You only have to visit the ossuary at the 1916 battlefield of Verdun, site of a famous handholding between Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand in 1984, to see the importance to Europe of Franco-German reconciliation.
The ornamentation on an ossuary from Bia Naiman (State Hermitage Museum) has so many points in common with the decorations on a series of silver vessels that were, until recently, assigned to Bactria that the latter have come to be accepted as Sogdian.
In both cases the niches owe their form to Western influence, but those on the ossuary are formed of columns surmounted by capitals upholding pearl-studded arches, while on the ewers the Central Asian rosette replaces the capitals and the pearls.
"As a child, I visited the ossuary, with its painted skulls, one of the strangest places I have ever been — a mystic and very silent place".
Shanks learned about the ossuary from Andre Lemaire, a Sorbonne professor of paleography and epigraphy; Lemaire said the ossuary was authentic.
The ossuary is now locked up in the headquarters of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the government agency responsible for policing the antiquities trade.
The most famous item from Golan's collection is the ossuary, or stone burial box, of James, son of Joseph, a Jew who died in the first century in Jerusalem.
No one doubted that the ossuary dated from the time of Jesus of Nazareth, but some scholars questioned whether the inscription had been written by a single hand in the first century A.D. At a museum panel, McCarter claimed the second part of the inscription ("brother of Jesus") was written by a different hand.
The show also includes several bone-and-ivory figurines with violin-shaped silhouettes; an exquisitely slim little Venus with a prominent nose and a neatly incised pubis; a breasted ossuary that was probably the receptacle for a revered woman's bones; and a clay libation vessel that depicts an enthroned Copper Age Madonna, though perhaps what she's sitting on is a birthing stool.
Last summer, a committee of archeological experts examined the ossuary and the Jehoash tablet and concluded both inscriptions were fakes.
The Vietnamese were also building an ossuary, a memorial to the murdered.
