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Friday, August 30, 2024

Inscribed genie seal excavated in Jerusalem

ARCHAEOLOGY, HEBREW EPIGRAPHY, ICONOGRAPHY: ‘Extremely rare, beautiful’ First Temple-era ‘genie’ seal discovered in Jerusalem. 2,700-year-old stone seal is inscribed with the words ‘Yehoʼezer son of Hoshʼayahu’; its image of a protective winged demon or genie betrays Assyrian influence (Gavriel Fiske, Times of Israel).
“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.

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.

The seal invites a lot of fascinating inferences. Over at Haaretz, Ruth Schuster unpacks more of them:

Ancient Seal Featuring Assyrian Demon From First Temple Period Discovered in Jerusalem. A black stone seal-amulet with name 'LeYehoʼezer ben Hoshʼayahu' inscribed in paleo-Hebrew shows the cultural influence of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in ancient Judah, archaeologists say

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