More on the mikveh at Ostia and Other Jewish Materials

Posted on April 24, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

In March I noted the announcement that a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, had reportedly been found in Ostia, the port city of ancient Rome. I had missed an article from the Times of Israel that adds some details to the original press release. The article records an interview with Alessandro D’Alessio, the director of the Archaeological Park of Ostia Antica, who speculates a bit about the building that includes the pool structure:

“Our first hypothesis is that the structure was a luxurious private residence, but it could have also been a public building. …We uncovered at least six rooms. Two of them are equipped with an oven to cook. We also found a latrine and another room that was probably a kitchen. These rooms overlooked a courtyard facing south. A staircase suggests that there were at least two floors.”

It looks like some of the area has now been backfilled, so it’s difficult to see the details of the surrounding architecture.

Excavation of the pool at Ostia; image Brent Nongbri 2025

After noting the discovery of the lamp with Jewish symbols, D’Alessio added, “We found an additional two lamps, one very similar to the artifact from the bottom of the mikveh with the depiction of a menorah, the other one engraved with a Christogram [a combination of letters abbreviating the name Jesus Christ]. …We know that during that period, the Jewish and Christian communities in Rome were still very close; therefore, finding both symbols in the same environment is not surprising.”

It will be interesting to learn more precisely where the lamp with the Christian symbol was found in relation to the lamps with the Jewish symbols.

On a related point, back in August of 2024, I noted that the site museum at Ostia had reopened after a long closure. I also expressed some disappointment that none of the many Jewish artifacts from the site were on display. This has now been partially remedied with a small case containing the recently excavated menorah lamp along with two other decorated lamps. I say “partially” because the display contains almost no didactic material, and what little there is seems wrong. The display label does not say where the lamps were found and gives a date of “II-V secolo” for the whole group. Yet, we do know where the other two lamps (inv. 12495 and 12498) were found. They come from the synagogue excavations of the 1960s. They were found above a floor that post-dates the mid-fourth century and have been assigned by Letizia Ceccarelli to the latter part of the fourth century or the fifth century. I’m not aware of any lamps that exactly match the decoration of the lamp from the mikveh, but similarly shaped African lamps with a central decoration flanked by stylized palm leaves are also assigned to the fourth and fifth centuries.

Display of Jewish artifacts at the museum at Ostia Antica; image: Brent Nongbri 2025

The other item in the display case is described as an inscription of the first century CE. It may in fact be that old, but not necessarily. This is another relatively recently discovered piece of evidence for Jews at Ostia. The inscription was discovered by chance during construction work in 2006 in the Pianabella area southeast of Ostia. It identifies several people as Judaeans (Iudaei), including a certain Quintus Fabius Longor[um]. A Quintus Fabius Longus is known from the Fasti Ostiensis as a duovir and prefect in the 30s CE. The form of the name in the inscription, Longor[um], may indicate that we are dealing here with a freed person of the Fabii Longi, either in the first century or later.

The museum is also now displaying one of the decorated corbels from the synagogue (the other one has for many years been on a podium just outside the museum).

Display of Jewish and Christian artifacts in the museum at Ostia Antica; image: Brent Nongbri 2025

It’s helpful to be able to examine this corbel up close. Mary Jane Cuyler informs me that the reddish color on the menorah on the corbel is indicative of gilding, so these menorahs would have been a colorful addition to the torah shrine, which was itself decorated in different types of cut marble. Gold decorations also raise the question of reflection and lighting within synagogues, an issue discussed in a 2023 article by Karen Stern.

It’s nice to see this material on display.

Posted in Judaism, Ostia, Synagogues | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Working with Manuscripts

Posted on April 4, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

It’s a nice moment when you receive the first copies of a book you’ve written. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of opening the box of authors’ copies of Working with Manuscripts, written together with my colleague Liv Ingeborg Lied.

This book emerged from our own experiences in trying to learn the ropes of working with manuscripts over the last couple decades. It’s a guide that addresses both the practicalities and ethics of studying manuscripts. We wrote it with graduate students in mind, but we hope it is widely useful for any scholar interested in including manuscripts in their research.

Thanks to the critical readers who offered feedback to some or all of the book, to the Research Council of Norway for supporting us (through the Lying Pen of Scribes project and The Early History of the Codex project), and to the editorial and production team at Yale University Press from making a nice looking and affordable volume.

Posted in Working with Manuscripts | 3 Comments

A Newly Discovered mikveh at Ostia

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

At a press conference this afternoon in the archaeological park at Ostia Antica, it was announced that a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, has been discovered in the center of the ancient city.

Ostia is well known to students of ancient Jewish life because of the late antique synagogue that was discovered there in the early 1960s. Just over a year ago, I posted about the publication of a statuette of Venus that was discovered in the synagogue.

