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Ossuaries
An ossuary is a chest, box, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains. They are frequently used where burial space is scarce. A body is first buried in a temporary grave, then after some years the skeletal remains are removed and placed in an ossuary ("os" is "bone" in Latin). The greatly reduced space taken up by an ossuary means that it is possible to store the remains of many more people in a single tomb than possible in coffins. The practice is sometimes known as grave recycling. Persian ossuaries In Persia, the Zoroastrians used a deep well for this function from the earliest times (c. 3,000 years ago) and called it '' astudan'' (literally, "the place for the bones"). There are many rituals and regulations in the Zoroastrian faith concerning the ''astudans''. Jewish ossuaries During the Second Temple period, Jewish burial customs were varied, differing based on class and belief. For the wealthy, one option available inclu ...
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James Ossuary
The James Ossuary is a 1st-century limestone box that was used for containing the bones of the dead. An Aramaic inscription reading "Jacob (James), son of Joseph, brother of Yeshua" in translation is cut into one side of the box. The ossuary attracted scholarly attention due to its apparent association with the Christian Holy Family. The existence of the ossuary was announced at an October 21, 2002, Washington press conference co-hosted by the Discovery Channel and the Biblical Archaeology Society. The owner of the ossuary is Oded Golan, an Israeli engineer and antiquities collector. The inscription was initially translated by André Lemaire, a Semitic epigrapher, whose article claiming that the ossuary and its inscription were authentic was published in the November/December 2002 issue of ''Biblical Archaeology Review''. In 2003, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) argued that part of the inscription was forged at a much later date. In December 2004, Oded Golan was charge ...
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Talpiot Tomb
The Talpiot Tomb (or Talpiyot Tomb) is a rock-cut tomb discovered in 1980 in the East Talpiot neighborhood, five kilometers (three miles) south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six inscribed with epigraphs, including one interpreted as "''Yeshua bar Yehosef''" ("Jeshua, son of Joseph"), though the inscription is partially illegible, and its translation and interpretation is widely disputed. The tomb also yielded various human remains and several carvings. The Talpiot discovery was documented in 1994 in "Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries in the Collections of the State of Israel" numbers 701–709, and first discussed in the media in the United Kingdom during March/April 1996. Later that year an article describing the find was published in volume 29 of ''Atiqot'', the journal of the Israel Antiquities Authority. A controversial documentary film, '' The Lost Tomb of Jesus'', was produced in 2007 by director James Cameron and journalist Simcha Jacob ...
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Second Temple Period
The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE – 70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and ended with the First Jewish–Roman War and the Roman siege of Jerusalem. In 587/586 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Judah; the Judeans lost their independence upon the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, during which the First Temple was destroyed. After the Babylonians annexed Judah as a province, part of the subjugated populace was exiled to Babylon. This exilic period lasted for nearly five decades, ending after the Neo-Babylonian Empire itself was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which annexed Babylonian territorial possessions after the fall of Babylon. Soon after the conquest, Persian king Cyrus the Great issued a proclamation known as the Edict of Cyrus, encoura ...
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Skull Chapel
The Skull Chapel () is an ossuary chapel located in the Czermna district of Kudowa-Zdrój, in southwestern Poland. Built in Baroque architecture, Baroque style in the last quarter of the 18th century, the temple serves as a mass grave with thousands of skulls and human skeletal remains adorning its interior walls, floor, ceiling, and foundations. The Skull Chapel is the only such monument in Poland, and one of five in Europe. History The chapel was built in 1776 by Czech Corner, local Bohemian parish priest Václav Tomášek. It is the mass grave of people who died during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), three Silesian Wars (1740–1763), and people who died because of cholera epidemics, Pandemic, plague, syphilis, and hunger. Together with sacristan J. Schmidt and grave digger J. Langer, father Tomášek who was inspired by the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, Capuchin cemetery while on a pilgrimage to Rome, collected the casualties' bones, cleaned and put them ...
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Sedlec Ossuary
The Sedlec Ossuary (; ) is a Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints (Czech: ), part of the former Sedlec Abbey in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel. The ossuary is among the most visited tourist attractions of the Czech Republic, drawing over 200,000 visitors annually. Four bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. A chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault. Other works include piers and monstrances flanking the altar, a coat of arms of the House of Schwarzenberg, and the signature of František Rint, also executed in bone, on the wall near the entrance. History In 1278, Henry, the abbot of the Cister ...
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Jerusalem
Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and is considered Holy city, holy to the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Both Israel and Palestine claim Jerusalem as their capital city; Israel maintains its primary governmental institutions there, while Palestine ultimately foresees it as its seat of power. Neither claim is widely Status of Jerusalem, recognized internationally. Throughout History of Jerusalem, its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, Siege of Jerusalem (other), besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, and attacked 52 times. According to Eric H. Cline's tally in Jerusalem Besieged. The part of Jerusalem called the City of David (historic), City of David shows first signs of settlement in the 4th ...
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Jericho
Jericho ( ; , ) is a city in the West Bank, Palestine, and the capital of the Jericho Governorate. Jericho is located in the Jordan Valley, with the Jordan River to the east and Jerusalem to the west. It had a population of 20,907 in 2017. From the end of the era of Mandatory Palestine, the city was Jordanian annexation of the West Bank, annexed and ruled by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 and, with the rest of the West Bank, has been subject to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Israeli occupation since 1967; administrative control was handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1994. Jericho is among the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world,Murphy-O'Connor, 1998, p. 288.Freedman et al., 2000, p. 689–671. and it is also the city with the oldest known defensive wall.Michal Strutin, ''Discovering Natural Israel'' (2001), p. 4. Archaeology, Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of ...
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Mishnah
The Mishnah or the Mishna (; , from the verb ''šānā'', "to study and review", also "secondary") is the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah. Having been collected in the 3rd century CE, it is the first work of rabbinic literature, written primarily in Mishnaic Hebrew but also partly in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. The oldest surviving physical fragments of it are from the 6th to 7th centuries. The Mishnah was literary redaction, redacted by Judah ha-Nasi probably in Beit She'arim (Roman-era Jewish village), Beit Shearim or Sepphoris between the ending of the second century CE and the beginning of the third century. Heinrich Graetz, dissenting, places the Mishnah's compilation in 189 CE (see: H. Graetz, ''History of the Jews'', vol. 6, Philadelphia 1898, p105), and which date follows that penned by Rabbi Abraham ben David in his "Sefer HaKabbalah le-Ravad", or what was then ''anno'' 500 of the Seleucid era. in a time when the p ...
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André Lemaire
André Lemaire (born 1942) is a French epigrapher, historian and philologist. He is Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études, where he teaches Hebraic and Aramean philology and epigraphy. He specializes in West-Semitic old civilization and the origins of monotheism. He is a corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He heads the scientific edition of the international series ''Supplements to Vetus Testamentum'' (more than 30 volumes). King Solomon's Temple In the 1980s, Lemaire authenticated a small, broken, carved piece of " ivory pomegranate" that dates to the 8th century and would have belonged to the cult objects of Solomon's Temple. This is according to his analysis of the inscription examined with the methods of epigraphy. This interpretation was challenged by Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University, who stated that the inscription is subsequent to damage that had fragmented the piece. Following this, a commission of ex ...
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