Latest news with #Judean
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A Tomb Once Said to Hold ‘Jesus's Midwife' Might Instead Hold Ancient Royalty
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: For centuries, a cave near Jerusalem was believed by Christian pilgrims to be the tomb of an attendant to the birth of Christ. Salome is depicted in the apocryphal Gospel of James as doubting the 'virgin birth' only to repent and be visited by angels. A new study suggests that the Salome buried in this tomb was, in fact, not the apocryphal Biblical figure, but rather the younger sister of Judean king Herod the Great. This story is a collaboration with For centuries, a subset of Christian pilgrims have journeyed to a cave southwest of Jerusalem in Israel referred to as the 'Cave of Salome,' due to its asserted connection to a figure associated with Jesus of Nazareth. Now, a new study in the Israel Antiquities Authority's journal 'Atiqot posits that this cave does serve as a tomb to someone named Salome, but not the one it's long been purported to have been. Rather than the Biblical figure sometimes described as 'Jesus' midwife,' the tomb might have held a figure of Judean royalty. But if you've only read the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you might find yourself wondering just who this Salome was supposed to be in the first place (while there is a Salome briefly alluded to in Mark 15:40 said to be present at the crucifixion, this is not the Salome in question). For that, we need to dip into a subset of Christian texts known as 'the apocrypha.' Given the underground origins of Christianity amidst the Roman Empire, it's no surprise that there was not one single written text relied upon to spread the word of the new faith. Even the four Gospels widely considered part of the Biblical Canon are traditionally believed to have been originally composed with different audiences in mind (Matthew wrote for those with a familiarity with Jewish tradition while Mark for a Roman audience, for example). This means that there are an array of texts, both extant and lost, that offer different, divergent, and at times even contradictory tellings of the story of Jesus than those that were ultimately determined by church bodies to be the 'canonical' works. One particular and prominent subset of these are what is called the 'infancy gospels,' stories of Jesus during his childhood. Little is said of Jesus' youth in the four canonical gospels, with only Matthew and Luke mentioning the story of his birth, and Luke alone including a single anecdote of a child Jesus visiting a Temple (Luke 2:41-52). But the apocryphal infancy gospels contain a wide array of events allegedly involving a child Jesus, including a confrontation with a literal dragon (the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew). One of these texts, the apocryphal Gospel of James, introduces the character of Salome. While Salome is present for the birth of Jesus in this text, she was not actually 'Jesus' midwife.' Rather, this gospel depicts the actual midwife during Jesus' birth, referred to only by her title of 'Emea,' crying out to Salome about the virgin birth she had witnessed, only for Salome to dismiss it: 'And the midwife went forth of the cave and Salome met her. And she said to her: Salome, Salome, a new sight have I to tell thee. A virgin hath brought forth, which her nature alloweth not. And Salome said: As the Lord my God liveth, if I make not trial and prove her nature I will not believe that a virgin hath brought forth.' Salome then goes to witness the newborn child herself and decries her earlier doubts, seeking atonement, and is visited by an angel, healed, and told not to speak of what she had witnessed 'until the child enter into Jerusalem.' Some scholars point to this story of Salome as a predecessor and/or parallel to the more famous story, post-Resurrection, of Doubting Thomas. As Live Science reports, the aforementioned Cave of Salome gained its religious reputation when an ossuary, a casket filled with bones, was discovered in that cave bearing the name Salome. Adherents to the Gospel of James took to attributing these bones, and therefor the tomb that held them, as belonging to the Salome of the birth story, and began making pilgrimages there. As Live Science notes, those pilgrimages were a common enough occurrence that they continued for two hundred years after the area had been conquered by the Islamic Caliphate in the 7th century. The cave was excavated in 1984, where they found 'hundreds of clay oil lamps from the eighth and ninth centuries, which archaeologists think were sold to Christian pilgrims so they would have light while exploring the dark cave.' But to determine who might really have been interred in this tomb, the 2025 IAA study, co-authored by Vladik Lifshits and Nir-Shimshon Paran, they looked not at what had been left within the tomb, but rather how the tomb itself had been constructed: 'Lifshits noted the monumental architecture — including a large courtyard at the entrance — indicated that a member of the royal family may have been buried there. The authors also discovered the remains of several luxurious villas nearby, which indicates the site once belonged to a very wealthy family.' Their study suggests the possibility that the Salome in question may not have been connected to Jesus' birth, but rather to a different figure who factors into the story of the young Jesus: Herod I, also known as Herod the Great. Biblical tradition holds that Herod I, who ruled from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C., ordered the death of all male babies in Bethlehem, but no objective historical evidence has yet emerged that supports that particular tale. Instead, what is known about Herod I, as Live Science recounts, are his contributions to the kingdom he oversaw: 