A Faction Acclamation Incised on a Pithos Found Near the North-West Church at Hippos (Sussita)

In one of the domestic rooms attached to the North-West Church at Hippos (Sussita), at least three ceramic pithoi were found, all of them in secondary use, possibly for the processing (storing?) of lime. One of them bore an inscription in Greek, scratched into its surface, which turned out to be an acclamation for the circus faction of the Blues. This interesting addition to the corpus of the factions’ inscriptions from Syro-Palestine is also lending the dating to the original period of the pithos’ use, which cannot be later than the Islamic conquest of the region in ad 636/638.