Thursday, July 11, 2013

Rollston on the new Jerusalem inscription

CHRISTOPHER ROLLSTON: The Decipherment of the New ‘Incised Jerusalem Pithos’.

He says the script is of the 11th century BCE, not the tenth (and therefore it is older than the time of David and Solomon). He also reads the letters slightly differently than in that Hebrew University press release (or the IEJ article), with the result that the inscription refers to a "pot" or a "cauldron." Well, that does make sense.

Background here.

UPDATE (12 July): James McGrath has collected blog discussions of the text at: Fragments Discovered in Israel, among them Gershon Galil's rather different reconstruction (also here). I agree with George Athas that the latter involves an unsatisfying amount of reconstruction.

In the same post, James notes the now well publicized discovery of a fragment of an Egyptian sphinx at Hazor. It is really outside the interests of PaleoJudaica, but you can read more about it there if you want to.