“This is an extremely rare and unusual discovery. This is the first time that a winged ‘genie’ – a protective magical figure – has been found in Israeli and regional archaeology. Figures of winged demons are known in the Neo-Assyrian art of the 9th-7th Centuries BCE, and they were considered a kind of protective demon,” Dr. Filip Vukosavović, an assyriologist and IAA archaeologist, said of the seal.The seal invites a lot of fascinating inferences. Over at Haaretz, Ruth Schuster unpacks more of them:It seems the seal originally contained just the image of the winged figure, and the text was inscribed later. At first, the item was probably “worn as an amulet around the neck of a man named Hoshʼayahu, who held a senior position in the Kingdom of Judah’s administration,” the IAA said.
When Hosh’ayahu died, his son Yeho’ezer inherited the seal, and he “added his name and his father’s name on either side of the demon,” in an effort to “directly appropriate to himself the beneficial qualities he believed the talisman embodied as a magical item,” the archaeologists hypothesized.
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