plants or humans. Our findings align with several recent studies from the Wadi Faynan region in Jordan, which also point to very low levels of pollution. Timna and Faynan are ideal sites for this type of research because they have not been disturbed by modern mining, as happened in Cyprus for example, and thanks to their dry climates the metals in the soil are not washed away. In Faynan, a team led by Prof. Yigal Erel of the Hebrew University examined 36 skeletons of people who lived at the mining site during the Iron Age, and only three showed any trace of pollution in their teeth. The rest were completely clean. We now present a similar picture for Timna.”

In addition to the geochemical survey, the TAU archaeologists also conducted a comprehensive review of existing literature, pointing out that hypotheses about global pollution during the pre-Roman period lack solid evidence.

“There was a trend in the 1990s, which presented ancient copper production as the first instance of industrial pollution,” explains Dr. Omri Yagel, a leading researcher in the current study. “Such statements grab headlines and attract research grants, but they unnecessarily project modern pollution problems onto the past. Moreover, the research literature tends to use the term ‘pollution’ to describe any trace of ancient metallurgical activity, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that metal industries were harmful to humans from their earliest beginnings — which is patently untrue. Even when metal production was large-scale, becoming integral to human civilization, it was the toxic lead industry that caused global pollution, not necessarily other metals. A 1990s study argued that traces of copper found in Greenland ice cores had traveled through the atmosphere from sites like Timna. This claim, however, has not been corroborated by any subsequent study. As researchers confronting the severe environmental challenges of our time, such as climate change, we often tend to search for similar problems in the past or assume that environmental harm has been an inevitable consequence of human activity since the agricultural revolution. However, we must be cautious. While we might label a few pieces of slag on the ground as 'pollution,' we should not confuse this localized waste with regional or global environmental pollution.”

Discovering the Diet of Early Neolithic Farmers in Scandinavia

 

 

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One of the 14 grindings tones that archeologists found while excavating a 5,500 years old settlement on the Danish island Funen. A new study reveals that the stones were not used to grind cereal grains.

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Credit: Niels H. Andersen, Moesgaard Museum

Water and Gruel – not Bread: Discovering the Diet of Early Neolithic Farmers in Scandinavia

At a Neolithic settlement on the Danish island Funen dating back 5,500 years, archaeologists have discovered both grinding stones and grains from early cereals. However, new research reveals that the inhabitants did not use the stones to grind the cereal grains. Instead of making bread, they likely prepared porridge or gruel from the grains.

A grinding stone, as the name suggests, is a stone with a sufficiently flat surface that allows grinding against it with another, smaller stone.

Archaeologists found fourteen of such stones when they excavated the remains of a settlement from the Early Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture at Frydenlund, on Strandby Mark southeast of Haarby on Funen (see fact box at the bottom of this text).

You can view 3D images of 11 different grindings stones from the Frydenlund site here (you can rotate and turn them with your mouse). 

They also found over 5,000 charred grain kernels of naked barley, emmer wheat, and durum wheat, amongst others.

One might offhand assume that the inhabitants 5,500 years ago ground their cereals into flour and baked bread with it. That has indeed been the typical interpretation of grinding stones from that time.

But they didn’t.

An international research team from Denmark, Germany and Spain has now analysed both the grains and the stones, concluding that the grinding stones were not used to grind cereals. 

The researchers examined microscopic mineral plant remains (phytoliths) and starch grains in small cavities on the surfaces of the stones. Surprisingly, they did not find any evidence of grinding of cereals.

The researchers found only few phytoliths on the stones, and the starch grains they identified came from wild plants instead of cereals.

“We have not identified the plants the starch grains originate from. We have merely ruled out the most obvious candidates – namely the cereals found at the settlement, which were not ground, as well as various collected species, including hazelnuts,” explains archaeobotanist, PhD Welmoed Out from Moesgaard Museum.

Together with senior researcher, Dr. Phil. Niels H. Andersen, also from Moesgaard Museum, she led the study recently published in the scientific journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.

