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Samaria Ostraca

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Samaria Ostraca
Sketch of a selection of ostraca
MaterialClay ostraca
WritingPaleo-Hebrew script
Createdc. 850–750 BC
Discovered1910
Present locationIstanbul Archaeology Museums

The Samaria Ostraca are 102 ostraca found in 1910 in excavations in ancient Samaria (modern-day Sebastia, Nablus) led by George Andrew Reisner of the Harvard Semitic Museum.[1] These ostraca were found in the treasury of the palace of Ahab, king of Israel, and probably date about his period, 850–750 BC. Authored by royal scribes, the ostraca primarily record food deliveries, serving an archival function.[2]

The ostraca are written in the paleo-Hebrew alphabet,[3] which very closely resemble those of the Siloam Inscription, but show a slight development of the cursive script.[4] The language is typically seen as a northern Hebrew dialect.[2]

Of the 102 ostraca found, only 63 are legible.[1] The primary inscriptions are known as KAI 183–188. They are currently held in the collection of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.[5]

Description

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Diagram of the excavation

They are written on fragments of five different types of vessels—large thick amphorae, with a drab or grey surface; large thin amphorae, with a drab or grey surface; jugs of soft brown ware with a reddish slip; basins of the same ware; and bowls of coarse ware with a red or yellow slip, all of these presumably being vessels that were used in receiving and storing the revenue. Sherds with a smooth surface or a slip would naturally be preferred for writing.

These ostraca are evidently part of a somewhat clumsy method of book-keeping. Either they were a "day-book," notes of daily receipts to be written up in some form of "ledger" afterwards; or they were the sole record kept of the amount of wine and oil received in various years from various places. It is possible they were written and handed in by the payer, not by the receiver.

All of them began with a date, such as "In the ninth, tenth, or fifteenth year" presumably of the reign of Ahab. This is followed by the amount and quality of wine or oil received, with the name of the place where it came from and of the giver, such as "in the tenth year wine of Kerm-ha-Tell for a jar of fine oil" where evidently wine was accepted in place of fine oil. "A jar of old wine" and "a jar of fine oil" are the most usual descriptions.

Names of places

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Some names are of the villages or districts, and others are names of the peasant farmers who paid their taxes in the form of jars of wine. Of the places mentioned on these Ostraca, Shechem is the only one that can be identified with a text occurring in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament). In Kerm-ha-Tell, and Kerm-Yahu-'ali, the word Kerm must mean " the village, or vineyard," Tell means "mound", maybe referring to modern Tulkarm in Samaria. Six of these place-names occur in the Hebrew Bible as "tribal subdivisions of Manasseh", in Joshua 17:2. and Numbers 26:28–33:

  • Abi-'Ezer
  • Khelek
  • Shechem
  • Shemida'
  • No'ah
  • Hoglah

The names of the seventeen places occurring on these Ostraca are:

  • Abi-'ezer
  • Azat Par'an (?)
  • Azzo, possibly the current village of Azzun
  • Beer-yam
  • Elmatan, possibly Immatain[6]
  • Gib, possibly the current village of Gaba or Jaba'[7]
  • Haserot, possibly Asira ash Shamaliya[7]  
  • Yasot, possibly the current village of Yasid[8]
  • Kerm-ha-Tell, possibly the current town of Tulkarm
  • Sepher, possibly the modern-day Saffarin[6]
  • Shemida'
  • Shiftan, possibly the current village of Shoufa
  • Kheleq
  • Khoglah
  • No'ah Shekem
  • Shereq

See also

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Bibliography

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  • Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira; Shaus, Arie; Sober, Barak; Turkel, Eli; Piasetzky, Eli; Finkelstein, Israel (2020). "Algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria inscriptions illuminates bureaucratic apparatus in biblical Israel". PLOS ONE. 15 (1): e0227452. Bibcode:2020PLoSO..1527452F. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0227452. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 6975535. PMID 31968002.
  • Finkelstein, Israel (2021). "Notes on the Date and Function of the Samaria Ostraca". Israel Exploration Journal. 71 (2): 162–179. ISSN 0021-2059. JSTOR 27194659.
  • Mendel, Anat; Grosman, Leore (2013). "Unpublished Hebrew and Other Northwest Semitic Inscriptions from Samaria Studied with a 3-dimensional Imaging Technology". Kleine Untersuchungen zur Sprache des Alten Testaments und Seiner Umwelt. 15: 177–188.
  • Na’aman, Nadav (2019). "A new appraisal of the Samaria Ostraca". Ugarit-Forschungen. 50: 259–272. ISSN 0342-2356.
  • Noegel, Scott B. (2006). "The Samaria Ostraca" (PDF). In Chavalas, Mark William (ed.). The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 396–399. ISBN 9780631235804.
  • Richelle, Matthieu (2022). "Old and New Readings in the Samaria Ostraca". Bulletin de l'Académie Belge pour l'Étude des Langues Anciennes et Orientales. 10–11: 379–413. doi:10.14428/babelao.vol1011.2022.65023. ISSN 2034-9491.
  • Tappy, Ron E. (2016). The Archaeology of the Ostraca House at Israelite Samaria: Epigraphic Discoveries in Complicated Contexts. American Schools of Oriental Research. ISBN 978-0-89757-095-4.

References

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  1. ^ a b Noegel 2006, p. 396.
  2. ^ a b Suriano, Matthew (2007). "A Fresh Reading for 'Aged Wine' in the Samaria Ostraca". Palestine Exploration Quarterly. 139 (1): 27–33. doi:10.1179/003103207x162997. ISSN 0031-0328.
  3. ^ Lyon, David G. "Hebrew Ostraca from Samaria", The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan., 1911), pp. 136–143, quote: "The script in which these ostraca are written is the Phoenician, which was widely current in antiquity. It is very different from the so-called square character, in which the existing Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible are written."
  4. ^ Suriano, Matthew (March 2007). "A Fresh Reading for 'Aged Wine' in the Samaria Ostraca". Palestine Exploration Quarterly. 139 (1): 27–33. doi:10.1179/003103207x162997. ISSN 0031-0328.
  5. ^ "The Biblical Archaeologist". 1982.
  6. ^ a b Millard, Alan (1995-11-01). "The Knowledge of Writing in Iron Age Palestine". Tyndale Bulletin. 46 (2): 208. doi:10.53751/001c.30407. ISSN 2752-7042. Sixteen of the twenty-seven place names can be identified with those of Arab villages existing in the past hundred years in the countryside around Samaria (such as Elmatan, 28.3, modern Ammatin, or Sepher, 16a, b.1, 2, 29.3, modern Saffarin)
  7. ^ a b Zertal, Adam (2004). The Manasseh Hill Country Survey, Volume I: The Shechem Syncline. Leiden. pp. 76–79. ISBN 978-90-474-1352-3. OCLC 1294374548.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ Zertal, Adam (2004). The Manasseh Hill Country Survey, Volume I: The Shechem Syncline. Leiden. p. 77. ISBN 978-90-474-1352-3. OCLC 1294374548. The survey findings support its accepted identification with Yaset (y-s-t) of the Samaria Ostraca, nos. 9–10, 19 and 47.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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