An Aramaic ostracon from the Amman Citadel Excavation

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY: An Achaemenid-era administrative Aramaic ostracon has been belatedly recovered by the Amman Citadel Excavation. The ostracon has been published in Syria 102 (2025) and the French article is open access at the link. I give the English version of the abstract below.

Un ostracon araméen de la citadelle d’Amman : une lecture à la lumière du corpus iduméen
An Aramaic Ostracon from the Amman Citadel: An Interpretation in the Light of the Idumaea CorpusBR> أوستراكون آرامي من قلعة عمّان : قراءة في ضوء مدوّنة نصوص إدوم

Mitchka L. M. J. Shahryari
p. 69-80
https://doi.org/10.4000/16kx0

This article presents an unpublished Aramaic ostracon (AC-2568) discovered at the Amman Citadel during the 1989 French-Jordanian excavations and identified only in 2023 during pottery sorting. Though the stratigraphic context is mixed, the ostracon likely dates between the Iron Age and the Hellenistic period. The text, painted in ink on a small limestone fragment, is short and fragmentary. It seems to be a record of an economic transaction and displays strong paleographic and typological affinities with Achaemenid-period Aramaic texts from Idumea. As the first Aramaic inscription from the site, it seems to testify the administrative use of Aramaic in the region.

For more on the Amman Citadel Excavation, see here, with links on ancient Ammon and Ammonite.

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