A marble table presented by Sotheby’s as the oldest in the world recorded with the Ten Commandments It was sold yesterday at auction for more than five million dollarsannounced the New York auction house, despite doubts about its authenticity.
After several minutes of bidding, Sotheby’s sold a 52-kilogram object, dating from between 300 and 800 AD in the Byzantine Roman period, for the listed price including taxes. The estimated starting auction price ranged between 1 and 2 million dollars.
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Discovered in 1913 during excavations for the construction of a railway in what is now Israel. The tablet is inscribed in alphabet paleo hebrew the verses of nine of the Ten Commandments that appear in the Bible and Torah.
“The person who dug it up did not realize its importance and took it home to use as a pavement. It remained there for about thirty years, until an archaeologist living in Israel, Dr. Jacob Kaplan, recognized its importance and bought it,” he explained. Sharon Liberman Mintz, specialist in Jewish texts Sotheby’s Nueva York, during a performance of the piece in early December.
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The stone then passed through the Brooklyn Torah Museum, before being acquired by a private collector, its last owner.
According to the specialist Sotheby’s, “There is no other stone of this type in private hands, all the other pieces are small fragments” and are found in museums.
Before the auction, other experts cited by The New York Times They asked for caution due to the difficulty of authenticating an object of this type.