“(Work) of CILO”: An Impression of a Roman-Period Private Stamp from the Western Wall Tunnels

The CILO tile joins a growing group of impressed building material fragments that have been discovered in Jerusalem and dated to the period of Aelia Capitolina, adding to the well-known corpus of legionary stamps from the workshop at Binyene Ha-Umma. Several stamp types from this period have been identified so far in the area of Jerusalem: legionary stamps, IUL stamps and COL AEL[C] stamps, as well as the CILO stamp and a ΙΟΥΛΙΣ stamp. Notably, most stamps are inscribed in Latin, or bear Latin names spelled in Greek. At this stage, it is not yet possible to determine whether the various private workshops were contemporaneous or appeared one after the other. The stratigraphic contexts from which the finds were retrieved at the various sites, and their chronological affiliation, indicate an increase in the prevalence of private impressions in the third century CE. It can therefore be cautiously suggested that the cessation of building material production in the legionary kilns at Binyene Ha-Umma sometime in the late second/early third century CE, and the growing need for building materials in the new developing city, encouraged the emergence of private pottery workshops from the third century CE onward. Nevertheless, as stated earlier, it is possible that a few private pottery workshops existed as early as the second century CE.