Oldest piece of writing ever found in Israel identified on ancient shard of

A workforce of researchers from the Austrian Academy of Science’s, Austrian Archaeological Institute, and the Hebrew College of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archeology, has identified a piece of writing on a shard of pottery unearthed in 2018 on the Lachish archaeological web site because the oldest piece of writing ever found in Israel. Of their paper revealed in Cambridge College Press’s, Antiquity, the group describes finding out the writing and what they realized about it.

Again in 2018, a workforce of archeologists working on the Lachish archaeological dig web site found a shard of pottery with some writing on it—but it surely was not till lately that examine of the textual content on the shard was performed. Prior work confirmed that the shard was roughly 3,500 years previous—a time when the location the place it was found was half of a Canaanite middle, which in flip was half of a metropolis known as Lachish, a metropolis talked about in the Bible—it was destroyed by the Israelites after their exodus from Egypt. After that, it was rebuilt, solely to be destroyed once more in the seventh century BCE.

The discovering is taken into account to be important as a result of it helps to fill in a spot between early testimonies of scripts and the event of Semitic alphabets in the realm. The researchers be aware that prior analysis has proven that early alphabets existed in the realm as early because the nineteenth century BCE however then there isn’t a point out of them in historic information till the thirteenth or twelfth centuries—this new script represents an alphabet between them.

The researchers have been in a position to transcribe some of the writing on the shard—some of the letters seem like varieties of daled, ayin and wager, which mix to create the phrase “eved,” which in Hebrew means slave. One other bit of script seems to spell out the phrase for nectar. The researchers be aware that prior proof has proven that each one of the alphabets created all over the world received their begin with hieroglyphs. The writing they found represents an early half of the method that led to an alphabet. In addition they be aware that it proves that the alphabet that arose in the Levant didn’t come from Egypt.

Supply:Felix Höflmayer et al. Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Close to East: the ‘lacking hyperlink’ from Tel Lachish, Antiquity (2021). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.157  http://antiquity.ac.uk/

Oldest piece of writing ever found in Israel identified on ancient shard of pottery

Gobekli Tepe: The world’s first astronomical observatory?