Mount Zion has produced a strange mug:
In June 2009, a broken limestone mug was discovered by archaeologists in the rubble of a Jewish home on Mount Zion. The house had been destroyed in 70 C.E. when the Romans leveled Jerusalem and the Temple to stomp home the message of their victory over the unmanageable Jews. source: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2025-05-26/ty-article-magazine/jewish-secrets-scratched-in-stone-2-000-year-old-cryptic-text-found-in-jerusalem/00000197-0c16-dc94-ab97-0e1ef6680000
The article states that stoneware was preferred because pottery that was exposed to impurity was from that point forward irredeemable.
The mug was found broken into four pieces above the ceiling of a mikveh (a Jewish ritual bath). It was about 15 centimeters (six inches) high and originally had a single perforated handle. It was hand-carved from soft limestone. Its inside, rim and base were smoothed but the sides were roughly cut from top to bottom by knife, creating a series of facets.
All in all it is typical of the Jewish stoneware of the time – nothing new there – except that when the archaeologists made a careful examination of its surface, they could see a series of scratched marks and were stunned to observe what seemed to be, and would prove to be, “spidery writing,” as Gibson calls it. source: ibid
The writing had an unusual connection:
What writing system it might be, however, was not immediately identifiable. Yet it wasn’t an unknown language or alphabet, and it did look very similar to Jewish script. The archaeologists began their work with the help of experts, starting with Professor Stephen Pfann at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, who is an expert on ancient Jewish scripts. He identified 10 lines, some partial, in a 17-line script.
It transpired that the mug had been painstakingly engraved using a cryptic writing system – previously encountered only in the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Deciphering the “spidery” writing was not going to be a straightforward task. source: ibid
What does the mug say? Well, that’s also weird:
According to Pfann, about 100 letters can be discerned on the mug, written in not one alphabet but at least three: Cryptic A, another previously unknown cryptic alphabet, and a “Jewish” square script for specific words such as “Adonai” (a Hebrew word for God). One line begins in Cryptic A and ends in square script. The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, featured word dividers, Pfann adds, which the mug does not, impeding its interpretation. That is sad.
Cryptic A is a simple replacement cipher, according to Ben Dov. Every Hebrew letter is replaced by a consistent sign, though unlike Hebrew, there are no “special” forms for letters in the final position of a word, like tsadeh sofit. Ben Dov also observed that several Cryptic A letters resemble other letters of late paleo-Hebrew – but to be extra quirky, the scribes wouldn’t even use the paleo-same letters consistently. They’d use other letters instead, as if the paradigm was shifted sideways: as in qof-to-resh, yod-to-lamed, et cetera.
It almost looks like children were making up a cipher to write instead of Hebrew, that only they can read and that will keep safe their childish secrets, Tov says.
Lovely. But what does the writing on the mug say? We don’t know exactly but the prevailing thesis is that its use had some esoteric religious or superstitious context, and not necessarily in a good way.
Pfann suggests interpretations of some parts, such as two words possibly saying “Adonai, shabti” which may paraphrase the Psalm 26:8 reference “Adonai ahabti me’on beteka,” meaning “Lord, I love [the dwelling of your house].” In previous work Pfann had demonstrated that cryptic writing in the Scrolls tended to appear in the context of esoteric teachings or sensitive information, or as interpretations of sacred law, Gibson explains. It was the fief of the priesthood and thus, Pfann concludes, whoever engraved that mug from Mount Zion did not intend it for a member of the unwashed illiterati to be able to read it.
Another expert on ancient Jewish paleography, Dr. David Hamidović of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, noted another similarity, with incantation and curse texts from a somewhat later time, which often feature seemingly meaningless words or letters known as nomina barbara. This mug seems amply blessed with nomina barbara. source: ibid
The mug mentions no specific name, and so it does not follow a typical curse script pattern. The result? Nobody knows what it was for. It certainly is unique.