What the grinding stones were used for remains open to interpretation, aside from the fact that they lack clear wear marks from the pushing motions used for grinding grain.

“The trough-shaped querns with traces of pushing movements emerged 500 years later. The grinding stones we studied here were struck with pestles made of stone, like crushing in a mortar. We also found such pestles at the site, resembling rounded, thick stone sausages. However, we have not analysed them for phytoliths or starch,” explains Niels H. Andersen.

This is the first time a state-of-the-art combination of phytolith and starch analyses has been performed on grinding stones from the first farmers in Northern Europe. The results support a hypothesis that archaeobotanists and archaeologists elsewhere in Northern Europe also have proposed after discovering remains of grains cooked into porridge and gruel: that the first farmers did not live on water and bread but rather on water and gruel, alongside berries, nuts, roots, and meat.
And yes, they likely drank water. According to Niels H. Andersen, no definitive traces of beer brewing have been found in Denmark before the Bronze Age.

However, as the two researchers from Moesgaard Museum emphasize: “This study only involves one settlement. While it supports other findings from the Funnel Beaker Culture, we cannot rule out the possibility of different results emerging when this method is applied to finds from other excavations.”

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Facts:

• The Funnel Beaker Culture was an early farming culture in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe during the period ca. 4000–2800 BCE, marking the introduction of agriculture and cattle farming to Scandinavia. The name refers to the culture's commonly found clay beakers with funnel-shaped necks.
• The discovery on Southern Funen is the most extensive find of grinding stones and grains from the Funnel Beaker Culture in the entire region it encompassed.
• The study was done in collaboration between researchers from Moesgaard Museum and Aarhus University in Denmark, Kiel University in Germany and the Spanish National Research Council (IMF-CSIC) in Barcelona

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Journal

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany

DOI

10.1007/s00334-024-01020-9 

The earliest surviving inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments

 The Ten Commandments: The earliest surviving inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments, incised during the late Roman-Byzantine era, The Holy Land, (ca. 300–800 CE)

The Only Complete Example Of A Ten Commandments Tablet From This Early Period. 

White marble tablet, approximately 24 ⅞ x 22 ⅛ x 2 ⅜ inches (632 x 562 x 62 mm), weighing approximately 115 pounds (52 kg), neatly chisel-inscribed with the Mosaic Ten Commandments in their Israelite Samaritan version, 20 lines in a Paleo-Hebrew script, each line containing between eleven and fifteen characters, with margins of about 10 cm on either side; the letters have a width of between one and 2 cm and words are separated from one another with one or two dots; a few letters are confused for each other (especially ה and א) and a few characters on the right side of the first two lines are effaced and re-inscribed.

The Ten Commandments are by any measure one of the most widely known and influential texts in the vast canon of the world’s written word, taking primacy in disciplines ranging from religion to literature to philosophy to law to ethics to pedagogy and beyond. Described in their earliest recordings as being spoken directly by God to Moses so that they could be conveyed to the Israelites encamped at Mount Sinai after the Exodus from Egypt, the Ten Commandments—or the Ten Statements, as the Hebrew would be rendered literally—remain fundamental to the adherents of Judaism and Christianity. But the influence of the Decalogue extends far beyond the Judeo-Christian religions, underpinning around the globe the foundational concepts of common law, natural law, formal legal codes, personal conduct, and the social compact. 

THE HISTORY

Dating to the late Roman-Byzantine era, this remarkable artifact is approximately 1,500 years old and is the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments still extant from this early era. Weighing 115 pounds and measuring approximately two feet in height, it is now called the Yavne Tablet after the city on the coastal plain of the Land of Israel near where it was rediscovered more than a century ago. This monumental, incised marble slab was serendipitously uncovered during excavations for a railroad track running through the Land of Israel to Egypt. The significance of the discovery went unrecognized for many decades, and for thirty years it served as a paving stone in a local home.