The new discovery is in an entirely different sector of the city:

Plan of Ostia showing location of the synagogue near the ancient coastline and the mikveh in the center of the city; image adapted from a plan at Parco archeologico di Ostia Antica

While the synagogue was located close to the ancient coastline, the new discovery is inside the city walls in the central part of the town, not far from the large theater.

According to the press release, the mikveh was excavated in 2024. There are several photos from the excavation posted online:

View of the mikveh at Ostia from above; image source: Parco archeologico di Ostia Antica
View of the mikveh at Ostia during excavation; image source: Parco archeologico di Ostia Antica
View of the steps of the mikveh at Ostia ; image source: Parco archeologico di Ostia Antica

The following description from the press release gives the arguments for identifying the area as a mikveh:

“The peculiar characteristics of the room–such as the steps covering its entire width, the walls lined with hydraulic plaster, the presence of a well for capturing groundwater, the passage for communication with the adjacent room (possibly intended to house a pipe for adding water to groundwater), and again the discovery of the oil lamp with Jewish symbols at the bottom of the well–lead to an interpretation as a Jewish ritual bath (mikveh).”1

And in fact the Ostia Antica homepage also provides an image of the lamp with a menorah:

Lamp with menorah found at the bottom of the well in the mikveh at Ostia; image source: Parco archeologico di Ostia Antica

A couple preliminary observations: First, we seem not to have a date for the installation. The lamp and an accompanying glass vessel are both said to date from the 5th-6th century, so well into the “Christian” period in Ostia. The fill above this area also seems to have contained lamps decorated with the menorah, which are assigned to the 4th to 6th centuries. It will be good to learn what other evidence there is for assigning a date to this space. Second, there was a feature in the synagogue at Ostia that has often been described as a mikveh, but that identification has been challenged, and it must be said, the space in the synagogue looks nothing at all like the newly excavated area.

I’m sure there will be more to say as we learn more about this in the coming weeks. It’s an exciting discovery, and I very much look forward to the full publication of the area, so that we can better understand how this feature fits into the surrounding buildings and neighborhood.

  1. “Le peculiari caratteristiche dell’ambiente – quali i gradini estesi per la sua intera ampiezza, le pareti rivestite di intonaco idraulico, la presenza di un pozzo di captazione dell’acqua di falda, il condotto di comunicazione con l’ambiente adiacente (possibilmente destinato ad alloggiare una tubatura per l’aggiunta di acqua a quella di falda), e ancora il rinvenimento della lucerna con simboli ebraici sul fondo del pozzo – inducono a ipotizzarne una interpretazione come bagno rituale ebraico (mikveh).” ↩︎
Posted in Judaism, Ostia, Synagogues | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The So-called Scriptorium at Bu Njem

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

It is common for historians of ancient Rome to state that writers did not use desks (As Theodor Birt put it, “In antiquity, people did not write on desks”).1 I have noted before on the blog that I am not sure this view is entirely accurate. In a well-known article, Bruce Metzger gathered some visual evidence for the use of desks in Late Antiquity, a relief from Ostia Antica, a relief from Portus, and a mosaic from Thabraca that all show writers at desks.

Another aspect of the discussion is the material evidence of so-called scriptoria in the Roman world. The most famous of these is a controversial room found in the ruins of Qumran. Another (the only other?) potential surviving example is a structure in the remains of a Roman military camp at Bu Njem in modern Libya.

The site was excavated between 1967 and 1980 by a team led by René Rebuffat (1930-2019). According to the excavators, the fort was established in 201 CE and used by Roman military garrisons until around 260 CE. It was occupied by squatters after that who left a few traces and then abandoned and buried by wind-swept sand. The fort thus survived to the present in remarkably good condition.

Among the discoveries at the site in 1971 was a space on the south side of the central facility contained benches along the walls and a raised rectangular block (un massif rectangulaire) in the center of the room, highlighted in green in the image:

Fort at Bu Njem, adapted from R. Rebuffat, “Bu Njem 1971,” Libya Antiqua 11-12 (1974-1975)

The excavators described this space as “a scriptorium” that existed in two phases. In the first phase that corresponds to the construction of the fort in 201, the room featured a flat rectangular table (109 cm long, 66 cm wide, about 60 cm high) and two short benches on either side of the table (the report describes the benches as 80 cm high, but this must be an error; the scale indicates they are about 40 cm high). In a second phase, additional benches were added to extend to the north and south walls on both sides of the room, and a triangular “lectern” (pupitre), about 10 cm high at its peak, was added to the top of the flat table. The authors provided a top plan and profile drawing of the area as they found it:

“Scriptorium” at Bu Njem, top plan and profile, adapted from R. Rebuffat, “Bu Njem 1971,” Libya Antiqua 11-12 (1974-1975)

