✦ Published pieces
The Merneptah Stele
A pharaoh carved a hymn to Israel's destruction in 1208 BCE and accidentally gave the tribe its oldest written birth certificate.
Read the piece →Ketef Hinnom Amulets
Two silver scrolls, smaller than a thumbnail, rolled up in a burial cave above Jerusalem - the oldest biblical text on earth, four centuries senior to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Read the piece →A Dead Sea Scroll Fragment
A shepherd, a cave, and a complete Isaiah a thousand years older than any copy then known - with the text so close to the modern version it made scholars blink.
Read the piece →The Sarajevo Haggadah
Illuminated in medieval Barcelona, carried out with the expulsion, saved in turn by a censor's signature, a Muslim curator, and a besieged city that refused to hand it over.
Read the piece →The Boney M Single
A sixth-century BCE lament about sitting by Babylonian rivers became, via Rastafarian poets and a German disco group, one of the best-selling singles in British chart history.
Read the piece →An Elephantine Papyrus
On a Nile island in the fifth century BCE, Jewish soldiers wrote contracts, letters, and shopping lists — and kept their own temple going 2,500 km from Jerusalem.
Read the piece →A Bar Kokhba Letter
A Roman-era military commander wrote letters in his own hand demanding lulav for Sukkot, mid-rebellion. Those letters still exist. You can read them.
Read the piece →The Bar Kokhba Coins
A short-lived Jewish administration overstruck Rome's own coins with Hebrew words for redemption, freedom, Israel and Jerusalem.
Read the piece →A Geniza Shopping List
Someone's grocery list from medieval Cairo survived 900 years because of a scruple about discarding paper that might bear God's name. That scruple preserved an entire civilisation.
Read the piece →The Cochin Copper Plates
A South Indian king inscribed a royal charter on copper and gave it to a Jewish community leader. The plates are still in the synagogue — the oldest documentary evidence of Jews in India.
Read the piece →The Kaifeng Stele
A Ming-dynasty stone, carved in classical Chinese, records the history and faith of a Jewish community in the heart of imperial China — one of the most extraordinary objects in the whole diaspora.
Read the piece →The Aleppo Codex
The most authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible ever produced — every vowel point placed with care, every cantillation mark exact. And a third of it is missing.
Read the piece →A Judaea Capta Coin
Rome struck coins to announce the end of the Jewish people. The coins circulated. The people did not end. A small bronze disc with a lot to answer for.
Read the piece →The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon
A five-line ink inscription from a fortified site above the Elah Valley, dated to the late 11th or early 10th century BCE and still argued over letter by letter.
Read the piece →The Rylands Genizah Fragments
Cairo Geniza fragments scattered into modern libraries, including Manchester's Rylands collection, turning discarded papers into a recoverable archive of Jewish life.
Read the piece →Forgery Debates, and How We Test Them
The James Ossuary and Jehoash Tablet controversies show why provenance, patina, language and tool marks matter when an ancient-looking text appears.
Read the piece →A Yemeni Torah Case
A silver Torah case from Yemen turns the scroll into a standing shrine, opened like doors rather than laid flat on a table.
Read the piece →A Spice Tower
A little silver tower of sweet spices carries Shabbat out of the house and leaves ordinary time smelling better than it did before.
Read the piece →A Bukharan Robe
Bukharan Jewish dress belongs to the Silk Road: colour, trade, public dignity and a community that looked local without disappearing.
Read the piece →In the workshop