'For example, he was a prolific builder who restored the decrepit Second Temple on the Temple Mount, and the massive rock walls he had built are still standing today as the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.' The study asserts that the Salome buried within the cave was Herod I's younger sister, who died in approximately 10AD. This Salome is not to be confused with Herod I's granddaughter who also bore that name. That Salome, recorded in the Bible as ordering the beheading of John the Baptist, would later be immortalized in an array of fictional works like Oscar Wilde's 1893 play and the subsequent 1905 opera by Richard Strauss. When Live Science spoke to Boaz Zissu of Israel's Bar-Ilan University, a scholar unaffiliated with the study, they conceded that 'The authors correctly identify the original phase as a monumental tomb belonging to local elites of the Herodian period' but suggested 'more rigorous evidential support' was required before it could be firmly established to be the tomb of Salome. For their part, study co-author Vladik Lifshits conceded as much. 'It's not that I think it must be the tomb of Salome the sister of Herod,' Lifshits told Live Science. 'I'm suggesting that this is one of the possibilities.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be older than thought, experts say
Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be older than previously thought, with some biblical texts dating from the time of their original authors, researchers say. The first of the ancient scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran in the Judean desert by Bedouin shepherds in the mid-20th century. The manuscripts range from legal documents to parts of the Hebrew Bible, and are thought to date from around the third century BCE to the second century CE. Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to glean fresh insights into the dates of individual scrolls – findings experts suggest could challenge ideas about when, where and by whom they were produced. 'It's like a time machine. So we can shake hands with these people from 2,000 years ago, and we can put them in time much better now, said Prof Mladen Popović, first author of the research from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. While some scrolls were radiocarbon dated in the 1990s, Popović said scholars did not tackle the problem of castor oil contamination – a substance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the manuscripts, but which could skew results. In addition, many of the scrolls had only been dated by handwriting analysis. Writing in the journal Plos One, the team report how they attempted radiocarbon dating of 30 samples from different manuscripts found at four sites and thought to span five centuries. Crucially, the team first cleaned the samples to remove the castor oil contamination. The researchers successfully radiocarbon-dated 27 samples, finding that while two were younger than handwriting analysis had suggested, many were older. Among other findings, the researchers discovered two different writing styles, known as Hasmonean and Herodian scripts, coexisted for a much longer period than previously thought, while a sample from a manuscript called 4Q114 – which contains verses from the book of Daniel – was older than traditional palaeography had suggested. 'It was previously dated to the late second century BCE, a generation after the author of the Book of Daniel. Now, with our study we move back in time contemporary to that author,' said Popović. The team then used a type of AI known as machine learning to build a model they called Enoch – a nod to a biblical figure associated with scientific knowledge. The team trained Enoch by feeding it 62 digital images of ink traces from 24 of the radiocarbon dated manuscripts, together with the carbon-14 dates. They then verified the model by showing Enoch a further 13 images from the same manuscripts. In 85% of cases the model produced ages that tallied with the radiocarbon dates, and in many cases produced a smaller range of probable dates than obtained from radiocarbon dating alone. 'What we have created is a very robust tool that is empirically based – based on physics and on geometry,' said Popović. When Enoch was presented with images from 135 undated manuscripts it had not previously seen, it realistically dated 79% of them – as judged by expert palaeographers. Popović added those deemed unrealistic might have had problematic data, such as poor quality images. The system has already produced new insights including that a copy of the biblical book Ecclesiastes dates from the time of the book's presumed author. Popović said Enoch meant the age of further scrolls could now be uncovered without radiocarbon dating – a process that requires the destruction of small samples. 'There are more than 1,000 Dead Sea scrolls manuscripts so our study is a first but significant step, opening a door unto history with new possibilities for research,' he said. Prof emerita Joan Taylor of King's College London, said the results would have a major impact on Qumran studies. 'These results mean that most of the manuscripts found in the caves near Qumran would not have been written at the site of Qumran, which was not occupied until later,' she said. However, Dr Matthew Collins of the University of Chester cautioned that radiocarbon dating only shed light on the age of the parchment, not when it was written on, while there were also questions about how stylistically representative the small number of training samples were for different periods in time. 'Overall, this is an important and welcome study, and one which may provide us with a significant new tool in our armoury for dating these texts,' he said. 'Nevertheless, it's one that we should adopt with caution, and in careful conjunction with other evidence.'