The sloping triangular feature in the profile drawing would be the “lectern.” The dark grey feature above it represents a niche in the south wall that is also visible in dotted lines in the top plan above. The “lectern” was somewhat damaged when the excavators found it, as illustrated in a photo that accompanied the article:

The excavators describe the use of the room in the following way:

“The central block of the Bu Njem scriptorium is not a table but a double-sloped lectern (pupitre). It is likely that the flat table (built in 201) that preceded this development also served as a lectern, because it was much too low, and the slightest test shows the discomfort of the position to which it would have forced a writer. The position remained uncomfortable with the double-sloped lectern, and the extension of the benches shows that one could work without being in front of the block. These benches are not designed for squatting or kneeling: They were obviously set up so that a seated person can be comfortable, and their extension beyond the block also proves that they are not made to raise a kneeling or squatting person in front of the block. The only overall hypothesis is therefore that the lectern served to support documents being read by a reader and listened to by other people sitting on the benches. The reader could naturally write on his lap while reading, and the listeners could also write. The room then fully deserved the convenient name of ‘scriptorium’ that we have given it.”2

The excavators paint an interesting picture here, one in which the “desk” is not used for writing but for holding something in position for reading. The excavators seem to be describing the production of multiple copies of a text by dictation, but what sort of writing do they imagine is happening in this military setting? The written artifacts found at the site included more than 146 ostraca that date from near the end of the occupation of the site, ca. 250-260 CE, and the majority of which were found in the vicinity of the so-called scriptorium.3 But these are mostly daily reports, not really the kind of thing needed in multiple copies. There are inscriptions of a literary nature that have survived at the site, namely poems inscribed on stone and credited to two centurions.4 But again, drafts for inscriptions probably wouldn’t be needed in multiple copies. I’m not sure what kind of texts the excavators have in mind with this imagined scene of dictation.

So, this is a very interesting piece of evidence, but I’m unsure about the proposed use of this space. I think there is more to say, but the bibliography on this “scriptorium” seems very limited. I would be grateful for any tips on other relevant publications on this space. For a good recent overview of the study of Bu Njem, see Anna H. Walas, “New Perspectives on the Roman Military Base at Bu Njem,” Libyan Studies 53 (2022) 48-60.

  1. Theodor Birt, Die Buchrolle in der Kunst (Leipzig: Teubner, 1907), p. 209: “Im Altertum schrieb man nicht auf Pulten.” ↩︎
  2. “…le massif central du scriptorium de Bu Njem n’est pa un table, mai un pupitre à double pente. Il est probable que la table, plate qui a précédé cet aménagement et qui a été construite en 201, servait aussi de pupitre, car elle était beaucoup trop basse, et Ie moindre essai montre l’inconfort de la position à laquelle elle aurait contraint le scripteur. La position restait inconfortable avec le pupitre à double pente, et l’extension des banquettes montre qu’on pouvait travailler sans être en face du massif. Ces banquettes ne sont pas faite pour s’accroupir ou s’agenouiller: elles ont visiblement été réglées pour qu’un homme assis soit confortablement installé, et leur prolongation au-delà du massif est également bien la preuve qu’elles ne sont pa faite pour exhausser un homme agenouillé ou accroupi en face du massif. La seule hypothèse d’ensemble est donc que le pupitre servait à supporter des documents qu’un lecteur, lisait, et que d’autres personnage assis sur le banquettes écoutaient. Le lecteur pouvait naturellement écrire sur ses genoux en même temps qu’il lisait, et les auditeurs en tout cas écrire eux aussi. La salle méritait alors pleinement le nom commode de ‘scriptorium’ que nous lui avons donné d’abord.” ↩︎
  3. See Robert Marichal, Les ostraca de Bu Njem (Tripoli, 1992). Marchial published 146 ostraca, but he prepared others for publication, including alphabetic exercises, that have not yet been fully published. See the discussion here. ↩︎
  4. See J.N. Adams, “The Poets of Bu Njem,” Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999) 109-134. ↩︎
Posted in desks, Ostraca, Scriptoria | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A Mosaic from Thabraca with a Writer at a Desk

Posted on February 5, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

In earlier posts, I discussed two pieces of evidence for writing at desks in the late antique period, a relief from Ostia and a relief found at Portus. Another piece of evidence that Metzger mentioned in his well known chapter on desks was a mosaic floor panel from a church in Thabraca on the coast of Tunisia.1 It was published in 1906 by Paul Gauckler.2

The figure behind the desk has been identified as both a banker and a scribe. It is unfortunate that the inscription near the figure’s head is not better preserved (just a couple letters survive, probably the remains of [I]N PA[CE]). The figure holds a stylus and writes–in a way oriented toward the viewer of the mosaic rather than toward the writer–the letters MA. The woman below the desk is identified by the name Victoria.

