Courtesy Gideon Avni and Zvi Greenhut

Once brightening narrow tombs, oil lamps found in the three Akeldama caves now shed light on six centuries of burials. This double-nozzled lamp from the late Second Temple period (first century C.E.) shows clear differences in design from Roman lamps from the second to the fourth centuries and a Byzantine lamp. These differences enable scholars to differentiate among them, though the basic shape remained largely the same.