 According to the Harps news agency, an unusual bronze oil lamp shaped like a grotesque cut in half face has been discovered in an unusual place, under the foundations of a massive building in Jerusalem that Israeli antiquities authority announced on Wednesday. The lamp was made of bronze, not pottery as was more common and had been manufactured using a sculpted mould. It is grotesque, featuring a goatee male, half face complete with a satyr's beard and a horned forehead. The lamp's tip is shaped like a crescent moon and the whole enchilada was placed inside a wall of the building, which had been erected smack bang on what had been a pilgrimage road to Jerusalem. And the motif is not unknown, it looks like the happy, sad, theatrical masks of the classic sphere. According to the director of the excavation, a few others such are known from around the classic world, but only one other lamp like this has ever been found, and this was found in Budapest. The Israeli Antiquities Authority dates the building to the transition period between the two great Jewish rebellions against the Roman overlords, and this means curiously that the building must have been built after Jerusalem's destruction, but before the Romans rebuilt it. In this time of transition the city had shrunk, the pilgrims road was no longer in use, and this mass of edifice had apparently been built to protect the road to the city's water supply, the pool of shalom which lay beyond the walls. Later on other buildings would also be erected in this form of pilgrimage road, but during the transition period this was apparently the only one that was there, and according to the researchers it was enormous, and they say that we haven't even exposed it all yet, only about 40 meters of its length, and there's so much more, no this wasn't a fort but served as a connection between the city and shalom which remained the principal source of water to Jerusalem throughout the Roman period as well. So if foundational deposits are intended, generally speaking, to protect the household members, in this case the grotesque Roman lamp may have been protecting Jerusalem's water supply. In prehistoric times, when humankind began to settle down and rebuild homes in the Levant, sometimes they would bury their dead inside the home, under the floorboards, and home burials had been documented time after time, and perhaps this was the precursor to a habit that would practically become the norm, even to this day. Some latter-day researchers think the living thought the spirits of the dead would protect them and the household, and some suspect the role of the deceased was to repel evil spirits. Were or not inspired by a similar muse, ancient peoples commonly made use of foundation deposits when building new homes, public buildings, and even the Temple Mount itself. One of the project researchers told Hart's News, usually the deposits in or under the walls or the floor, were a material object, from the divine figures, coins and such like. In some cultures, a human being was interred into the foundations of a building. When Canaanite Geza was first excavated over a century ago, one discovery was expected to be exactly that. It is probable that the victim was a sacrifice offered to the deity, but we also have reason to assume that this was intended to serve as a guardian spirit who would protect the city from all harm. Rather less horrifyingly, another foundation deposit found at Canaanite Geza a century later and reported in 2016, was a cache of gold and silver divine figurines dated to 3600 years ago, the object they were found inside a clay pot within the foundations of a building. Foundation deposits in general go back to the dim reaches of antiquity. It was accepted in construction in general to bring luck and symbolic defence to the building and to cast fear and awe onto the attackers. Its significance is highly symbolic, not functional, and one is indeed hard-pressed to think why a lamp or even a coin in the floor would ward off evil doers, but there it is. One of the researchers added that the elaborate decoration of the particular lamp in question shows up the argument of its symbolic gesture. Sure, households could have neat stuff, but this grotesque bronze lamp is unique not only in Jerusalem but in Israel. And this indicates that its utility, despite having a flax wick inside, was ritualistic, not used to light the way from the well to the bedroom at night. That being said, the lamp was theoretically functional and did have that wick. Molecular analysis will be able to tell if it was ever used for the usual purpose of lamps. Unless you assume that this was a pagan pre-delection, Jews widely made use of foundation deposits too. For instance, when building synagogues, where we also found foundation deposits inside the walls or under the floor, a range of objects including lamps but without human forms, coins and so on. The researchers say that synagogues only took on the form we now know for actual worship after the destruction of the second temple in the year 70. But before that, synagogues were like hostels for pilgrims, where the mitzvah was taught and the Torah was read. But these places were not places for worships per se at this time and in all of these places we find foundation deposits. Instead of viewing these ancient foundation deposits as ancient Jewish people embracing pagan rituals and beliefs, this practice should be seen as a prevailing cultural norm that our ancestors embraced. Paganism is a popular belief, descended from the ancient Egyptians and they wouldn't categorise it as pagan or not pagan, that's a theological matter. In monotheism, there is room for popular belief too. In 1884, archaeologists dug to the foundations of the south-east and south-west corners of the Temple Mount and what did they find an astonishing 20 metres beneath the surface, marks that are now interpreted as the letters K O F H E T standing for holy sacrifice, a twist on the foundation deposit theory. And this is all part of a huge process to protect the house, starting at the stage of construction. A ritual was probably involved when laying the foundation deposits. But what do you guys think about the grotesque figure discovered in Israel? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.