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The New Jerusalem Inscription—So What?

By Alan R. Millard

In 012, while excavating at the southern wall of the Temple Mount, Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar discovered the oldest alphabetic inscription ever found in Jerusalem. It had been inscribed on a storage jar, but, alas, the jar had not fared well. Made of pottery, it had broken into pieces. Along with at least seven other broken jars, the pieces had somehow found another use. Masons at work on a new building used the pieces to level an uneven patch of ground. On two small pieces of one jar that fitted together were scratched letters of an early alphabet. Although […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Chris Rollston, “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?” BAR 38:03.

Endnotes

1.

Eilat Mazar, David Ben-Shlomo and Shmuel Ahituv, “An Inscribed Pithos from the Ophel, Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 63 (2013), pp. 39–49.

2.

More detail in André Lemaire, “West Semitic Epigraphy and the History of the Levant During the 12th–10th Centuries B.C.E.,” in Gershon Galil, Ayelet Gilboa, Aren M. Maeir and Dan’el Kahn, eds., The Ancient Near East in the 12th–10th Centuries B.C.E., Alter Orient und Altes Testament 392 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012), pp. 5–13.

3.

Alan Millard, “Only Fragments from the Past: The Role of Accident in Our Knowledge of the Ancient Near East,” in Piotr Bienkowski, Christopher B. Mee and Elizabeth A. Slater, eds., Writing and Ancient Near Eastern Society, Papers in Honour of Alan R. Millard (London: T & T Clark, 2005), pp. 301–319.