Image Details

Courtesy Nahman Avigad
ON THE COVER: This high stone table found in a Second Temple period Jerusalem house was used as pictured here to hold drinking vessels. The single leg is a complete miniature column with base, shaft and capital. Excavator Nahman Avigad discovered a number of these expensive tables in the Upper City, where wealthy Jerusalemites lived in the first centuries B.C. and A.D., until the Romans burnt the entire city. This particular table was pieced together from dozens of fragments retrieved from rooms filled with earth and soot. See “Jerusalem Flourishing—A Craft Center for Stone, Pottery and Glass.”