A tablet of the Ten Commandments that was inscribed more than 1,000 years ago will be auctioned off by Sotheby's this week.
The tablet is the oldest known in existence, believed to date somewhere between 300 to 800 A.D., will be sold Wednesday in New York. The ancient tablet is believed to be the earliest completed tablet still intact, according to Sotheby's.
The marble tablet stands about 2 feet tall and weighs about 115 pounds. The artifact and its inscribed Paleo-Hebrew script were discovered during excavations in 1913 in modern day southern Israel, as reported by the New York Times.
A scholar recognized the tablet's significance and bought it in 1943. Before then, it was believed to have been used for decades as a paving stone for a home.
The tablet is expected to sell for between $1 to $2 million, Sotheby's estimates.
"This remarkable tablet is not only a vastly important historic artifact, but a tangible link to the beliefs that helped shape Western civilization. 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," Richard Austin, Sotheby's global head of books and manuscripts, said in a statement.
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