Last week I picked up this news of a great discovery in Turkey — a lighthouse from the first cenutry:

Turkish archaeologists unearthed a 2000-year-old lighthouse at the ancient Roman port of Patara, near southern town of Kas, Antalya, discovering probably the oldest such structure that managed to remain intact.

The 12-meter-high lighthouse was built under the reign of Emperor Nero who ruled from 54 to 68, Professor Havva Iskan Isik, head of the excavation team reported.

“The oldest known lighthouse is the one in Alexandria but there is nothing left of it. So, the lighthouse at the Patara port is the oldest one that has remained intact,” she said.

Isik said there might be a second lighthouse at the other edge of the port under a huge debris of soil, which she said was to be excavated at a later time.

I’m excited because the lighthouse is a significant image in ancient Christian art. In fact, it occupies an entire chapter in my forthcoming book, Signs & Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols, which includes hundreds of illustrations by Czech artist (and new mama) Lea Maria Ravotti. The book is due out in September, and not yet available for pre-order. But I’ll keep you posted. “Behold,” says the Lord, “I will … raise my signal to the peoples” (Is 49:22).

Which brings me back to lighthouses, an ancient symbol of the Christian faith. Lighthouses raised their beacons at the entrances to many major harbors. And the greatest of all was in Alexandria, Egypt. Named after the small island it occupied, the skyscraping Pharos was much taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Alexandria was a major hub for trade and travel. So missionaries would have known it well. St. Mark the Evangelist was said to be the city’s first bishop; and in medieval images he is often portrayed with the Pharos as backdrop.

St. Mark’s successors would inherit this luminous association. Around 371 A.D., St. Basil of Caesarea wrote a warm tribute to St. Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria, who was then a very old man. Basil compares Alexandria’s brilliant bishop to the great beacon in its harbor: “You see everything in all directions in your mind’s eye like a man looking from some tall watchtower, while at sea many ships sailing together are all dashed one against the other by the violence of the waves.”

That’s just a small sample of the sources we cover in the lighthouse chapter of Signs & Mysteries. How good that we have a newly discovered, and quite intact, lighthouse to light up our reading of so many ancient texts!