These mosaic panels covered burials under the church floor. The panel with the writer and Victoria covered a lead coffin in which two skeletons were found. The panel is oddly oriented relative to the other panels and positioned directly in front of the apse, but off center:

Gauckler’s publication includes one photograph from the excavation, and fortunately, it happens to show this mosaic in context. The raised apse is visible on the left side of the image:

The mosaic is now in the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and the details are a bit easier to discern in a color image:

The date of this mosaic is ambiguous. Gauckler places the construction of the chapel in the age of Constantine and dates its abandonment to the end of the fifth century, which means that the production of the mosaics would likely fall into the second half of the fourth century or the first part of the fifth century. Yet, the evidence for this chronology is not clearly articulated, so those dates should probably be regarded as tentative.

  1. Bruce M. Metzger, Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 123-137. ↩︎
  2. Paul Gauckler, “Mosaïques tombales d’une chapelle de martyrs à Thabraca,” Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot 13 (1906) 175-228. ↩︎
Posted in desks | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Ehrman on Titles of the Gospels in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus: Fact Check

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

Over at his blog, Bart Ehrman has been posting some basic facts about different books of the New Testament. The last couple posts have been about the Gospel According to Mark, and yesterday’s post, which is publicly available, treats the question of the title of the Gospel According to Mark, and includes a short discussion of how the title shows up in our earliest complete manuscripts of Mark. Ehrman writes [[Update 28 January 2025: Ehrman has now adjusted the text of his post.]]:

“Our oldest two manuscripts (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, for you fellow Bible nerds) come from toward the end of the fourth century (around 375 CE), and they have the shortest titles (“According to Mark”).  But in both cases, the titles were added by a later scribe (in a different hand).  We don’t really know how much later. So it’s impossible to know when the manuscripts began calling it this, except to say that the manuscripts that the authors of both these 4th century manuscripts used apparently didn’t have titles at all (since they lacked them until the later scribe added them). Interesting.”

But is this actually right? On papyrus rolls, titles typically appeared at the end of the text, and this practice carried over into codices. In the case of Codex Sinaiticus, the titles that appear at the ends of the works are widely regarded to be the product of the original copyists of the books. Here is what Milne and Skeat say in their detailed study of the codex:

“That those main titles are written by the same scribe as the immediately preceding text has never been doubted, and is so obvious from the most cursory inspection of the manuscript that it needs no justification here.”1

And in fact, the subscript title at the end of Mark in Codex Sinaiticus is not the short version but the longer version (ⲉⲩⲁⲅ’ⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲙⲁⲣⲕⲟⲛ):

The end title of the Gospel According to Mark in Codex Sinaiticus; image source: codexsinaiticus.org

Some aspects of the script differ from that of the main text (the smaller epsilon and omicron raised off the base line, the mu with a curved belly), but other letters are identical with the script of the main text of Mark. There is no reason to doubt that these titles were part of the original production of the manuscript and that the differences in the script are simply decorative.

There are running titles (titles at the top of each page) in the gospels in Codex Sinaiticus that use the shorter version of the title, just ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲙⲁⲣⲕⲟⲛ, but these too are generally thought to be the work of the original copyists of the codex.

What about Codex Vaticanus? Here, we do indeed find the shorter version of the title at the end of Mark:

End title of the Gospel According to Mark in Codex Vaticanus; image source: DigiVatLib

But was this title a later addition or the work of the original producers of the codex? In this case, it’s a little harder to tell because almost all the letters in this codex have been re-inked by someone who was not as skilled as the original copyists at producing the biblical majuscule script. But again, the consensus view is that these end titles were the work of the copyists who produced the codex.

In a similar fashion to Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus has running titles that use the shorter version of the title (ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲙⲁⲣⲕⲟⲛ), but these are also generally thought to have been added as a part of the production of the codex (and in fact, they constitute important evidence for the original script of the book because they have not been re-inked for the most part).

So, to summarize: The titles of the gospels in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus were most likely the work of the original producers of these books [codices] and attest to the use of both the longer version of the title (ⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲙⲁⲣⲕⲟⲛ in Codex Sinaiticus) and the shorter version (ⲕⲁⲧⲁ ⲙⲁⲣⲕⲟⲛ in Codex Vaticanus) at the time when these books [codices] were produced.

  1. H.J.M. Milne and T.C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (London: The British Museum , 1938), 27 ↩︎
Posted in Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, Palaeography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

The Lying Pen of Scribes Project: An Appreciation

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Brent Nongbri


Over the last few years, I have had a number of occasions to mention The Lying Pen of Scribes, a project on the Dead Sea Scrolls funded by the Research Council of Norway. In fact, it may not be quite right to say “project on the Dead Sea Scrolls.” While the Scrolls have been the focus of the project, it has touched many wider issues: the trade in antiquities, fakes and forgeries, the relationship of the physical sciences to manuscript studies, and more.

