A catalogue and analysis of over 1000 Roman-period oil lamps from the Holy Land within the collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Roman period in Palestine begins with the conquest of the East by Pompey in 63 BCE - essentially the period representing the continuation of the partial political and cultural annexation of the country to Western civilisation following the earlier arrival of Greek and Hellenistic culture.

This catalogue publishes the closed pottery oil lamps in the collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and follows the previous volume of saucer lamps. It caintains mainly intact oil lamps discovered in exavations and listed with the Antiquities Authority up to the year 1988. Sussuman provides a typology for the lamps, with notes on dating and distribution, as well as the catalogue itself.

In the course of the past century, excavations in Palestine have turned up large numbers of oil lamps. This first volume in a planned catalogue raisonne, summarizes the typological development of Palestinian oil lamps from the earliest such items of the Late Chalcolithic period onward, and their historical, cultural, and political contexts. The abundance and great variety of the material make this, a difficult undertakingparticularly for the oil lamps of the earlier periods dealt with in the present volume. Detailed descriptions of many items in the collections of the Israel Antiquities Authority, as well as of recorded oil lamps from other sites and neighboring regions, serve here as a basis for generalizations and conclusions.