40-43, pl. V.3 (in Hebrew) (ed. pr.) | |
79-80 | |
157-168 | |
594-595, no. 650 (Feissel) | |
248-254 | |
28, no. 25 |
SEG 16 (1959): 850; 20 (1964): 493; 26 (1976): 1672; 43 (1993): 1059; 47 (1997): 2052; 53 (2003): 1835
AE 1993: 1628
CIIP I.2 (2012): 848 (ph.)
Western end of the nave of the funerary chapel excavated at Beit Safafa in 1952.
Pres. loc.: findspot (covered).
Remains of a chapel excavated in the 1950s at Kh. Sheibun, in the neighborhood of Beit Safafa, in the southwestern outskirts of Jerusalem. The structure consists of an underground vault with eight burial cubicles, and a chapel adjoining the north side of the vault, and perhaps built in a later stage. The entrance of the chapel was from the east; this orientation, and the annexed vault, indicate that it probably had a funerary function. The chapel, 7 m long and 8 m wide, was divided by columns into a nave (3.5 m wide) and two aisles. The nave was paved with a mosaic carpet of a plain geometrical pattern. After the excavation the site was covered again.
The inscription is set in a tabula ansata at the western edge of the mosaic carpet. The lines of script are oriented to the west and arranged in reverse order, the bottom line being the first of the text. The text begins with a cross. The letters are oval; lunate sigma and w-shaped omega. The stem of the upsilon slants to the left. Twice (ll.1, 3) vowels are left out, and once (l.4) the epsilon was written without the middle bar, therefore looking like a sigma.
Meas.: w 230 cm.
☩ Ἐγένετο τὸ πᾶν ἔργ⟨ο⟩ν τῆς ἀνεγέρσεως τοῦ οἴκ-
ου τῶν ἁγίων μαρτύρων ὑπὲρ σωτηρίας κ(αὶ) ἀντιλή-
μψεως Σαμουήλου κ(αὶ) τῶν αὐτοῦ δι⟨α⟩φερόντων κ(αὶ) ὑπὲρ ἀν-
απαύσεως τῶν πολυβότων, ἐν μη(νὶ) Ἰουνίῳ ἰνδ(ικτιῶνος) ιδʹ ἔτους ϛσʹ.
The whole work of the erection of the house of the Holy Martyrs was accomplished for the salvation and succor of Samuel and his household, and for the rest of the many-feeding (benefactors?), in the month of June of the 14th indiction, year 6200.
l.4 ΠΟΛΑΒΟΤΩΝ: πολυετῶν, “elders” Landau; πολυβώτων or Πολυβότων, “many feeding (parents)” or “Phygians from Polyboton” Avi-Yonah; <ἀ>πολ<ώ>των, “deceased” Woodward in SEG 16; πολαβ<ι>ότων, “long-lived” Lifshitz; πολαβο<η>ῶν for πολυβοητῶν Di Segni 1993; π<ρ>ολαβό<ν>των, “predeceased” Feissel.
Dated building inscription in a tabula ansata at the western edge of a mosaic carpet.
Avi-Yonah interpreted the first digit of the date as a digamma, and read the figure 206, by the era of Diocletian, corresponding to 489/90 CE. June 490, however, falls two months short of the beginning of the 14th indiction. Ovadiah dated the mosaic to 491. The oddly shaped digit is in fact a stigma preceded by a “tail” indicating the thousands. Τhis figure appears on mosaic floors of the 8 c. in Israel (SEG 40, 1481; 52, 1667) and Jordan (SEG 42, 1496; 44, 1410), dated by Christian eras of the creation. The year 6200, however, does not coincide with the 14th indiction, either by the Alexandrine reckoning in use in Palestine or by the Byzantine in use east of the Jordan. It might perhaps be interpreted as a date according to the Georgian era, June 596 (Di Segni 1993), or to a creation era in which year 1 of the Nativity corresponded to 5500 of the world (June 701: Di Segni 1997). According to Bagatti (Judaea 24), the martyrs to whom the chapel was dedicated would be the forty soldiers of the legio XII Fulminata who suffered martyrdom by exposure in a frozen pond ca. 320, and whose relics were brought to Jerusalem in the 5 c. However, many dedications “to the martyrs” in general are known from inscriptions and papyri (Meimaris, Sacred Names 112f. nos. 612-27). It is even possible that the inscription referred to the dead buried in the adjoining and much earlier vault, whose real identity had been forgotten, and whose memory had come to be regarded as hallowed. The various corrections and explanations of the unknown term ΠΟΛΑΒΟΤΩΝ must now be reconsidered in the light of the appearance of the same term in an unpublished inscription, also pertaining to the Iberians (Georgians), as the present inscription seems to be. In CIIP I/2 no. 977, two members of the clergy of the Anastasis (deacons?) are described as πολ<υ>βότων, which in that context can only mean “many-feeding”, in the sense of charitable persons who fed many poor by their alms. If, as it seems, the same term appears here, all suggestions become invalid except that offered by Avi-Yonah, though not in the sense he suggested.