On Tuesday Israel’s Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced that it had recently discovered a stone fragment at an excavation north of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate with an inscription dedicated to the Roman emperor Hadrian. The inscription reads:
(1st hand) To the Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, son of the deified Traianus Parthicus, grandson of the deified Nerva, high priest, invested with tribunician power for the 14th time, consul for the third time, father of the country (dedicated by) the 10th legion Fretensis (2nd hand) Antoniniana.
According to archaeologists Avner Ecker and Hannah Cotton of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “This inscription was dedicated by Legio X Fretensis to the emperor Hadrian in the year 129/130 CE.” The recently found fragment and inscription is “the right half of a complete inscription, the other part of which was discovered nearby in the late 19th century and published by the pre-eminent French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau.”
“We found the inscription incorporated in secondary use around the opening of a deep cistern,” Rina Avner and Roie Greenwald, excavation directors on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in a statement. “In antiquity, as today, it was customary to recycle building materials, and the official inscription was evidently removed from its original location and integrated in a floor for the practical purpose of building the cistern. Furthermore, in order to fit it with the capstone [of the cistern], the bottom part of the inscription was sawed round.”
Avner explained to The Times of Israel the significance of the find.
“It provides us with an exact date for the official construction of the city,” Avner said. “It indicates that there was monumental, official construction projects in the city at least two years before the Bar Kochba Revolt.”
By 130 CE, just 60 years after Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus, the city had its main roads, piazzas, temples and monuments, she said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the discovery last year of a gold treasure at the foot of the Temple Mount as a “historic testimony, of the highest order, to the Jewish People’s link to Jerusalem, to its land and to its heritage.”
[Photo: IBA News VOD / YouTube ]