Jordanian Lead Codes
The Jordanian Lead Codices or Umm al-Ghanam Codices are a collection of around 70 ring-bound books made of lead and copper platelets, which are said to date from the 1st century AD, were published in 2011 and were soon recognized as forgery .
The codes are said to have been discovered by Bedouins in a cave near the village of Saham near Hamat Gader / Umm Qais in northern Jordan in 2006 and smuggled into Umm al-Ghanam near Nazareth in northern Israel . The owner Hassan Saida, an Israeli Bedouin, also claimed they were found by his great-grandfather a hundred years ago. After the discovery of the find, the Jordanian Antiquities Administration tried to get it back.
The individual ring binders each have between 5 and 15 pages roughly the size of a credit card. A depicted figure with the inscription "Savior of Israel" is said to represent Jesus Christ . According to a radiocarbon dating , the leather used actually appeared to be old, and the lead alloy did not appear to have any modern admixtures either.
The finds were made by the theologian Margaret Barker from Cambridge University , the epigrapher André Lemaire from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the Judaist James R. Davila from the University of St. Andrews , the ancient historian Peter Thonemann from the University of Oxford , studied the Aramaist Steve Caruso of Rutgers University and other scientists.
The investigations came to the result that the texts, symbols and images were put together from various inscriptions in an amateurish way. The Aramaic letters are taken from palaeographic examples from a period of 800 years, mixed in time and occasionally used in mirror image. The Greek parts were partly incoherently taken from an inscription found in 1958 on display in the Archaeological Museum of Amman , and they often confuse the letters alpha and lambda . The alleged pictorial representation of Jesus with the “crown of thorns” copies a mosaic representation of Venus (so-called “ Galilean Mona Lisa ”) from Sepphoris in Galilee found in 1987 or similar representations of the sun god Helios “in a wreath of rays”.
The "Jordanian Lead Codices" are a forgery using old materials.
Individual evidence
- ↑ See e.g. B. Josef Nyary: 2000 year old ring binder: sensation or fake? . In: Hamburger Abendblatt, April 5, 2011 ( online resource , accessed August 1, 2011). The “discoverer” of the find was the English-Australian private scholar and geolinguist David Elkington (* 1962; also: Paul Elkington), co-author of In the Name of the Gods. The Mystery of Resonance and the Pre-historic Messiah , Sherborne: Green Man 2001.
- ↑ Tombstone from Madaba with an Aramaic-Greek bilingual from AD 108/9.