BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: Where Are the Royal Archives at Tel Hazor? Searching for cuneiform tablets at Tel Hazor (Marek Dospěl). Where indeed? Yigael Yadin thought he knew, and he was getting set to go find them when he died unexpectedly back in 1984. Then, excavations began again at Hazor in 1990. Amnon Ben-Tor and (the late) Sharon Zuckerman have been looking since then and have not found the archives, so the answer is not obvious. I noted that they were looking back in 2005 and (when another cuneiform tablet was found there) in 2007. I mentioned the search again in passing in 2010 and again in the same year (cf. here) when the excavation found a couple of new cuneiform fragments.
The BAR article by Shlomit Bechar is behind a subscription wall, but the BHD essay is reasonably informative. If she knows where the archives are, I wish her and the excavation team all good and speedy success in finally finding them. The recovery of the Hazor archives would revolutionize our knowledge of the land of Israel in the second millennium BCE.