The funding period of The Lying Pen of Scribes is now coming to a close, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the importance of the project and to appreciate its architect. As a discipline, we all owe a large debt of gratitude to Årstein Justnes of the University of Agder. Årstein will deflect any credit with a self-deprecating joke, but I’ll proceed anyway and point out that he did an enormous amount of work organizing and facilitating a large and complicated project that has produced very important results. If you looked only at the publications emerging from the project, that would be impressive in itself.

But The Lying Pen has, I think, had an impact that is broader than its publications. Over the life of the project, there has been a marked shift in the field’s thinking about issues of the materiality of manuscript artifacts, and The Lying Pen was one of the moving forces behind that shift. Even before the project officially received RCN funding in 2019, many of the team’s members were already busy uncovering the fake “Scrolls” in several collections. These discoveries rightfully received a lot of media attention, but the reach of the The Lying Pen extends beyond exposing these scandals. The provenance research that the project supported, the bridges built with the natural sciences, the conversations fostered among scholars and journalists–all of this contributed to creating an environment for thinking differently about manuscript studies. It’s a great achievement.

On a personal level, the project inspired me to think much more critically about my own work on early Christian manuscripts and issues of provenance. And finally, I’m grateful to the project for bringing me back to the Dead Sea Scrolls. I had studied the Scrolls pretty intensely in graduate school, but my research moved off in other directions over the years. The Lying Pen provided a welcome opportunity for me to revisit the Scrolls from the angle of provenance questions and the fascinating narratives surrounding some of the characters involved in the discovery of the Scrolls.

So, thank you to the Lying Pen team and to Årstein for making it all happen.

Posted in Antiquities Market, Archaeological context, Dead Sea Scrolls, Fakes and Forgeries | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

P52 on the Joe Rogan Experience: Fact Check

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

I’m not a regular consumer of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” but I was compelled to check it out when I heard that the podcaster was chatting about P.Ryl.Gr. 3.457, a.k.a. P52, the small fragment of a papyrus leaf containing a bit of chapter 18 of the Gospel According to John. The occasion was a conversation with a Christian apologist.

Joe Rogan with a facsimile of P52

The interview contained a number of standard apologetic talking points, and so it’s not surprising that the general topic of papyrology and the specific topic of P52 comes up (along with a facsimile and a reconstruction of the leaf). I’ve studied this fragment pretty carefully over the years (articles in Harvard Theological Review in 2005 and New Testament Studies in 2020), so I’m fairly familiar with the scholarship. Unfortunately, the apologist makes a number of false or misleading claims, so for anyone who might be interested, here is a brief fact check.

  • “Discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s” False. The piece was among several chosen and bought for the Rylands library by Bernard Grenfell in 1920. C.H. Roberts published the piece in 1935.
  • The codex is “almost exclusively a Christian convention”: False. We have many codices that contain non-Christian material.
  • “Most likely comes from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.” Misleading. We don’t really know where this piece came from because it was bought on the antiquities market and not scientifically excavated. It’s possible that it comes from Oxyrhynchus, but Grenfell was buying from dealers elsewhere in Egypt in addition to the area of Oxyrhynchus.
  • “There’s still debate about the dating of this” papyrus. True.
  • “But the unanimous consensus is that it’s comfortably second century, potentially beginning of the second century, which means that, this is found in Egypt; John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus. So it has to be written by John, spread around, find its way to Egypt, copied and then end up in this manuscript, which means at minimum, you’ve already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century, comfortably.” Very much debatable. This is the same story that was being told pretty much from the time of the publication of P52 in 1935. In older versions, the date of the papyrus was usually given as “circa 125 AD,” but here the rhetoric is a bit more slippery: “comfortably second century, potentially beginning of the second century.” But for the logic to work, that “potentially beginning of the second century” has to become “definitely beginning of the second century.” But the dating of P52 is not at all certain; it is just based on handwriting analysis, and there are good parallels for the script of P52 in papyri from the late second century and even the third century (see my 2020 New Testament Studies piece).

The fact is that we don’t know the date of this piece with confidence. So, trying to use P52 to establish a first-century date for the composition of the Gospel According to John doesn’t work. I don’t have a horse in the race when it comes to the time of the composition of John, but I would stand by the words I wrote back in 2005:

“P52 cannot be used as evidence to silence other debates about the existence (or non-existence) of the Gospel of John in the first half of the second century. Only a papyrus containing an explicit date or one found in a clear archaeological stratigraphic context could do the work scholars want P52 to do. As it stands now, the papyrological evidence should take a second place to other forms of evidence in addressing debates about the dating of the Fourth Gospel.”

The interview also has some misleading statements about P75 (a.k.a P.Bodmer 14-15, a.k.a. Hanna Papyrus 1). I’ve written a bit about the different scholarly views on this relationship and offered my own take on things (Journal of Biblical Literature 2016).