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Yahoo
A young Israeli diplomat was returning home to propose. Now they dig his grave
As locations for a proposal go, it doesn't get much better than the picturesque village of Beit Zayit. Set in the steep, wooded Judean mountains to the west of Jerusalem, it was here that Yaron Lischinsky, a gifted young diplomat at Israel's Washington embassy, intended to fly on Sunday with his American girlfriend Sarah Milgrim, another embassy staffer, to introduce her to his parents and get engaged. Instead, on Friday afternoon, a workman mopped the sweat from his brow as he stood over Mr Lischinsky's freshly dug grave in the small cemetery on the edge of the village. The couple were murdered two days earlier in the US capital by a gunman shouting 'free Palestine' – an act of political and racial violence, which shocked the world and led Israel to partly blame world leaders, including Sir Keir Starmer, for condemning Israel's new Gaza offensive. The revulsion and grief are exacerbated by the fact that the victims were so obviously in love and, just as obviously, at the start of glittering careers. Yaron Lischinsky, 30, knew from a young age that he wanted to be a diplomat. Born in Israel, his family emigrated to Germany before returning when he was 16. It meant that when he first attended Mae Boyar High School in Jerusalem, he was initially quiet among his classmates due to his hesitancy in speaking Hebrew. But even then, his personality stood out, according to Mr Lischinsky's former PE teacher. 'I remember his character was very special,' Yoram Menachem told reporters. 'He was a wonderful student.' Swiftly finding his feet in a radically different environment to Germany, the young Lischinsky, who is understood to have three siblings, was aided by his talent for football, which eventually saw him picked for the youth side of Beitar Jerusalem, a professional club. 'I remember that he was really, really good at it,' a friend of Mr Lischinsky's older brother, who asked not to be named, told The Telegraph. 'In Germany he had played in decent teams and when he came to Israel he found the level was not nearly so good, so he thrived.' By the time he left school, Mr Lischinsky's exposure to multiple languages had become an asset, and he began to learn Japanese as part of his degree in international relations and Asian studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 'His dream was to become a diplomat,' Nissim Otmazgin, the dean of humanities at the university told CNN. 'In many ways, I think for me he symbolises the hope of Israel. Young people, idealistic, that are going abroad, studying about different cultures, and trying to do good for their country. 'So in this sense, it is not only a personal tragedy – it's also kind of a public tragedy.' The professor described diplomacy as not just a career ambition, but a 'calling' for the Israeli-German citizen, who had completed his military service in the IDF. Another friend from his university days, Jakub Klepek, described him as a 'man of purpose', who loved nothing better than discussing politics, religion and books. Mr Lischinsky was a founding member of a sister organisation to the German-Israeli Society, promoting joint projects between young people from both countries. According to friends, this approach was inimical to his concept of diplomacy: not just promoting Israel's message abroad, but trying to build partnerships and understanding. As a researcher in the Middle East division of the Washington DC embassy, this took the form of passionate advocacy for the Abraham Accords, the set of agreements brokered by the first Trump administration that normalised relations between Israel, the UAE and other Arab states. In doing so, he appears to have been building links on the Right of the US foreign policy establishment. Indeed, Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Conservative think tank the Hudson institute, posted on X this week that it was at an event hosted by the Republican Senator Ted Cruz that Mr Lischinsky met the love of his life, a 26-year-old Jewish US citizen from Kansas who helped organise missions and visits by delegations to Israel. On Friday, the former presidential candidate posted an emoji of a shattered heart, saying: 'Absolutely heartbreaking. Two beautiful lives murdered by unmitigated evil.' For her part, Ms Riboua, said: 'Yaron Lischinsky was the finest friend I've ever had, brilliant, kind and endlessly thoughtful. 'A devout Christian and a gifted linguist, he spoke German, Hebrew, and Japanese. 'He was full of curiosity and always brimming with ideas. 