As they worked, the team uncovered a smaller rectangular room with a wide set of steps leading down to a well. Archaeologists identified it as an ancient Jewish ritual bath, known as a mikveh, dating back at least 1,400 years.

Archaeologists working at Ostia Antica, an ancient Roman port city, have discovered the oldest Jewish ritual bath outside of the Middle East, along with an oil lamp decorated with a menorah dated to the fifth to sixth centuries.

Instead, the archaeologists — budding and not — last summer uncovered what may be the oldest existing example in the ancient Roman world of a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath. They have tentatively dated the structure to the late fourth or early fifth century.