Oldest stone tablet inscribed with Ten Commandments to be sold for up to P116 million
Sotheby's, one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewelry, and collectibles, announced that it will auction one of the most significant historical artifacts ever discovered: the oldest inscribed stone tablet of the Ten Commandments.
The live auction, which will happen on Dec. 18 (New York time), will feature the approximately 1,500-year-old marble slab. It will also be sold at an estimated price of $1 million (P58,007,971) to $2 million (P116,018,971).
"This remarkable tablet is not only a vastly important historic artifact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization," Sotheby's Global Head of Books & Manuscripts, Richard Austin, said.
He added, "To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to journey through millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity's earliest and most enduring moral codes."
According to Sotheby's, it is the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments that is still extant from the late Roman-Byzantine era up to the present.
The marble tablet, which weighs 115 pounds and measures approximately two feet in height, was discovered in 1913 during railway excavations along the southern coast of the Land of Israel, near the sites of early synagogues, mosques, and churches. Its text is inscribed in the Paleo-Hebrew script.
Significantly, twenty lines of text incised on the stone "closely" follow Biblical verses familiar to both Christian and Jewish traditions.
But Sotheby's said that this tablet contains only nine of the commandments as found in the Book of Exodus, omitting the admonition "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain" while including a new directive "to worship on Mount Gerizim, a holy site specific to the Samaritans."