It’s good to see early Christian manuscripts being discussed in a popular setting, but it would be even better if the information was accurate.

Posted in P.Ryl. 3.457, Palaeography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

A Fake Lead “Codex” in Rome?

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Brent Nongbri

Among codices that supposedly date to the Roman and late antique eras, there is a small set of “books” made of lead. Some of these made their first appearance in the last couple decades (the so-called Jordanian lead codices) and were clearly demonstrated to be modern forgeries.

But there were earlier artifacts that have sometimes been called lead codices. One of them is on display in Rome at the Epigraphic Museum of the Museo Nazionale at the Baths of Diocletian. The label at the museum describes this object in the following way:

“‘Basilidian’ book: The small lead book was for magical and religious use and is formed of seven pages with a cover on whose faces are a male and a female portrait. On the pages, incised on both sides, objects, animals and human figures, are depicted, followed by a line and five rows of Greek characters with the value of magic symbols, charakteres. The term ‘Basilidian’ refers to Basilides, the founder of a philosophical school at Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. Unknown provenance, 4th-5th century AD”

The “unknown provenance” should of course give us pause. And it turns out there is a strange story to tell. But first, a brief description of the object (a quite thorough description of the sheets can be found in a 2012 catalog entry by Gabriella Bevilacqua1).

The cover, which is hinged, is displayed apart from the folia. It has the profile of a male head on the front cover and that of a female head on the back cover.:

The covers of the lead codex in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian (inv. 65036); image source: Brent Nongbri, 2025

The seven individual folia are displayed against a mirror, so that both sides of each leaf can be seen:

The sheets of the lead codex in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian (inv. 65036); image source: Brent Nongbri, 2025

Each sheet displays images at the top of the sheet with mostly gibberish text occupying the lower portion:

A sheet of the lead codex in the Epigraphic Museum at the Baths of Diocletian (inv. 65036); image source: Brent Nongbri, 2025

Drawings of all the sheets were published in a short pamphlet by Jacques Matter in 1852.2 Another set of drawings, including a detailed rendering of the cover and the hinge apparatus appeared in the1878 catalog of Ettore de Ruggiero.3 The images are reproduced below (after the front and back covers, each vertical pair with a Roman numeral shows the front and back of a sheet):

Plates with drawings of the lead codex from Ettore de Ruggiero, Catalogo del Museo Kircheriano (Rome, 1878)

Strings of letters that don’t form words are common in ancient magical contexts, but the text on these leaves is strange for a couple reasons. It not only combines letters seemingly from multiple different alphabets, it also combines different forms of letters from within alphabets. For instance, it uses both a “capital” omega, Ω, and something like a script omega, (see the W in what looks like ⲓⲁⲱ on sheet V). Similarly, the writing shows both a branched sigma, Σ, and what appears to be a lunate sigma, C. There also appear to be some Arabic numerals tossed in (for instance, the numeral 8 seems to appear on several pages).

It seems that the covers were each hinged to a vertical pipe with a rod to which the seven sheets were originally affixed with tabs wrapped around the rod (a couple of the plates seem to show small stubs where the tabs snapped off the hinge mechanism).

And now the provenance story: This item (currently inventory number 65036) comes from the Museo Kircheriano, the sprawling collection of antiquities most closely associated with Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), but the earliest documentation of this exact item seems to be the 1837 catalog of Giuseppe Brunati. There, Brunati notes that a similar item was in the Kircheriano in the eighteenth century, but that the present lead book was a different object. As he wrote, “The suspicion arises that somebody, having taken away the genuinely ancient booklet, has fraudulently substituted another.”4

This earlier lead book was documented in the catalog of Filippo Buonanni in 1709.5 Interestingly, he described the artifact both as a “book” (liber) and as a “box” or “case” (theca) that “contained seven lead plates” (septem laminae…plumbeae includunture). These sheets are said to have images and nonsense text drawn from different alphabets, but the accompanying illustration confirms that these are distinct from the lead artifact currently on display in the Epigraphic Museum:

Plate showing an earlier (now lost) lead codex from the Museo Kircheriano in Filippo Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709)

The cover at first glance looks similar to what we have seen, but the hinge mechanism and its attachment to the cover are both different. And again, the layout of the sheets is similar (images in the upper portion, nonsense text in the lower portion), but none of the seven current sheets match the images or text of this drawing. Note also that the sheet in the upper lefthand corner of the plate clearly looks as if it is sitting in a box with sides extending from the bottom, the top, and the side opposite the hinge.

Buonnani claimed that this book had come from “an ancient sarcophagus” that also contained the ashes of the deceased, but he offered no further details (Fuit hic plumbeus liber repertus in antiquo Sarcophago, in quo cineres demortui fuerant inclusi). The current location of this artifact is unknown (or at least unknown to me).

