Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Looted 2,000-Year-Old Stones Returned to Israeli Museum

Two Roman artifacts, each more than 2,000 years old, were left in the courtyard of an Israeli museum accompanied by an anonymous note whose author claimed to have stolen them two decades earlier.

The two sling stones left at the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures in Beersheba last week will be forwarded to the National Treasures Department of the Israel Antiquities Authority, according to a news release issued Monday by Israel’s Government Press Office.

The typed letter accompanying the two stones said, “These are two Roman ballista balls from Gamla, from a residential quarter at the foot of the summit. I stole them in July 1995 and since then they have brought me nothing but trouble. Please, do not steal antiquities!”

According to the Government Press Office, many similar stones are now on display in the Gamla Nature Reserve, in the Golan Heights.

Danny Syon, an Israel Antiquities Authority official who excavated at Gamla for many years, said the stones date from the Early Roman period and were shot by Romans at the defenders of the city.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.