The Yavneh Yam inscription

A HEBREW OSTRACON: Ancient email: Letter on pottery fragment dates back 2,600 years: It could have been an email to the boss about an unfair manager, but this letter on a pottery fragment from Metzad Hashavyahu dates back to the time of King Josiah. (Mike Rogoff, Haaretz). Excerpt:

The voices of history are typically those of rulers, generals and court historians. The little guy is seldom heard. This ostracon, as an inscribed potsherd is called, was discovered in 1960, in the excavation of a 7th-century BCE Judean fort on the southern Mediterranean shore between Jaffa and Ashdod; and the plaint in this makeshift ceramic notepad could as well have been a desperate email.

The location seems to have been at the port town of Yavneh-Yam, during the reign of the biblical king Josiah. Scholars are divided, however, as to who controlled the garrison: the king in Jerusalem or the pharaoh reasserting Egyptian power along the coastal plain.

Actually, I think formal complaints against an employer of this type usually still come in hard copy. But be that as it may, this is a nice profile of one of the most interesting Iron Age Hebrew ostraca ever to be uncovered, one that may allude to a biblical law.