This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It's a small, simple ring made of copper alloy and engraved with a handful of Greek letters and the image of a pottery vessel. But its unremarkable appearance belies a remarkable history: The signet was likely connected in some way to the New Testament figure Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea during the life of Jesus.
Since the ring's existence was made known in 2018, the meaning of those Greek letters and who exactly the ring may have belonged to have been the subject of scholarly debate. Now, in an article published in the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly, Catherine Bonesho, a UCLA professor of ancient Judaism, makes a novel observation about the lettering that offers a new explanation for the ring's likely wearer. Excavated in the 1960s from Herodium, a mountaintop fortress in the Judean desert, the ring sat in storage, essentially forgotten, for more than 50 years.
Then, in 2018, a team of Israeli scholars described the item in an article in the Israel Exploration Journal. They determined that the ring was created 2,000 years ago and that its Greek inscription, ΠΙΛΑΤΟ, suggested it might have belonged either to a person named Pilate (but likely not the famous prefect) or to a person working in Pontius Pilate's administration. Other scholars disagreed.
A paper published in 2023 argued that the inscription—in which the Π and Ι appear to the right of the vessel design and the Λ, Α, Τ and Ο to the left—represented two separate words and that the ring had no connection at all to Pilate. In the new paper, Bonesho, who teaches UCLA's Introduction to Judaism class each fall, rebuts the 2023 article and offers a more specific interpretation of the original 2018 research. She concludes that the writing on the ring's face likely refers to Pilate and is a transliteration of the Latin PILATO—meaning "for Pilate" or "to Pilate"—into Greek letters, as opposed to the earlier contention that it was a misspelled or abbreviated Greek form meaning "belonging to Pilate"—although not necessarily to Pontius Pilate.
So the ring probably did not belong to Pilate himself, Bonesho writes, but likely was worn by an enslaved or formerly enslaved person employed by a local Judean elite who somehow participated in the administrative work of Roman Judea. The wearer might have used it to imprint Pilate's name in wax or clay that sealed materials intended to be sent to Pilate and his associates. Bonesho first proposed her transliteration theory after the 2018 article was published.
Scholars of ancient studies were commenting about the discovery on their social media accounts, and Bonesho came across a Facebook post that noted the odd Greek spelling. "After talking with a friend of mine about it, I commented on the post that maybe it was Latin written in Greek letters," Bonesho said. That Facebook comment sparked new research on the ring, was eventually cited in a 2019 Biblical Archaeology Review article about the artifact and led to the development of Bonesho's new article.
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