Oldest surviving tablet of the Ten Commandments sells for almost £4m

The oldest inscribed stone tablet of the Ten Commandments, approximately 1,500 years old, was sold for just under £4 million at Sotheby’s New York.

The 115-pound marble artifact, dating to the Late Roman-Byzantine period (ca. 300–800 CE), is the only complete example of its kind from antiquity.

The rare tablet was sold to an anonymous buyer who plans to sell it to an Israeli institution. At auction, it surpassed its pre-sale estimate of £800,000 to £1,660,000.

It was unearthed in 1913 during railway excavations along the southern coast of Israel, near the sites of early synagogues, mosques, and churches.

The significance of the discovery went unrecognised for decades, and for thirty years it served as a paving stone at the entrance to a home, exposing the inscription to foot traffic.

The marble tablet, inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew script, was finally identified in 1943 by leading archaeologist Dr. Jacob Kaplan, as a rare Samaritan Decalogue.

It features nine Biblical commandments and a unique directive to worship on Mount Gerizim, central to Samaritan tradition.

In 1947, Kaplan published its significance in the Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, explaining its 1913 discovery.

Measuring approximately two feet in height, the tablet may have originally been displayed in a synagogue or a private dwelling. Its original location was likely to have been destroyed during either the Roman invasions of 400- 600 CE or the later Crusades of the 11th century.

Following Dr. Kaplan’s publication revealing the significance of the tablet in 1947, the historical object has been studied by leading scholars in the field and published in numerous scholarly articles and books.

The 20 lines of text incised on the stone closely follow the Biblical verses familiar to Jewish traditions. However, the tablet contains only nine of the commandments as found in the Book of Exodus, omitting the admonition “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain” while including a new directive – to worship on Mount Gerizim – a holy site specific to the Samaritans.

"This remarkable tablet is not only a vastly important historic artefact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilisation,” said Richard Austin, Sotheby’s Global Head of Books and Manuscripts

“To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to journey through millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity's earliest and most enduring moral codes."