✦ Published pieces
Assyria: Room 10b
Sennacherib had the siege of Lachish carved in panoramic detail so no one would ever misremember it - and no one has, just not the way he planned.
Read the piece →Rome: The Arch of Titus
The arch raised to celebrate the Temple's destruction is now a tourist stop, and the menorah Titus had carved on it became the emblem of the state that outlasted his empire by two millennia.
Read the piece →Babylon: The Ishtar Gate
Nebuchadnezzar's great gate stands rebuilt in a Berlin museum, and the exile it caused produced the most durable invention in Jewish history: the portable homeland.
Read the piece →Egypt: A Boast in a Cairo Museum
Pharaoh Merneptah boasted in 1208 BCE that he had destroyed Israel. The boast is the oldest known mention of Israel outside the Bible. He was wrong.
Read the piece →Moab: The Mesha Stele
A king of Moab boasted about defeating Israel — and in doing so named Israel's God, king, tribe, and dynasty. One of the most important objects for the external verification of the Hebrew Bible.
Read the piece →The Seleucids
Antiochus IV called himself God Manifest. His enemies called him the Madman. Both names are on his coins. The Maccabees lit a lamp.
Read the piece →Persia: The Cyrus Cylinder
A baked clay cylinder in the British Museum records the moment the Babylonian exile ended — and confirms the Hebrew Bible's account of Cyrus was no pious invention.
Read the piece →Greece: The Arch of Hadrian
The Arch of Hadrian still stands in Athens. The same emperor who gave the Greeks a new city took Jerusalem away from the Jews and renamed it — the same hand, the same year.
Read the piece →Egypt: The Elephantine Papyri
Actual letters from a fifth-century BCE Jewish garrison in Egypt — contracts, prayers, petitions, readable today. The papyri that proved Judaism was never in one place.
Read the piece →Tel Dan: The Enemy's Witness
The oldest widely accepted mention of the House of David - carved by an Aramean enemy who meant it as an obituary. It now sits in Jerusalem; his kingdom is gone.
Read the piece →Rome: The Jewish Catacombs
Menorahs, names and synagogue offices from Rome's Jewish catacombs record one of Europe's oldest continuous Jewish communities under the imperial city.
Read the piece →The Worms Artefacts
The oldest Jewish Europe survives in stone: Worms, the Rhineland and the objects that kept Ashkenaz legible.
Read the piece →