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 […]