The oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments was sold on Wednesday for more than $5 million in New York, according to Sotheby's auction house.
The 52kg marble slab – which went for $5,040,000, beating lower estimates – dates from between 300AD to 800AD. The commandments are inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew script.
The auction house initially estimated that the tablet would be sold for between $1 million and $2 million.
The tablet was unearthed during railway excavations along the southern coast of Israel in 1913 and was at first not recognised as a historically significant artefact.
It was used as a paving stone in a local home until 1943, when it was sold to a scholar who grasped its significance, Sotheby's said.
“This remarkable tablet is not only a vastly important historic artefact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilisation,” Sotheby's head of books and manuscripts Richard Austin said.
“To encounter this shared piece of cultural heritage is to journey through millennia and connect with cultures and faiths told through one of humanity's earliest and most enduring moral codes.”
The text inscribed on the slab follows the Biblical verses familiar to Christian and Jewish traditions but omits the third commandment against taking the name of the Lord in vain.
It includes a new directive to worship on Mount Gerizim, a holy site specific to the Samaritans, Sotheby's said.
