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Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1998

Discovering a Goddess

A new look at the Ekron inscription identifies a mysterious deity

By Aaron Demsky

In 996, in the final season of the 13-year excavation of Tel Miqne, excavators discovered a monumental inscription that is surely one of the most sensational finds of the 1990s. It is a royal dedicatory inscription that mentions Ekron, thus pinning down the ancient name of Tel Miqne and confirming what had long been suspected: The site was one of the five cities of the Philistine pentapolis mentioned in the Bible (the other four being Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gaza and Gath). But the inscription also has much to tell us about Philistine culture in the land of Canaan. The inscription […]

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Footnotes

1.

This summer, Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Land of Israel Studies, under the direction of Aren Maeir and Adrian Boas, conducted its second season of excavations at Tel es-Safi, which is generally identified as Philistine Gath.

Endnotes

1.

Seymour Gitin, Trude Dothan and Joseph Naveh, “A Royal Dedicatory Inscription from Ekron,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997), p. 1ff. See also Aaron Demsky, “The Name of the Goddess of Ekron: A New Reading,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 25 (1997), pp. 1–5.

2.

James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET), 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 291.

3.

Pritchard, ANET, p. 294.

4.

Pritchard, ANET, p. 287.

5.

Klaus Tuchelt, “Didyma,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, 5 vols. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 159–161.

6.

Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 126f, 289, 311.

7.

Chadwick, “Potnia,” in Minos, vol. 5 (1957), pp. 122–123.

8.

Herbert Donner and W. Röllig, Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften (Wiesbaden, 1964), nos. 4, 6, 7.