'I don't think we ever had a conversation that didn't leave me inspired to write something new.' On his LinkedIn profile, Mr Lischinsky described himself as an 'ardent' believer in peace-building. Others were swift to point out that the event at the Capital Jewish Museum outside which he and Ms Milgrim were so ruthlessly gunned down had been to discuss how multi-faith organisations can bring aid to war-torn regions such as Gaza. Son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, the diplomat was an enthusiastic member of a sect described by some as Messianic Jews, those who self-identify as Jews but who accept the divinity of Jesus Christ and the concept of salvation – beliefs that put them firmly in the Christian camp, according to mainstream Jews. He worshipped weekly at the Melech Ha'Melachim in Jerusalem, where a friend, David Boskey, described him as 'softly-spoken but not timid. Always smiling. Always volunteering.' Ronen Shoval, the dean of the Argaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, where Mr Lischinsky participated in a year-long course in classical liberal conservative thought, told The New York Times: 'He was a devout Christian, but he had tied his fate to the people of Israel.' Due to the actions of a lone fanatic, Mr Lischinsky's fate was not to walk arm-in-arm with his beloved Sarah through the ancient groves of his youth, perhaps even to propose to her there – he had already bought the ring. Instead, at 6pm local time on Sunday, just up the hill from the birthplace of John the Baptist at Ein Karem, he will be buried there. Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer, along with other world leaders who recently criticised Israel's actions in Gaza, faces the uncomfortable accusation that, in doing so, he fed the 'incitement' that leads to anti-Jewish hate. 'They are both gone. And the loss is immeasurable,' wrote Ms Riboua. 'The world has lost two extraordinary souls. And I have lost a dear friend who made every moment brighter.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
CBC
16-04-2025
- CBC
1,900-year-old Roman papyrus details elaborate tax evasion scheme, research suggests
Social Sharing If you thought you would find few parallels between today's world and the world of 2,000 years ago, or you feel like you're the only one dealing with taxes on seemingly everything, think again. According to a recent analysis of a 1,900-year-old papyrus from ancient Rome, taxes and tax evasion have existed for millenia. "It was an incredibly lucky rediscovery that brought this publication to light eventually," Anna Dolganov, a historian and papyrologist of the Roman Empire with the Austrian Archaeological Institute, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "It's extremely historically substantial. It's one of those documents that very few scholars get to work on in the whole of their career." The papyrus, found in the Judean desert in the 1950s, includes a tale of two men who lived in a border region between two Roman provinces. The scroll, written by a prosecutor in preparation for a tax evasion trial, accuses the men of an elaborate scheme involving the bogus sale and then manumission of enslaved persons. There were at least five types of taxes associated with the trade, sale, ownership and manumission of slaves in the Roman empire. The earliest evidence shows four per cent tax was charged on the sale of slaves and five per cent tax on manumissions, according to the research. "What they seem to have done is weaponize the fact that the administrative systems of the two Roman provinces did not routinely communicate with each other," she said. Dolganov says it appears the sales of slaves on one side of the border were not verified by the other provincial administration. "And this appears to have been instrumentalized by them to make the slaves effectively disappear on paper from the view of the officials." Two of the men, Gadalias and Saulos, have biblical names which indicate very strongly that they are Jewish, Dolganov said. "The one who was instrumental in the forgery happened to be the son of a notary. So he was involved in his father's notarial business and therefore had access to the instruments that one needs to create forged legal documents," she said. Possible motives The details of the case are seen through the lens of the prosecution, which argues the men are criminals who should be condemned. It is possible, however, to eke out a bit of the background story, Dolganov said. One puzzling element to the whole story, Dolganov said, was that at some point after the sale of the slaves took place, one of them was freed by the original owner who was no longer the owner on paper. "If the point is to evade taxes, why was the risk of manumitting the slave taken? Because when a slave is manumitted, their manumission has to be registered," she explained. She believes that this may have been when officials became suspicious that something was going on. Dolganov has several theories as to the men's motives beyond mercantile tax evasion. The slaves automatically became Jewish if they had Jewish masters, and Jewish law has requirements surrounding the treatment of slaves. She says it's possible that the men were trying to evade their own law. Another possibility, according to Dolganov, could be that the accused men had a human relationship to these slaves, and in the Roman world it was customary to reward faithful household slaves with manumission. Capital punishment Rules for tax evasion were not specific to Jewish subjects. They were universal and extremely harsh. "The Romans did not joke about tax evasions. They saw this, essentially, as a crime against the state," Dolganov said. The punishment could include significant fines, temporary or permanent exile, or hard labour in mines or stone quarries — with the latter essentially a death sentence, she explained. "In the worst case, one could be made an example of and executed in an imaginative way. For example, being thrown to wild beasts in the amphitheatre," Dolganov said. The text mirrors what Roman legal literature says about the way that these types of cases ought to be handled, Dolganov said. "It shows that these local lawyers in these borderland provinces were extremely competent in both rhetoric and Roman law, and this is a huge discovery because it shows that Roman legal knowledge was actually very widespread throughout the empire." 