On the Trail of Hazor’s Royal Archive

A cuneiform archive had never been found in Israel. But archaeologist Yigael Yadin was confident it was there—at Hazor where he was digging.a Remembered in the Bible as “the head of all those kingdoms” (Joshua 11:10), Hazor was the grandest of all the Canaanite city-states in the Bronze Age. Major cuneiform archives had been found at Mari on the Euphrates and at El-Amarna in Egypt. Hazor is mentioned in these archives. Yadin thought there might even be two cuneiform archives at Hazor—one from the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000–1550 B.C.E.) (like Mari) and another from the Late Bronze Age […]