Jordanian Lead Codes (sometimes simply called Jordanian Codes or Lead Books) are a group of 70 small codices mostly on lead plates (but there are also copper plates) that were found in a cave in Jordan. Information about them was first published in March 2011. Lead books were discovered by scientists in early March 2011 when their owner, the Israeli Bedouin Hassan Saida, tried to sell the manuscripts. To evaluate the "books", he turned for their expertise to researchers he knew.
Each of the codes contains 5 to 15 lead sheets (some the size of a passport, others a credit card). The sheets are held together by lead rings. Drawings and letters melted into lead pages.
The codes were found in 2005-2007. near the village of Saham in Jordan, when a cave entrance was discovered by flooding. There, in small niches carved into the rock, the codes were found. One of the niches was marked with a menorah (seven-branched candlestick), an ancient Jewish religious symbol. The Jordanian Bedouin who discovered the find opened the locks of these niches and found the codes inside, but did not give them to the state, but sold them to the Bedouin from Israel, who smuggled the find to Israel in his truck.
The Israeli Bedouin, who now has the books, denies that he smuggled them out of Jordan and claims that they were the property of his family for the last 100 years and were found by his grandfather.
However, the Jordanian authorities are determined to return the codes to their country.
The first who came into contact with the "books" were employees of the government Department of Antiquities of the State of Israel. Almost immediately after getting acquainted with the codes and other artifacts, they refused to recognize any historical value for them. And a specialist in ancient epigraphy from the Sorbonne, Professor André Lemaire, admitted, based on the presence of symbols of “different periods and incompatible writing styles … for sale by fraudulent antique dealers).
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The Israeli authorities, considering the find a fake, allowed the British Museum to take them to Europe for analysis. According to the preliminary conclusion of the Swiss metallurgists, the sheets were cast from lead obtained from ore in the Mediterranean region, according to the technology used by the ancient Romans, and the corrosion rate of the sheets corresponds to approximately two millennia in a dry climate.
At Oxford, some tentative tests were done by metal expert Peter Northover, which could put a hypothetical age around the 1st century AD. AD However, such dating refers to the actual material from which the "books" are made. As for the inscriptions on the metal sheets, very heated disputes began among the researchers around them.
Israeli archaeologists consider the Jordanian Codes to be a high quality forgery. In their opinion, the analysis showed such an ancient age, because the authors of the fake, apparently, used metal from some ancient site.
Ziyad al-Saad, director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, believes the codes may have been the work of Jesus' followers and could have been made several decades after Jesus was crucified. He compared these codes to the Dead Sea Scrolls and noted that this may be the most important discovery in the history of biblical archeology. He believes that the content in the codes is encrypted.
British religious scholar David Elkington strongly spoke out in favor of the antiquity of the codes, he gathered around himself a group of researchers who shared his opinion.
The very form of the code speaks in favor of antiquity, which, along with the parchment scroll, was widely used by the first Christians.
About the origin of artifacts from the Judeo-Christian environment of the 1st century. may indirectly testify that they were found in the area of the probable resettlement of the Judeo-Christian communities in the Trans-Jordan after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD.
Philip Davis, professor emeritus in the Department of Old Testament Studies at Sheffield University, argues that the most compelling evidence of the monument's early Christian origins is the plate on which a map of the holy city of Jerusalem is cast.
Margaret Barker, an expert on New Testament history, points out that the location of the find in question speaks more of an early Christian than a Jewish origin.
“We know that two groups of Christians fled persecution in Jerusalem, and they crossed the Jordan River near Jericho and then proceeded eastward very close to where the books were allegedly found,” she says.
An expert in Greek epigraphy from Oxford Peter Tonemann drew attention to the Greek inscription of one of the codes, where the following words are read quite easily: “… Do not be sad and hello! Avgar, also known by the name of Eision … ". According to the researcher, it took him less than an hour to find the alleged original of the decoded inscription from the "code". This is a tombstone from Madaba in Jordan dating back to AD 108/109 and now in the Amman Archaeological Museum. The complete inscription looks like this: “To Selaman, a great husband, do not be sad, and hello! Avgar, also known as Esion, son of Monoat, erected this tombstone for his beloved son in the third year of the province's establishment.
That is, most likely, the "code" containing part of this inscription is a modern forgery made by one of the inhabitants of Amman on the model of an ancient inscription that was found and placed in a Jordanian museum in 1958.
The fake is also indicated by "a set of supposedly Christian symbols copied (if not strange) from ancient Greek and Jewish coins (palms, menorahs, silhouettes of Hellenistic kings, animals, etc.)", Tonemann is sure.
In addition, the following facts speak against authenticity:
- the images and symbols of the "metal books" are very similar to the well-known samples of ancient portraits that are available today in the public domain;
- a frequent combination on one sheet of Hebrew letters and words with letters and words in the army, moreover, different dialects; many of the words are most likely mere gibberish that cannot be translated.
The controversy over the content and authenticity of the codes is still pending. Also, the circumstances of the place and time of the discovery of the "books" along with other artifacts (censer, fragments of scrolls, etc.) still remain shrouded in a fog of uncertainty. According to the researchers, they were first found and recovered from a cave located in Jordan. According to the current owner, a Bedouin from a Galilean village (as evidenced by his interlocutor D. Elkington), they were discovered by his grandfather a hundred years ago in northern Egypt and passed on to him by inheritance.
The Jordanian authorities are seeking to reclaim the manuscripts on the basis of a law giving them the right to possession of antiquities found in the kingdom. 7 of them, according to media reports, have already been returned to Jordan.