We wanted to alert you to an exciting special exhibition, “Unearthing a Masterpiece: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel,” which opens at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia on February 10 and runs through May 19. The Penn Museum is the final U.S. venue for the Lod Mosaic, which premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and travels to the Louvre in Paris after Philadelphia.
The Lod Mosaic is a large and exceptionally well-preserved ancient Roman floor mosaic, discovered in Lod, Israel, in 1996, and excavated in 2009. The mosaic floor is believed to come from the home of a wealthy Roman living in the Eastern Roman Empire about at 300 CE. The exhibition features the three most complete and impressive panels found in what was probably a large reception room.
Lod is located near Tel Aviv, and the site was initially settled in the 5th millennium BCE. Its name appears in the written record as early as the 15th century BCE—in a list of towns in Canaan that was compiled during the reign of the pharaoh Thutmose III (1479–1425 BCE)—and also in the Old and New Testaments. In the 1st century CE, the inhabitants of Lod were sold into slavery and subsequently the town was razed. A Roman colony under the name of Diospolis (City of God) was established there in 200 CE.
Special guests from the Israeli Consulate, Israeli Antiquities Authority, the Italian Embassy, and the Italian Consulate join us at the official ribbon cutting Sunday, February 10 at 1:00 pm. Dr. C. Brian Rose offers a lecture on the mosaic at 2:00 pm.
More information can be found at: http://www.penn.museum/press-releases/918-lod.html. If you have any further questions regarding the exhibition “Unearthing a Masterpiece: A Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel” or the Penn Museum, please contact Darien Sutton at (215) 898-4045 or email dsutton@upenn.edu.