'Sound piece of scholarship' One history expert applauded the research, saying it is an impressive piece of legal history from a lesser-known time period. The papyrus dates back to the eve of a poorly documented revolt by Jewish people against the Roman Empire in Judea — a period researchers have struggled to document. "I think it's a really sound piece of scholarship … it's a really important piece of evidence from a time and place that we just don't know much about otherwise," said Seth Bernard, a professor of ancient history at the University of Toronto. He says two aspects of the research stood out: the history of slavery in the Empire, and the political history of a time and place that historians have had trouble accessing. He compared the findings to today's world, where taxes on many goods and services are commonplace. "You have to pay a tax when you buy a slave, you have to pay a tax when you own a slave, you have to pay a tax when you manumit them and you pay a tax when you export them," he said. "It's like this is just one activity, and it seems like they're paying taxes on everything … it's kind of nice to know that we're not the first people dealing with taxes on everything."
New York Times
14-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome? A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Offers a Guide.
It may not have been the tax-evasion trial of the century — the second century, that is — but it was of such gravity that the defendants faced charges of forgery, fiscal fraud and the sham sale of slaves. Tax dodging is as old as taxation itself, but these particular offenses were considered so serious under Roman law that penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals. The allegations are laid out in a papyrus that was discovered decades ago in the Judean desert but only recently analyzed; it contains the prosecutor's prep sheet and the hastily drafted minutes from a judicial hearing. According to the ancient notes, the tax-evasion scheme involved the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan. Both tax dodgers were men. One, named Gadalias, was the impoverished son of a notary with ties to the local administrative elite. Besides convictions for extortion and counterfeiting, his catalog of misdeeds included banditry, sedition and, on four occasions, failing to show up for jury duty at the court of the Roman governor. Gadalias's partner in crime was a certain Saulos, his 'friend and collaborator' and the supposed mastermind of the caper. Although the ethnicity of the accused is not explicitly stated, their Jewish identities are assumed, based on their biblical names, Gedaliah and Saul. This ancient legal drama unfolded during the reign of Hadrian, after the emperor's tour of the area around 130 A.D. and presumably before 132 A.D. That year, Simon bar Kochba, a messianic guerrilla chief, led a popular uprising — the third and final war between the Jewish people and the empire. The revolt was violently suppressed, with hundreds of thousands killed and most of the surviving Jewish population expelled from Judea, which Hadrian renamed Syria Palestina. 'The papyrus reflects the suspicion with which the Roman authorities viewed their Jewish subjects,' said Anna Dolganov, a historian of the Roman Empire with the Austrian Archaeological Institute, who deciphered the scroll. She noted that there is archaeological evidence for coordinated planning of the Bar Kochba revolt. 'It is possible that tax evaders like Gadalias and Saulos, who were inclined to disrespect the Roman order, were involved in the preparations,' Dr. Dolganov said. In the current issue of Tyche, a journal of antiquity published by the University of Vienna, Dr. Dolganov and three Austrian and Israeli colleagues present the court proceedings as a case study. Their paper brings to light how Roman institutions and imperial law could influence the administration of justice in a provincial setting where relatively few people were Roman citizens. 'The document provides rare and highly interesting evidence for the slave trade in this part of the empire,' said Dennis P. Kehoe, a classicist at Tulane University, who was not involved in the study, 'as well as the circumstances under which Jews might have slaves.' Following the papyrus trail No one is certain when or by whom the papyrus was unearthed, but Dr. Dolganov said that it was probably found in the 1950s by Bedouin antiquity dealers. She suspects that the discovery site was Nahal Hever, a steep-walled canyon west of the deep cleft of the Dead Sea where some Bar Kochba rebels, fleeing the Romans, took refuge in natural fault line caves in the limestone cliffs. In 1960, archaeologists found documents from the era in one of the Jewish hide-outs; others have been discovered since. Initially misclassified, the ragged 133-line scroll lay unnoticed in the archives of the Israel Antiquities Authority until 2014, when Hannah Cotton Paltiel, a classicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, realized that it was written in ancient Greek. In light of the document's complexity and extraordinary length, a team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources. Deciphering the papyrus and reconstructing its intricate narrative posed major challenges to Dr. Dolganov. 