In 1947, Jacob Kaplan, the highly regarded municipal archaeologist for Tel Aviv, published an article in the Bulletin of The Jewish Palestine Exploration Society that detailed his acquisition of this Tablet four years previously and provided further information about the Tablet’s origin and provenance. Kaplan described how in 1943, an Arab man from Yavne sold him a white marble Tablet with an inscription engraved upon it. According to the seller, his father found the Tablet in 1913 during the excavation for the railroad and transferred it to his home where he placed it at the threshold of one of the rooms of the inner courtyard.  

In a companion article in the same issue of the Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a historian and the second and longest-serving president of Israel, provided an overview of the earlier history of the Yavne Tablet. Based on the Paleo-Hebrew script and on the paleography, Ben-Zvi dated the Tablet to the Byzantine era and ascribed its creation to the Israelite Samaritans, an ethno-religious people who lived in Samaria in the Land of Israel. The Samaritans claim partial descent from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, but they set themselves apart religiously and ethnically from the Jews.

According to further information received by Jacob Kaplan, the Tablet was discovered buried to the east of the central Jama Mosque in the same spot where a church and a Samaritan synagogue once stood. Historical documents associated with the mosque indicate that it was established in 1292 and/or around 1373 C.E. This places the mosque’s construction after the era of the Christian Crusaders.  Before the mosque's establishment, the site was occupied by a Christian church built by the Crusaders following their conquest of the area in 1142 C.E. During this period, the Crusaders besieged the city of Yavne and conquered the city. However, several decades later, following the Muslim victory over the Crusaders, a large mosque was constructed atop the ruins of this church.

This raises intriguing questions about the site's earlier history. It is likely that an ancient Samaritan synagogue once existed in the same location during the time when Samaritans inhabited Yavne and that the Crusaders destroyed the Samaritan synagogue to erect their church. Following the Crusaders' defeat, it is conceivable that Muslims constructed the new mosque in the 13th century, utilizing the remnants of the church as its foundation. This pattern of religious structures being built atop one another is not uncommon; for instance, remnants of other Samaritan inscriptions have been discovered in the ruins of a small 4th century church on Mount Nebo, suggesting that an ancient Samaritan synagogue had previously stood there as well.

Further information about the early Samaritan communities in the Holy Land is provided by Peter the Iberian (ca. 417–491), the son of Bosmarios, king of Georgia (Iberia). Peter traveled to Jerusalem and become a monk, eventually settling in a monastery near Gaza. During the last 3 years of his life, he lived in the town of Yavne and reported that the entire city of Yavne and its coastal areas were settled by the Samaritans. During that time, Yavne served as a vital center for the trade of Samaritan grain. Historical accounts from Greek and Arab sources indicate that a significant population of Samaritans resided in Yavne and its surrounding regions until the end of the 9th century. This is further corroborated by Samaritan sources, including the 12th century Tolidah chronicle, considered to be the oldest Samaritan historical work. This text references a Samaritan settlement in the vicinity of Yavne, offering additional evidence of the area's historical significance to the Samaritan community.

Benjamin of Tudela, the famous 12th century Jewish traveler who provided a colorful and detailed account of the many places he visited, noted in his diaries that Ashkelon (a city not far from Yavne) was home to a large Samaritan community of approximately 300 families. However, following the era of the Crusaders, we do not have any further information regarding a significant Samaritan community in this area and it would therefore stand to reason that this Tablet discovered near Yavneh must have been created for the larger Samaritan community that lived there during the earlier Roman or Byzantine era.

THE SCRIPT

The text of the Ten Commandments on this Tablet is engraved in a Paleo-Hebrew script, an ancient writing system used by the Israelite people during the early stages of their history, specifically from around the 10th century BCE to the 5th century BCE. This early script, known in Hebrew as Ktav Ivri, is characterized by its angular and linear forms. By the 5th century BCE, the Jewish people had largely transitioned from this alphabet to the Aramaic alphabet and adopted a square form that is now known as the Hebrew alphabet (and in Hebrew as Ktav Ashuri). The Samaritans, however, continued to use the early Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, as seen on this Tablet. As a precursor to the modern Hebrew alphabet, Paleo-Hebrew script holds significant importance for the study of the Hebrew Bible.

