« What Has Become of the Methodist Church?
Main
On Fundamentalism »
November 1, 2005
Things Found
As I've said, over the last few weeks Shirley and I have been engaged in a top to bottom cleaning of our house. Well, yesterday was the beginning of cleaning the bedroom that we have elevated to a study. And we discovered many treasures including a fake Byzantine period lamp that I bought a long time ago in Jerusalem. It came tumbling out of a bag of wadi stones, ballistae, mill stone fragments and pot shreds. At first, I couldn't figure out why a perfectly good Byzantine lamp was in this bag of ignoble miscellany. And then I remembered. I had been had by an antiquities dealer in the Jerusalem Suq. The tuition for this lesson was not very high but it was none-the-less a lesson for which I paid. I'm not sure that I would buy any antiquities today but in those days no one thought it wrong and I collected a few small things of doubtless authenticity and a couple of things that are without doubt fake. This lamp is one of the latter.
We do have a Byzantine lamp that is very likely authentic and I paid less for it then I did this fake one.
Among the other things we found in the same closet as the bag with the fake lamp, was the tag from the wheelbarrow my team and I used at Gezer in 1973. You can see my name on one side and a note from Sy Gitin on the other. Sy was my boss that year. He is now the Director of the Albright Institute of Archeological Research in Jerusalem and a big time archeologist. I hope to see him at the Gezer excavation reunion in Philadelphia later this month. But I knew him when.
Posted by Duane Smith at November 1, 2005 3:56 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1427
Comments
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.