'The letters are tiny and densely packed, and the Greek is highly rhetorical and full of technical legal terms,' she said. Unlike in documents such as contracts, there were no formulaic expressions that made the translation easier. 'It certainly does not help that we only have the second half, or less, of the original,' Dr. Dolganov said. The researchers deduced that the tax scheme was designed to escape notice, which meant careful detective work was required to piece together what happened. 'I had to adopt the perspective of the Roman fiscal administration to understand what the text is talking about,' she said. Dr. Dolganov also had to imagine the dodge from the standpoint of the accused: To commit tax fraud with the slave trade in the most remote corner of the Roman world, what would you have to do, and what would have made the effort profitable? The ancient scheme has resonated deeply with modern tax lawyers. A German lawyer told Dr. Dolganov that the shenanigans of Gadalias and Saulos were not all that different from today's most common forms of tax fraud — shifting assets, phony transactions. And the Roman interrogation methods were largely in line with Untersuchungshaft — investigative custody — for financial crimes, which involves intimidation and often brutal questioning. 'Dr. Dolganov has performed wonderful feats of scholarship in unraveling the meaning of the contents and their significance for the history of the region and the empire,' said Brent Shaw, a classicist at Princeton University with no connection to the project. Rebels with a cause The case against Gadalias and Saulos was bolstered by information provided by an informant who tipped off the Roman authorities — and the text even suggests that the informant was none other than Saulos, who denounced his accomplice Chaereas to protect himself in a looming financial investigation. The most likely scenario, Dr. Dolganov said, was that Saulos, a resident of Judea, arranged the bogus sale of several slaves to Chaereas, who lived in the neighboring province of Arabia. By being sold across the provincial border, the slaves would have vanished in print from Saulos's assets in Judea. But because they physically stayed with Saulos, the alleged buyer, Chaereas, could opt not to declare them in Arabia. 'Thus, on paper, the slaves disappeared in Judea but never arrived in Arabia, thereby becoming invisible to Roman administrators,' Dr. Dolganov said. 'Henceforth, all taxes on these slaves could be avoided.' The empire had sophisticated systems for tracking slave ownership and collecting various taxes, which amounted to 4 percent on slave sales and 5 percent on manumissions. 'To free a slave in the empire, you had to present documentary evidence of the slave's current and previous ownership, which had to be officially registered,' Dr. Dolganov said. 'If any documents were missing or looked suspicious, Roman administrators would investigate.' To hide Saulos's double-dealing, Gadalias, the notary's son, evidently forged the bills of sale and other legal agreements. When the authorities became aware of the matter, the defendants allegedly made payments to a local city council for protection. At the trial, Gadalias blamed his late father for the forgeries, and Saulos pinned the manumission on Chaereas. The papyrus offers no insight into their motive. 'Why the men took the risk of freeing a slave without valid papers remains a mystery,' Dr. Dolganov said. One possibility is that, by faking the sale of slaves and then releasing them, Gadalias and Saulos were observing a Jewish biblical duty to free enslaved people. Or maybe there was profit to be made in capturing people — perhaps even willing participants — from beyond the border, bringing them into the Empire and then releasing them from their 'slavery' to become free Romans. Or maybe Gadalias and Saulos were human traffickers, plain and simple — Dr. Dolganov emphasized that the alternate story lines were entirely speculative, as nothing in the text supported them. What surprised her most about the trial, she said, was the professionalism of the prosecutors. They employed deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek. 'This is the edge of the Roman Empire, and boom, we see legal practitioners of high caliber who are competent in Roman law,' Dr. Dolganov said. The papyrus does not reveal the final verdict. 'If the Roman judge was convinced these were hardened criminals and execution was in order, Gadalias as a member of his local civic elite may have received a more merciful death by decapitation,' Dr. Dolganov said. 'At any rate, almost anything is better than being eaten by leopards.'