After Buonnani published this object in 1709, Bernard de Montfaucon in 1719 published another similar artifact that he said he had purchased during his trip to Rome in 1699.6 This piece is described as having six lead sheets between two lead covers, though only four of the lead sheets were said to have text. The illustration provided by Montfaucon again shows the similarities in terms of layout, imagery, and writing but also the differences in the details when compared to the lead codex in the museum.

Bernard de Monfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, vol. 2.2 (Paris, 1719)

It was Montfaucon who gave this small genre its commonly used name (“Basilidian books”), because of the iconography, which includes an Abraxas figure (a human torso and arms with a bird head and two serpents in place of legs), which he associated with the “gnostic” teacher Basilides. Montfaucon said that he gave this lead book to Cardinal de Bouillon (1643-1715). I am not aware of its current location.

We thus seem to have evidence for two lead codices in Rome in the very late 17th and early 18th centuries (both now lost), and for a third that shows up in the early 19th century. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other such objects that have been published. Iconography for hinged book-like objects in pre-Roman contexts is attested, and ivory diptychs with different forms of hinges are well known from Roman late antiquity.7 But these lead codices seem very dubious to me, especially the one now on display in the Epigraphic Museum–the thickness of the lead, the look of the script, and most of all its sudden appearance in a museum in place of an entirely different artifact! When Brunati first mentioned this “new” lead book in 1837, his evaluation did not inspire much confidence: “Utinam vero authenticus sit.” I suspect his hesitations were justified. Barring the discovery of a similar kind of artifact in a secure archaeological context, it is probably best to regard this object as a production of 17th or 18th century.8

  1. Gabriella Bevilacqua, “IX, 41. Libro ‘Basilidiano’,” in Rosanna Friggeri et al. (eds.), Terme di Diocleziano: La collezione epigrafica (Milan, 2012), pp. 596-599. ↩︎
  2. Jacques Matter, Une excursion gnostique en Italie (Paris, 1852), plates 3-9. ↩︎
  3. Ettore de Ruggiero, Catalogo del Museo Kircheriano (Rome, 1878), pp. 1.63-64): “199: Libello basllldlano di piombo (al. c. 10, lar. c. 9). La copertura del libro ha sul diritto, in rilievo, un busto di donna velata, sul rovescio quello d’un uomo barbato. Dentro erano, per mezzo di cerniera, riunite sette sottili tavolette di piombo della medesima grandezza, che ora sono sciolte, ciascuna delle quali contiene, ai due lati, incise due figure simboliche nella parte sùperiore, e una leggenda nel rimanente. Una strana mescolanza di lettere greche, italiche e latine non ne rende possibile alcuna decifrazione; il carattere gnostico dell’ insieme è però indubitato. Il Bonanni menziona (mus. Kirch. p. 180), pubblicandone un saggio (tav. LX), un analogo monumento, che pare sia stato ai suoi tempi trovato in Roma, ed era conservato nel Museo. Esso però era affatto diverso dal nostro, come pure dall’altro acquistato in Roma dal Montfaucon nel 1699 e donato da lui al cardinale de Bauillon (palaeoar. graeca p. 181; cf. antiq. expliq. 2, 2, pl. 177). È ignoto come e quando sia scomparso il primo del Museo, sostituendovisi quest’altro. Il Brunati, (p. 122) per altro, già notò nel 1838 questa sostituzione, manifestando qualche dubbio sulla sua autenticità, e concludendo che tutti e tre i sudetti libelli possano pervenire da una medesima origine.” These images were reprinted in H. Leclercq’s entry for “Basilidiens” in the Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (Paris, 1910), vol. 2, part 1, cols. 514-525. ↩︎
  4. Brunati, Musei Kircheriani inscriptiones ethnicae et christianae (Milan, 1837), pp. 122-124: “Tantum suspicio oritur, quod quidam, abrepto sincero veteri libello, alium fraudolenter substituerit.” ↩︎
  5. Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709), p. 180: “LIBER PLUMBEUS, Thecam plumbeam expressimus in Tabula LX. in formam libri compactam, in qua septem laminae etiam plumbeae includuntur, in quarum singulis plures characteres incisi fuerunt verriculo, & quidem non unius idiomatis, sed variorum linguarum; sunt enim aliqui ex graeco Alphabetico selecti, alqui verò ex haebraico, multi ex antiqo Etruscorum, varii ex latino. Horum Characterum combinationes verba intelligibilia efformat, quae nec Graecus, nec haebraici, neque latini sermonis licet peritissimus intelligere nunquam potuit. Singulis etiam laminis adjecta sunt aliqua symbola at ex nullo eorum deduci potest, quid Artifex mente conceperit, quod indicaret. Quamobrem in genere Talismanorum enumerandum esse judico, in quibus Antiquorum superstitio id exprimebat, quod erronea mente conceperat, putabatque optimum esse remedium, vel ad amla avertenda, vel ad daemones fugandos, aut tutissimam viam ad bonorum. Fuit hic plumbeus liber repertus in antiquo Sarcophago, in quo cineres demortui fuerant inclusi. Constat autem ex pluribus monumentis, ab Aethnicis praecipuè Aegyptiis non rarò in sepulchris aliqua deposita fuisse, quae ad placandos Manes, vel ad Daemones fugandos utilia esse opinabantur. Ex Cornelio Tacito Annal. lib. 2. habemus, cum refert Mortem Germanici veneno intersecti, ‘Carmina, & devotiones, & nomen Germanici, plumbeis tabulis insculptum, semiusti eineres ac able obliti, aliaque maleficia, & animas Numinibus infernis sacrari.’ Ubi notat Ludovicus Dorleans in suis novis cogitationibus, Antiquos plumbeis laminis usos esse, ne facilè illa nomina delerentur.” ↩︎
  6. Montfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, vol. 2.2 (Paris, 1719), plate 177 and page 378: “Il me reste à parler d’un petit livre tout de plomb, que j’achetai à Rome en 1699, & dont je fis present à M. le Cardinal de Bouillon: il eft de la même grandeur qu’il est ci-après représenté dans la planche; non seulement les deux plaques qui font la couverture , mais aussi tous les feuillets au nombre de six, la baguete inserée dans les anneaux qui tiennent aux feuillets, la charnière & ses clous; enfin tout sans exception est de plomb. Les douze pages que sont les deux côtez de chaque feuillet, ont autant de figures des Gnostiques: audessous de ces figures, il y a des inscriptions, partie Hetrusques & partie Greques , mais aux quatre premières pages seulement; toutes ces inscriptions sont également inintelligibles.” ↩︎
  7. On hinged Hittite tablets, see Michele Cammarosano, “Writing on Wood in Hittite Anatolia,” in Marilina Betrò et al. (eds), The Ancient World Revisited: Material Dimensions of Written Artefacts (De Gruyter, 2024), 165-205. For an example of a hinged late antique diptych, see the Boethius Diptych. ↩︎
  8. The first catalog of the Kircher collection appeared in 1678: Georgius de Sepibus, Romani collegii Societatus Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum (Amsterdam, 1678). It has a section on books in foreign languages, but that includes nothing that matches well with the lead books. In the index of objects, the only leaden item is a chunk of pure lead (p. 41). Perhaps this is an indication that the lead codex described by Buonanni in 1709 entered the collection after 1678. ↩︎

