Ossuary

Photo Comments

View of an ossuary that is in the Citadel Museum in Amman.  It is not indicated where it was discovered, but many such ossuaries (bone boxes) have been discovered in the Jerusalem area.

Note the geometric patterns on the right and the left, and the urn in the center as well as the coloring that is still on the front of the ossuary.

Ossuaries are bone boxes, which were used primarily in the Jerusalem area in the late Second Temple period - although they have also been found in other areas of the country. All totaled, over 1,500 of them have been discovered. An ossuary had to be large enough to contain the femur bones and a typical one measured 2 x 1 x 1.5 ft. [0.6 x 0.3 x 0.5 m.]. Most of them were decorated in some way: geometric, floral, and building patterns. Some were inscribed with the names of the deceased.

Normally the deceased was placed in a niche (kokh/loculi) in a tomb. About a year or so after the burial, after the body had decomposed, the bones were collected and placed in an ossuary – so that the kokh could then be reused.

This practice seems to have been in use from the second half of the first century B.C. until the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. However the practice actually continued, on a much lesser scale, with less elaborate ossuaries, until about A.D. 250.