THE TEXT OF THE YAVNE TABLET

THE TEXT OF THE YAVNE TABLET

Translated from Hebrew, the line-by-line inscription runs as follows:
1. Dedicated in the name of Korach
2. I will call you to remember for goodness forever
3. God spoke
4. all these words
5. saying I am the Lord
6. your God you shall not have
7. for yourself other Gods
8. besides me; you shall not make
9. for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness;
10. for I the Lord
11. your God am an impassioned God;
12. Remember the Sabbath day
13. keep it holy; honor
14. your father and your mother;
15. you shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery;
16. you shall not steal; you shall not bear [false witness] against your neighbor
17. you shall not covet; you shall erect
18. these stones that
19. I am commanding you today
20. on Mount Gerizim rise up to God

The Ten Commandments are most familiar from their inclusion in two of the books of the Pentateuch: Exodus, chapter 20 and Deuteronomy, chapter 5. But there is a significant degree of variation in the enumeration and even the content of the Commandments among the various translations and faith traditions that consider the Five Books of Moses to be sacred texts. Simply put, there are a variety of ways the Commandments can be listed, combined, and separated to get to “Ten.”  Even between the rosters of Commandments presented in Exodus and Deuteronomy, there are several differences, for example, the variant explanations given for the observance of the Sabbath.  

The Yavne Tablet opens with two lines of dedicatory text and for reasons that cannot now be discerned, omits the Third Commandment against taking the name of God in vain. But this omission may not simply be an error or oversight on the part of the stonecutter; it must be noted that the Palestine Museum Tablet also omits this prohibition, and the scholars Bowman and Talmon hypothesize that the Palestine Museum Tablet inscription included in its Second Commandment by implication the Jewish Third Commandment. The same implied inclusion could well pertain to the Yavne Tablet.

Further, while Ben-Zvi acknowledges that the Commandment “You shall not take the name of God your Lord in vain” is absent from the Yavne Tablet, he points out that this commandment is carved on the stone in the Green Mosque in Shechem [i.e., Nablus], but another commandment “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image” is missing.

The Yavne Tablet concludes with the Tenth Commandment that focuses on the imperative to worship exclusively at Mount Gerizim, reflecting the Samaritans' belief that this location is the true and divinely ordained site for worship. The text directs the reader to construct an altar and place inscribed tablets on Mount Gerizim and worship God there.

The text of the Yavne Tablet is succinct, largely due to its format: incising or carving in marble is necessarily a slower process than engrossing with a reed and ink on papyrus or parchment. But by all accounts, with the first two Commandments presented as they were originally intended, and with the concluding Samaritan Commandment regarding Mount Gerizim, the Yavne Tablet is a true Decalogue. 

While a handful of other fragmentary stone tablets of the Decalogue have been documented, crucially, all these other witnesses are partial, and several are weathered to the point of illegibility. They contain only a portion of the Ten Commandments or otherwise cannot be considered complete. Several of them are also from a later period than the Yavne Tablet, and the current locations for some of them are not known. No other is believed to be in private hands and certainly no other is in the United States. Ferdinand Dexinger has published ten other inscriptions of the Samaritan Ten Commandments—in addition to the present, Yavne Decalogue (his g), these can be found in an appendix to this catalogue entry.  

The Yavne Tablet is not simply the earliest surviving complete inscribed stone tablet of the Ten Commandments, but the text it preserves represents the spirit, precision, and concision of the Decalogue in what is believed to be its earliest and original formulation. 