Posted in Bernard de Montfaucon, Fakes and Forgeries, Lead codices | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Decoration of the Fore-edges of Coptic Codices

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Brent Nongbri

There is a fun article in The New York Times about the growing trend among publishers of producing deluxe editions of romance and fantasy books. The article mentions different kinds of cover enhancements but focuses on decoration of the fore-edge. There are short videos and photos of the production of the deluxe edition of Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, which is due out in January 2025. The deluxe edition will have dragons painted on the fore-edge:

Producing the decorated fore-edges of Onyx Storm; image source: The New York Times

This kind of decoration goes quite far back in the history of the book. The earliest example that I know of is a set of parchment Coptic codices said to have been found in a jar in the Egyptian city of Saqqara in the winter of 1924-1925. A colophon allows us to identify the original home of the books as the Monastery of Apa Jeremiah in Saqqara. They are usually dated to the 6th or 7th century and contain quite interesting combinations of texts:

  • The letters of Paul and the Gospel According to John
  • The Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel According to John
  • A portion of the Psalms (1-5) and the first chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew

These books all had wooden covers, leather covered spines, and decorated fore-edges:

Saqqara Coptic Codices, views of the spines (top) and fore-edges with decorations (bottom)

These three books are now in the Chester Beatty collection in Dublin (Cpt 813, Cpt 814, and Cpt 815) and were bought from the Cairo dealer Maurice Nahman (other books from the same find are in the University of Michigan’s collections). The codices were considerably fancier than they look in these photos. The leather on the covers had intricate decorations, and the books were found together with the remains of elaborate leather wrapping bands and carved bone clasps. The article in which these photos appeared was written by Charles T. Lamacraft,1 who also produced some lovely models of the codices based on his study of the surviving fragments:

Model of Chester Beatty Cpt 815 showing cover and leather wrapping band; image source: Chester Beatty Online Collections
Model of Chester Beatty Cpt 815 enclosed in leather wrapping band; image source: Chester Beatty Online Collections

These would have been very nice little books. It’s encouraging to see the modern publishing industry recapturing some of the traditions of early codex production.

  1. C.T. Lamacraft, “Early Book-bindings from a Coptic Monastery,” The Library 20 (1939) 214-233. ↩︎
Posted in Book binding, Book covers, Chester Beatty Papyri, Codicology, Maurice Nahman, Saqqara Codices | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment