The mysterious crosses carved into one of the walls of the stairs leading down to the Chapel of Saint Helena at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem may not be what they imagined, a new study suggests.
Crosses on the wall at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Holy Land of Jerusalem. Until now, religious scholars believe that medieval pilgrims traveling to this sacred site carved images of crosses on the walls. But new research has shown that only a handful of people, be they masons or artisans, carved these crosses on behalf of pilgrims, who may have kept the dust from carved as a sacred keepsake. Some crosses date from the 14th or 15th centuries, hundreds of years after the Crusades in the Holy Land (1096-1291), suggesting that post-medieval pilgrims may have made the trees. Cross. “During our research, we scrutinized, analyzed every millimeter inside the crosses – their depth, their width, even the hands of the people who carved them,” said the project leader. Project Amit Re’em, Jerusalem regional archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority said. The team found that it was one person, or several, responsible for making these crosses, not the hundreds and thousands of pilgrims who visited the church. Re’em got the idea for research while visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The church was built in the 4th century, when Saint Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, traveled to Jerusalem, and according to legend, helped discover the place where Jesus was crucified, burial and resurrection. Constantine had a basilica built there, and it was later called the Church of the Tomb. Together with colleagues Moshe Caine and Doron Altaratz, professor and senior lecturer, in the Department of Photographic Communication at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem, the team used three photographic techniques to record the shape of the crosses: photogrammetry, reflectance-conversion imaging (RTI) and gigapixel imaging. For the optical measurement, the team took between 50 and 500 images of each subject, with each image at a different angle, and then used software to create a digital 3D image based on the triangulation of all The pictures. Meanwhile, with gigapixel photography, which is similar to zooming in from the whole world to a close-up street view on Google Maps, the team took multiple photos of the carved surfaces. All of these techniques help Re’em investigate the similarities and differences, including the chisel technique, of each carved cross. Furthermore, when the researchers took pictures of the crosses, they noticed inscriptions of names and dates engraved along them. “We found that the crosses were carved around the inscriptions, which means that the crosses date to or slightly later than the inscriptions,” Re’em said. After reading about the research being done in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently, William Purkis, a reader of medieval history at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, contacted Re’em. Purkis said he shares the same thoughts with Israeli researchers on the findings that these crosses were made by only a few experts. It is possible that the pilgrims paid a stone mason or an artist to carve a cross for them in the church, and then saved the dust as a sacred keepsake, Purkis said. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims were known to carry small lead vessels filled with souvenirs of the Holy Land, such as water from the Jordan River. Two of these medieval vases are in museums – the Cleveland Museum of Art and the British Museum.
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