Fr. Virgilio Corbo’s excavations in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the 1960s yielded a number of epigraphic finds, mostly fragmentary. These were reported, together with illustrations, in his Il Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme (1982) and in earlier articles in Liber Annuus, but were not deciphered, and, as far as I know, did not attract the attention of epigraphists or historians in later years.

Among the finds are two fragments of a marble plaque that Corbo understood to be part of one inscription. They are now identified as two adjoining fragments containing part of the first lines of an edict of Emperor Justinian (527–565 AD). I intend to suggest some possible identifications of this edict, which was in clear public view in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Corbo also published photos and drawings of four Byzantine capitals reused on top of two heart-shaped columns on the eastern side of the rotunda in the renovation of the church by Constantine Monomachos in the early eleventh century. All four capitals bear four identical monograms, which were not read by Corbo but are now shown to represent the names of Mauricius, emperor from 582 to 602, his wife Constantina, and their two elder sons, Theodosius and Tiberius. The capitals must have originally belonged to four colossal columns erected in the church at some stage of its renovation in the latter part of the sixth century.