A Comparative Table of the Ten Commandments as Recorded on  the Yavne Tablet and in Exodus and Deuteronomy 

Ten Commandments Comparative Table

PROVENANCE

1913: Tablet was found during excavations for a railroad track near the city of Yavne on the coastal plain of the Land of Israel

1913 to 1943:  Taken home by the local man who found it while working on the railroad and used as a paving stone in his courtyard

1943:  Tablet passed to the finder’s son, and its text now recognized, sold to Mr. Jacob Kaplan, a scholar in Israel.

1995:  Sold by Kaplan’s descendants to the Israeli antiquities dealer Robert Deutsch

2005: Sold to Rabbi Saul Deutsch (no relation to the above dealer), Founder and Director of the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn, New York

2016: Deaccessioned by the Living Torah Museum and purchased by the Judaica collector Dr. Mitchell Stuart Cappell 

The Israeli Antiquities Authority has provided an export license and agreed to the public or private ownership of the tablet.

The bacteria used to produce Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz cheese show signs of ancient domestication

 The domestication of plants and animals has played a key role in the development of human societies. And microbes, too, have been tamed: a study by UNIL, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that the bacteria used to produce Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz cheese show signs of ancient domestication.

The domestication of livestock and plants marked an important stage in the settlement of human populations in the Neolithic period, as they moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a subsistence model based on animal husbandry and agriculture. Because of the microscopic size and virtual absence of fossils of micro-organisms, their domestication is more difficult to prove than that of flora and fauna. Although several studies have already demonstrated this in the case of yeasts (microscopic, single-celled fungi with nuclei), the case of bacteria (micro-organisms that are mainly single-celled and have no nuclei) has yet to be elucidated. This was the objective of Vincent Somerville, a former doctoral student in Philipp Engel's team at the Department of Fundamental Microbiology (DFM) in the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at UNIL. The results of his latest study, carried out under the co-direction of Florent Mazel and in collaboration with Agroscope, have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

An old process

Domestication consists of artificially selecting - generation after generation - variants of a wild species that have developed interesting characteristics for agriculture or livestock farming, such as the nutritional quality of plants or the size and docility of animals. As human population has grown throughout history, and food demand has increased, long-term storage solutions were needed. ‘This is the case with fermentation, which converts sugars into acids, protects against the proliferation of undesirable microbes and therefore enables food to be preserved for longer,’ explains Philipp Engel, co-director of the study. This technique, which dates back several thousand years, uses micro-organisms such as yeast to make beer or wine, or bacteria to make cheese. The first indirect archaeological evidence of milk fermentation dates back around 10,000 years, to the Neolithic period.

Swiss cheeses as study subjects

Thanks to collaboration with Agroscope, the Swiss centre of competence for agronomic and food research, the Lausanne group had access to a collection of bacterial strains used in the production of three different Swiss cheeses: Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz, and stored for 50 years. ‘These cultures, also called “cheese starter cultures” were partially reactivated to create some sort of laboratory mini cheeses’, explains Vincent Somerville, first author of the article. ‘We then analysed the evolution of the genetic and phenotypic characteristics of this collection over time in order to identify markers indicative of domestication. By observing more than 100 bacterial isolates and almost 1,000 samples, the scientists found, respectively, low genetic diversity and high stability of traits specific to the food preservation process (for example, acidification) over this half-century period. Those are indicators of an ancient, or even very ancient, adaptation, which by extrapolation corresponds to the appearance of the first fermented dairy products. ‘The temporal concordance between the dating of the micro-organisms and the archaeological history of this fermented food was quite unexpected’, enthuses researcher Florent Mazel. In other words, it is possible to trace the past of the domestication of bacteria from Swiss cheeses.

Guaranteeing food safety

In the future, cheeses from different parts of the world could be compared in order to generalize the study. In addition, research into the domestication of bacterial communities used to initiate the fermentation of other products, such as kefir, looks promising. ‘A better understanding of bacterial domestication will enable us to optimize the characteristics of these microbiota, improve the use of this process and make it a more sustainable method of food storage’, hopes Florent Mazel.