Radiocarbon dating of two Jewish ritual instruments found in London a century and a half ago has dashed hopes that they date from the period before the Jewish community was expelled in 1290. They are postmedieval and one of them may never have been finished or used in the synagogue.

The shofar is a ritual instrument often made from a ram’s horn, Tamara Chase and her colleagues explain in London Archaeologist. “It is mentioned 69 times in the Bible”, they say. The first occurrence is in the book of Exodus, and they were also blown at Jericho on Joshua’s orders, whereupon the walls fell down. Shofarot are used in the synagogue during the month of Elul, which commemorates Moses’s time on Mount Sinai and they are played on the holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Of the examples found in London, the first was found at Vauxhall during dredging of the Thames in 1850 and is preserved in the Cuming Museum in Southwark. The other discovery was in Leadenhall Street in the City in 1855, where the Bricklayers’ Hall was used as a synagogue from 1761; the horn now belongs to the Jewish Museum in Camden Town.

Jews were excluded from England from the time of Edward I until Cromwell’s rule in the 1650s, and it seemed a good idea to see if the shofarot belonged to the earlier or later period. Tiny samples of horn were subjected to AMS (accelerator mass spectrometer) dating at Oxford.

The Vauxhall shofar, with a shaped mouthpiece and zigzag-decorated bell, is more than 95 per cent certain to date from the period 1630-1939, with a two-thirds chance of dating from after 1800. It is most likely of 18th or early 19th century date. Why it was found in the Thames is unknown: a split in the base made it unusable and unusable ritual objects should be buried. This flaw may have developed during manufacture, so that the horn was never used formally as a shofar. The Leadenhall Street shofar yielded the same date ranges, but its provenance remains a mystery. The Bricklayers’ Hall was leased to the Elders of the New Synagogue until 1883, but by then the object had been out of the ground for a generation.

London Archaeologist Vol. 12 No. 1: 14-15

Byzantine glass at Petra

Petra, “the rose-red city half as old as time” in southern Jordan, is best known for its spectacular Nabataean rock-cut temples and the narrow entry through the gorge of the Siq, featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. But the site has a much longer history, with an early neolithic village on the hill of Beidha near by, and it was a regional centre in the Roman and early Byzantine eras.

During this latter period, a number of churches were built: one known as the Petra Church was probably built in the late 5th century and destroyed by fire a century later. Documents found in the ruins “suggest that Petra was a significant administrative centre of the Byzantine Empire, still fully functional in the middle of the sixth century”, Dr N. Schibille and colleagues note in Archaeometry.

This church seems to have been a light-filled building. Dr Schibille’s work on fragments of window glass shows that much of it was imported from the coastal region of what is now northern Israel. Electron probe microanalysis (EPMA) and X-ray fluorescence (ED-XRF), have established that 23 fragments are all soda-limesilica glass.

About 70 per cent of their make-up was silica, derived from sand, 15 per cent soda and 9 per cent lime; all of the glass was of blueish or greenish hue. This composition matches that of the “Levantine I” glass type, which Ian Freestone and his colleagues suggest was made in the Belus delta on the Bay of Haifa. “It is likely that the glass used at Petra derived ultimately from the Palestinian coast”, the investigators say.

One piece of glass had an aberrant chemical composition, with high levels of manganese and antimony and a raised rim. Comparison with glass from mainland Italy suggests that it was imported from farther away, “potentially indicating the recycling of Roman glass or even the reuse of whole window-panes as spolia”, something already attested at Petra.

The difference between the church glass and that from the older Great Temple indicates that between the 4th and 7th centuries Petra’s glass supply changed, apparently to a more local source on the Mediterranean coast. Trade routes running south across the desert would have brought the small but still fragile panes for use in the city’s holy places. “Windows are just as much an aesthetic component of the architecture as the multicoloured interior decorations with which the Petra Church was richly embellished”, the team concludes.

Archaeometry Vol. 50: 627-642