Stones of Fire

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His movements slow and deliberate, the curator ran his fingertips over the small bronze coffer, lightly grazing the incised Hebrew letters. A lover’s caress.

Holding his breath, he opened the box.

‘Claves regni caelorum,’ he whispered, entranced by the relic nestled within the box. Like Eve gazing upon the forbidden fruit, he stared at the twelve polished gemstones anchored in an ancient gold setting.

The keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Dr Jonathan Padgham, chief curator at the Hopkins Museum of Near Eastern Art, reached into the coffer, carefully removing what had once been a gem-encrusted breastplate. Once. Long ago. More than three thousand years ago by his reckoning.

Although bits and pieces of the gold scapular still precariously clung to the setting, the relic was scarcely recognizable as a breastplate, the chains that originally secured the gem-studded shield to the wearer’s body having long since vanished. Only the stones, set in four rows of three, gave any indication as to the relic’s original rectangular shape, the breastplate measuring some five inches by four.

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