Key takeaways
- One letter changes the story. UCLA professor Catherine Bonesho, in studying an ancient ring thought to be tied to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who figures prominently in the story of Jesus, has proposed a new theory about the ring's inscription.
- Who was the owner? Bonesho's research suggests the ring was likely worn by a lower-status Judean worker carrying out administrative business connected to Pilate.
- A window into ancient Judea. The findings offers new clues about who actually performed the everyday work of Roman rule in Judea.
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 about 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 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 for 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.
The transliteration clue
Bonesho first proposed her transliteration theory after the 2018 article was published. Ancient studies scholars 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 was what led to the development of Bonesho's new article.
Her argument hinges on a subtle but telling irregularity in the lettering.
She points out that in Latin, the genitive case — signifying "of" or "belonging to" someone — ends in a long "i" vowel: In this case, PILATI. The Greek translation would be ΠΙΛΑΤΟY. This, the 2018 researchers suggested, is what was intended by ΠΙΛΑΤΟ, with the Y, or upsilon, for some reason dropped. However, the dative case in Latin — signifying "to" or "for" someone — ends in a long "o" vowel: PILATO. In Greek, that would appear as ΠΙΛΑΤΩ, with a final omega rather than a final omicron, or O.
But Bonesho said someone with only an elementary knowledge of Latin, living in a region that had been under Roman rule for less than a century, might easily have missed that distinction, simply replacing the Latin long "o" vowel with the similarly shaped Greek omicron. When transliterating PILATO, the Latin O and the Greek omicron look alike enough that a craftsman inscribing the ring might simply have kept the O as written, without knowing to change it to the omega.
"The mixing up of omicron and omega for long and short 'o' vowels in transliterating Latin into Greek is common among early Latin language learners," Bonesho said. "They might have thought, 'It looks like an O, and I have an O in front of me — why not just use the O?'"
Bonesho conducted her analysis using digital images and drawings of the ring that were produced by the researchers who wrote the 2018 study. Bonesho also responds in her analysis to the 2023 paper's conclusion that the positioning of the letters on either side of the ring's vessel image meant the inscription represented two separate words. She contends that the letters were engraved in two separate groups because the craftsperson would likely have been trying to add lettering around the vessel image, which may have been engraved on the ring earlier.
She also suggests that a small defect on the ring, beneath the first set of letters — possibly created by the engraver himself — might have prompted the engraver to continue adding the rest of Pilate's name on the opposite side of the ring where there was more space. That, Bonesho said, might also explain why the second set of letters appears to be rotated: The engraver may simply have been trying to make sure that the rest of the name fit in the remaining space on the face of the ring.
Material evidence
Another clue about the ring's owner is that copper alloy metals were more commonly used for jewelry worn by members of lower social classes, including local Judeans, soldiers and lower-level Roman officials, whereas rings worn by those at the higher echelons of Pilate's administration were more likely made from higher-quality metals like gold or contained precious gems.
Finally, Bonesho writes that the use of the vessel design on the ring's face supports the notion that the ring may have belonged to a local Judean worker, as opposed to a Roman — supporting a conclusion of the 2018 study — because the particular style of vessel in the engraving was a common Jewish motif in Judea at the time.
The connection to a well-known historical figure like Pilate might be the ring's most attention-grabbing aspect. But for Bonesho, what makes the ring significant are the clues it offers about daily life in Judea two millennia ago. For one thing, it counters scholarship that contends that the only people who performed work related to the Roman administration of Judea were other Romans.
"Complexity often gets lost in popular narratives of how things worked at that time," she said. "But understanding the ring gives us more insight into what the Roman administration of early Roman Judea looked like, in terms of how authority was distributed into the lower echelons of the political structure.
"Looking at the poor quality of the ring, the Greek transliteration, the fact that those who used seal rings, like secretaries, are more likely to have been enslaved or formerly enslaved workers — all of that gives us insight into what was happening then."
