PROFESSOR BRUCE ZUCKERMAN is profiled the Daily Trojan the student newspaper of the University of Southern California, where he has taught for many years:

Unlocking artifacts of antiquity
Bruce Zuckerman uses the latest photo technology to study ancient texts, providing new findings on the date of their creation.
By Nathan Go
Published: Monday, October 18, 2004



For almost 20 years now, Bruce Zuckerman, professor of Semitic languages, has held the key to some of the world's oldest civilizations in his hands.

From deserts to war-torn areas, Zuckerman has pursued and taken hundreds of thousands of images of ancient inscriptions using the latest technology in photography - usually revealing new, striking information.

Zuckerman's findings last summer on an artifact believed to bear the earliest biblical passage might end the controversy surrounding the date of its existence.

While some scholars question the artifact's age, Zuckerman's high-resolution photographs show that the text is a distinct style of an early Hebrew script. The script was used from the period just before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., thus confirming its antiquity.

The images Zuckerman took provide the clearest analysis of the inscriptions ever taken so far, and he hopes they will finally dispel the cloud of doubt hanging over the artifact.

"Until then, most people were just relying on drawings," Zuckerman said.

Most scholars would rank the artifact, which was originally found in 1979, as the second most important archaeological find in Israel, just next to a stone inscription mentioning the House of David, Zuckerman said.

I'm a little confused by this comment and I wonder if the interviewer has gotten it completely right. I think everyone would agree that the most important archaeological find in Israel is the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Judean Desert scroll discoveries in general. Nothing is even a close second. But perhaps Zuckerman was referring to inscriptions recovered in controlled excavations, which would exclude most of the scroll finds. In any case, these silver amulets from Ketef Hinnom (which are the artifact the article is talking about) are the oldest fragments of a text found in the Bible and are extraordinarily important.

But put aside the nit-picking. This is really exciting:

However, Zuckerman emphasized that the findings on the Priestly Benediction artifact is just one of the many items he has photographed, and people often miss the bigger picture of what is being achieved.

The more important thing to ask, he said, is how such tremendously valuable and yet delicate artifacts can be preserved.

To this end, Zuckerman has created an online database system called InscriptiFact. In essence, InscriptiFact is a technological solution that takes the most important texts of the near-Eastern ancient world and preserves them in digital format.

The images can then be distributed worldwide for free, virtually guaranteeing that the artifacts are going to last forever.

"It's a kind of immortality," Zuckerman said. "A lot of times we have to rescue the artifacts before it's too late."

The article concludes with a quote from Lynn Swartz Dodd, curator of USC's Archaeological Research Center:

"Ultimately," she said, "he did for biblical inscriptions what Google did for the Internet."

That sounds about right. Quite a legacy. And he isn't done yet.

I think I've mentioned before that I was the first research assistant to the West Semitic Research Project back when I was a callow Master's student at UCLA in the early 1980s. You can find the InscriptiFact web page by following the link. Oddly, there's no link to it in the Daily Trojan article.