Israeli High

The broken artifact found in northern Israel is missing its mirror, but it’s a type found from the Late Roman to the Islamic period

Vanquishing demons is such a problem. Inner ones may be quelled with the help of mental health professionals or just moving on, but infestation by external evil spirits is another matter. Amulets that would hopefully repel foul fiends may go back tens of thousands of years, depending on one’s interpretation of archaeological finds such as perforated bear teeth, but that is highly speculative.

The case of the artifact found this week by a 17-year-old Israeli at the ancient site of Usha, temporary home of the Sanhedrin, is a little clearer.

The mirror itself is missing, but archaeologists believe that what emerged from the Israel Antiquities Authority dig may be a 1,500-year-old “mirror plaque” demon repellent dating to the late Roman or Byzantine period (from the fourth to the sixth century), the IAA announced on Thursday.

Theoretically, it could alternatively have served in catoptromancy – the Roman art of divination using mirrors – or had some other use. But use of mirrors to ward off demonic spirits was a practice in more than one religious circle in antiquity.

Aviv Weizman was participating in a Young Leaders’ Survival Course for pre-12th graders and spent Monday morning at an educational excavation in the northern village of Usha, directed by archaeologist Hanaa Abu Uqsa Abud, when she found the “magical mirror,” the IAA explains.

At first glance one might think it’s just another piece of pottery found amid ancient walls, but its identity as a device for protection against the evil eye was determined on the spot by the IAA’s Dr. Einat Ambar-Armon.

To be clear, the archaeologists cannot categorically determine that the clay frame, with chevron decorations, was the frame of a mirror plaque to drive back demons. But that is the most likely hypothesis, explains Navit Popovitch, the IAA curator of the classical periods. “This is our assumption,” she says in a phone interview. Mirror plaques were not functional as looking glasses as we think of them – they were usually quite small, a characterization that fits the present find.

Many such have been found in the annals of Israeli archaeology, though such finds fall short of being common, Popovitch qualifies. This newly unearthed one is almost exactly like one found in Yavneh Yam in 2007, which also features a ring of chevrons. The frame on which the mirror would be placed could be made of clay or stone or metal. “One made of lead was even found in a grave, in the form of a rooster,” she says.

How were they supposed to have worked? The maleficent one would see its own reflection and be horrified and depart, or simply bounce back like a ray of light striking a mirror, that’s how. Thus, the living – or the dead, since these were also placed among grave goods – would be protected.

“They were put on babies’ cribs, or hung on the wall like a hamsa,” Popovitch says, referring to amulets shaped like the palm of the hand which date back to at least Mesopotamian times and are sold today in souvenir shops throughout the Middle East and Africa. How the hamsa is supposed to work or what it signifies is debated, but they appear everywhere from taxi cabs to Jewish marriage contracts.

Back to the Byzantine evil-eye repellents. By that period, the mirror would typically have been made of glass, Popovitch says. The earliest known reflecting surfaces were made of polished volcanic obsidian from Neolithic Turkey. After the emergence of metallurgy, polished metal could serve the purpose. Pottery from ancient Greece shows depictions of them gazing at their selves in handheld polished metal mirrors, so mirrors for grooming purposes were in use by then. The earliest glass dates to about 5,000 years ago and wasn’t like anything we know today, but mirrors made by coating metal with glass only began in the early Byzantine period, around the third century.

In the case of the evil-eye reflector Weizman found in the educational excavation at Usha, the mirror would have been glued on with plaster, Popovitch says.

The marks around its circumference are mere decoration, she avers. Others found in Israel from the late Roman and early Byzantine period had other decorations, some quite complex.

A paper published in the Israel Exploration Journal 1964 shows a number of them: some simple and round, some female in form, some zoomorphic, such as one shaped like a fish with a depression at its center for the mirror. Another is shaped like a rooster; one like a dove, and so on. The paper describes a circular one “decorated with alternating raised and painted chevrons, and dots in red, dark blue and yellow,” with a piece of blown glass in the center, held in place by a “rather clumsy” plaster frame and surrounded by a gold border. Some have multiple depressions for glass insets.

During the Roman period, mirrors likely too small to serve to see oneself satisfactorily were reportedly also used in catoptromancy, one of the many techniques developed to try to contact the supernatural – though why one might place a divination mirror in a grave is a question.

In any case, in the Israeli archaeological context, mirror plaques have been found from the Late Roman through to the early Islamic period. Many had perforations on their top to hang them. Over the years, archaeologists have argued fiercely what these mirror plaques were for – and it is of course possible that they had different uses, including by different peoples from Romans and other “pagans” to Jews to early Christians. But all these harbored unhealthy beliefs in evil spirits. And many of their descendants continue to do so, and to try to fight them using artifacts to this very day.