Article of Faith?
A stone tablet could be a relic of King Solomon's temple-- or a clever forgery
The GSI team found, for instance, that the tablet's patina chemically resembles the stone itself, which the scientists took as evidence that the patina had formed naturally. Goren, however, says that patina often differs from the underlying stone because it takes on characteristics of the soil in which an artifact is buried. And in this case, the tablet and the Jerusalem soil where it supposedly lay for centuries are very different. "This means that the patina is unlikely [to have been] created in the Jerusalem environment," he says. The gold in the coating is even more suspicious, he adds, because it would be odd in the extreme if the patina picked up nothing from the dirt except micro-globules of gold.
Goren and his colleagues will take a closer look at the structure of the patina. While the GSI scientists analyzed scrapings of it, the committee plans to examine tiny chunks in cross section. Genuine patina forms in ultrathin layers because of changes over time in the environment in which the artifact is buried, says Goren. Forgers haven't yet figured out how to give fake patinas this laminar structure. The team will also try to date the stone with a technique that essentially reveals how long it's been since an object was subjected to intense heat. Called thermoluminescence dating, it may tell the scientists if the tablet was ever in a great fire, like the one that supposedly consumed the First Temple.
Truth will out. Richard Newman, who has examined many suspect artifacts as head of scientific research at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, cautions that even many more tests may not lead to a definitive verdict. But happily, that's not likely. Says Newman, "Forgers usually make some mistake or the other."
Oleg Grabar, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, guesses that ultimately the tablet will be judged a forgery. "It's unlikely that anyone's found an artifact from the First Temple period," he says. "It's been so hard to find anything referring to Christ--and that's 600 years later." But even if it turns out to be the real thing, he says, it should have no bearing on the contemporary battle over the Temple Mount-Noble Sanctuary. "To think that a bit of ancient stone [whether of Jewish or Muslim origin] would alter a claim to the land today, that is lunacy."
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