General Information

Wheel-made Knife Pared (‘Herodian’) Lamps are a well-recognized type in the southern Levant. They are often referred to as ‘Herodian’ lamps despite evidence from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem suggesting that the chronology, while Early Roman, may not overlap with the rule of Herod the Great. This ware family was produced from the end of the 1st century BCE through the Second Jewish Revolt. They are recognizable by their simplicity: a plain, circular body, spatulated nozzle, and a ridge surrounding the filling hole. These lamps have a relatively constrained area of distribution. They have been found most frequently at Jewish settlements in Judea and Galilee, but also in sites further north including Dor and Scythopolis, and further east into the Transjordan at Roman sites like Tall Jawa. They also appear in non-Jewish sites, though almost always in smaller quantities. 

It is hypothesized that the knife-paring of the nozzle and the lack of motifs decorating these lamps may have been conducted to create a vessel that was in accordance with Jewish laws of ritual purity. The undecorated body is a clear divergence from the lamp-making trends in the region. Berlin (2005: p. 436) writes that this new style is “both unusual and quite unnecessary...for the previous two hundred years, lamps had been made by a quick and inexpensive moulding process that allowed...fanciful and attractive designs.”

Berlin asserts that this design was meant to imitate a simple, unadorned lifestyle, and a mode of resistance to the imperial Roman culture that surrounded the Jewish population of Palestine in this time period - which explains why Wheel-made Knife-Pared Lamps are sometimes used as indicators of a strong Jewish presence at a site. However, more recent analysis on the distribution of this ware challenges this generalized assumption, indicating that they were the most popular form of ceramic lamps in the late Second Temple period, regardless of ethnicity and religion.

The production was heavily centralized in the Jerusalem area, but there is evidence that workshops further south also manufactured it, like the Nabataean workshop at Oboda. 

Wheel-made Knife Pared (‘Herodian’) Lamps exhibit: a circular, wheel-made body with a flat and unmarked base; a large central filling hole often surrounded by a discus and separated from the body by a well-defined ridge; a spatulated, knife-pared, and hand-formed nozzle; and a buff fabric that may have a red or gray slip. There are at least two sub-group: plain lamps without handles (constituting the majority of the ware), and minimalist geometrically decorated lamps that may or may not have a handle. 20th century scholars considered dividing the group, but the archaeological data indicates that all subsets were produced simultaneously, and thus Wheel-made Knife-Pared (‘Herodian’) Lamps remain a single classification.