Greek letters on the ring tie the Herodium seal to a Judean worker serving Pilate's office
A copper-alloy signet ring dug out of the Herodium fortress in the 1960s carries Greek letters split around an image of a pottery vessel. Catherine Bonesho of the University of California, Los Angeles argues in Palestine Exploration Quarterly that the letters transliterate the Latin form Pilato, with an omicron standing where Greek would want an omega. On her reading the ring belonged to a Judean worker who sealed material sent to Pilate's office rather than to the prefect himself.
Science··Midday
A ring that waited more than 50 years in storage
The ring was excavated in the 1960s at Herodium, the mountaintop fortress in the Judean desert, and sat in storage for more than 50 years before Israeli scholars described it in the Israel Exploration Journal in 2018. It is made of copper alloy and engraved with a handful of Greek letters and the image of a pottery vessel; it is roughly 2,000 years old. The 2018 team tied the letters either to a person named Pilate or to someone working in Pontius Pilate's administration. What the inscription means, and who wore the ring, has been argued over ever since. Catherine Bonesho, a professor of ancient Judaism at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a new reading in Palestine Exploration Quarterly that rests on how the letters are set out.[1], [2]
The gap between omicron and omega
In Latin the genitive ends in a long i, and the Greek form of Pilati would have closed with an upsilon. The dative ends in a long o, and the Greek form of Pilato would have closed with an omega. The ring ends in an omicron. Bonesho treats it as ordinary that an engraver with elementary Latin, in a province under Roman rule for less than a century, would answer the Latin letter in front of him with the similar-looking Greek omicron. A 2023 paper, reading the letters as two groups on either side of the vessel, took the inscription as two separate words with no connection to Pilate. Bonesho answers that the engraver worked the lettering around a vessel image already cut into the face, and that a small defect beneath the first group may have moved the rest to the opposite side.[1], [2]
Who wore the ring?
The reading points away from Pontius Pilate himself. Copper alloy is a low-status material for a Roman prefect, the vessel motif belongs to Jewish design of the period, and the workmanship is not elite. On Bonesho's reading the wearer was an enslaved or formerly enslaved person employed by a local Judean elite, who could have pressed the prefect's name into the wax or clay sealing material sent to Pilate and his associates. What stands here is an interpretation of an inscription and a physical object, without proof of who owned the ring. Bonesho worked from digital images and drawings prepared by the 2018 team; she first raised the transliteration idea in a comment on a social-media post after the 2018 article appeared, and it was cited in a 2019 Biblical Archaeology Review piece.[1], [2]
