Sifting Project Reveals City’s Earliest Writing

The small piece of inscribed clay has now been studied by leading Assyriologists Wayne Horowitz and Takayoshi Oshima, who report that it is a fragment of a 14th-century B.C.E. tablet, making it the oldest writing ever discovered in Jerusalem, predating the previous contender, the famous Siloam Tunnel inscription, by at least 600 years!¹

The fragment preserves only traces of nine lines, five on one side and four on the other. It was originally part of a larger tablet written in the Akkadian language (the diplomatic lingua franca of the time), but this is all that has survived. The preserved signs include “you,” “you were,” “to do” and “they.” With so little to work with, the scholars admit, they cannot restore even a single full phrase with any certainty. The fragment is thought to be part of an archived copy of an official letter written from a Canaanite king of Jerusalem to a pharaoh of Egypt. Although the fragment does not preserve any names or titles, the scholars believe its finely formed wedge-shaped characters could have been produced only by someone with considerable scribal training in cuneiform and knowledge of Akkadian: “The scribe of the Jerusalem fragment seems capable of producing high-quality international-standard scribal work,” the scholars note.

As analyzed by Tel Aviv University clay petrologist Yuval Goren, the clay from which the tablet was made came from Jerusalem, not a far-off city in Egypt or Mesopotamia.

This indicates that the letter was written in Jerusalem, most likely by a royal scribe, perhaps even one of the personal scribes of Abdi-Heba, the king of Jerusalem whose pleading letters to the pharaoh Akhenaten are famously preserved in the 14th-century B.C.E. archive found at el-Amarna in Egypt.^a In fact, given the close similarity between the cuneiform signs from the new fragment and those of Abdi-Heba’s letters, and the fact that the new fragment was found so close to Jerusalem’s Late Bronze Age citadel, the scholars believe the fragment may be part of a copy of one of Abdi-Heba’s letters to Pharaoh that was stored in the Jerusalem king’s archive.

This tiny, fragmentary inscription from which we cannot really extract any literal meaning nevertheless has a broader significance. It confirms evidence from the Amarna letters that Jerusalem was a thriving city in the Late Bronze Age, with scribes capable of writing cuneiform and with the governmental organization to employ them. This must be our conclusion despite the fact that archaeologists have found little of surviving structures from this period.

This is similar to the situation in the tenth century B.C.E. when David and Solomon ruled. Little from this time has been archaeologically recovered. But, as the Amarna letters suggest and this little cuneiform inscription confirms, Jerusalem could have been an important city at that time, even though structurally little has survived.

The small piece of inscribed clay has now been studied by leading Assyriologists Wayne Horowitz and Takayoshi Oshima, who report that it is a fragment of a 14th-century B.C.E. tablet, making it the oldest writing ever discovered in Jerusalem, predating the previous contender, the famous Siloam Tunnel inscription, by at least 600 years!1 The fragment preserves only traces of nine lines, five on one side and four on the other. It was originally part of a larger tablet written in the Akkadian language (the diplomatic lingua franca of the time), but this is all that has survived. The preserved signs […]