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University of Toronto archaeologists find cache of cuneiform tablets in 2,700-year old Turkish templeTORONTO, ON – Excavations led by a University of Toronto archaeologist at the site of a recently discovered temple in southeastern Turkey have uncovered a cache of cuneiform tablets dating back to the Iron Age period between 1200 and 600 BCE. Found in the temple’s cella, or ‘holy of holies’, the tablets are part of a possible archive that may provide insights into Assyrian imperial aspirations. The assemblage appears to represent a Neo-Assyrian renovation of an older Neo-Hittite temple complex, providing a rare glimpse into the religious...

Since this disk was found in Crete, and the people of Crete today speak Greek, that's a good language to assume was spoken by the maker of the disk. Still, that's a guess, or a hypothesis, not a fact. Besides that, we know that not everybody on Crete spoke Greek in the Bronze Age. The classical Greeks mentioned people they called Eteocretans who did not speak Greek. Further, we know that Linear A, written by the Minoans on Crete before the Mycenean Greeks came, did not represent Greek. Professor Hubert LaMarle considers it to be an early Indo-Iranian language, related...

Inscribed on the small, pillow-shaped tablet is a 3,000-year-old warning to Idanda, king of Qatna, from the Hittite general Hanutti, telling him to prepare for war. A small Bronze Age Syrian city-state, Qatna was once under Hittite control, but had been conquered by the Mitanni people from the north. The clay tablet, like others found with it, was fired twice--once just after it was written, to preserve it, and again when the ancient city was sacked and burned to the ground in 1340 B.C. by the Hittites, who ruled an empire that stretched from northern Turkey to Mesopotamia and Syria......

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

Posted on Mon, Jul. 22, 2002 Key to an ancient tongue Penn archaeologists have puzzled over the cuneiform writings for decades. At last, a Sumerian dictionary may be ready by 2004. By Faye Flam Inquirer Staff Writer Steve Tinney and Tonia Sharlach hold cuneiform tablets from the collection at Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The two Sumerologists are working on the 30-year dictionary project. The people known as Sumerians are credited with starting the first civilization and building the first settlements worthy of being called cities. They also invented writing, and then they wrote and wrote and wrote, filling...

Archaeologists rewrite timeline of Bronze and Iron Ages, including early appearance of alphabet FOR RELEASE: Dec. 19, 2001 Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr. Office: 607-255-3290 E-Mail: bpf2@cornell.edu ITHACA, N.Y. -- Using information gleaned from the sun's solar cycles and tree rings, archaeologists are rewriting the timeline of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The research dates certain artifacts of the ancient eastern Mediterranean decades earlier than previously thought. And it places an early appearance of the alphabet outside Phoenicia at around 740 B.C. Writing in two articles in the forthcoming issue of the journal Science (Dec. 21), archaeologists from Cornell University ...

The EFF is asking for a federal investigation into whether Google broke a pledge to honor student privacy with its educational tools. Today, the group filed a complaint with the FTC, alleging that Google for Education collects a broad range of data on students' browsing habits and gives administrators too much power to enable that collection. "We are calling on the FTC to investigate Google's conduct, stop the company from using student personal information for its own purposes, and order the company to destroy all information it has collected that's not for educational purposes," said EFF staff attorney Sophia Cope in...

A flake of limestone (ostracon) inscribed with an ancient Egyptian word list of the fifteenth century BC turns out to be the world's oldest known abecedary. The words have been arranged according to their initial sounds, and the order followed here is one that is still known today. This discovery by Ben Haring (Leiden University) with funding from Free Competition Humanities has been published in the October issue of the 'Journal of Near Eastern Studies'. The order is not the ABC of modern western alphabets, but Halaham (HLHM), the order known from the Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Arabian and Classical Ethiopian...

Israeli archaeologists say they are trying to decode ancient inscriptions written in Hebrew script discovered at a dig in Jerusalem. The writing was found on the walls of a room containing the remains of a Jewish ritual bath, or mikveh, believed to be about 2,000 years old. Experts are now trying to decipher words and symbols including a boat and palm trees. They say the markings may be graffiti or have some religious significance. One of the symbols could be a menorah - the seven-branched candelabrum which stood in the two Biblical Jewish Temples in Jerusalem - and some of...

A 3,000-year-old ceramic jar discovered in pieces in Israel has been restored to reveal a rare inscription of the name of a biblical figure and ruler whose reign coincided with that of King David, archaeologists announced today (June 16). The pottery was found in an ancient city overlooking the Valley of Elah, where, as described in the Bible, the legendary David defeated Goliath. The inscription, the researchers found, read: Eshba'al Ben Bada', who the archaeologists say was likely an important person since his name was inscribed on a jar. (Eshba'al Ben Shaul ruled over Israel at the same time...

JERUSALEM – Israel's antiquities authority says archaeologists have discovered a rare 3,000-year-old inscription of a name mentioned in the Bible. The name "Eshbaal Ben Beda" appears on a large ceramic jar. Eshbaal of the Bible was a son of King Saul. Archaeologists Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor say the jar belonged to a different Eshbaal, likely the owner of an agricultural estate. They said Tuesday it is the first time the name was discovered in an ancient inscription. It is one of only four inscriptions discovered from the biblical 10th century B.C. Kingdom of Judah, when King David is said...

The Biblical name Eshbaal has been found for the first time in an ancient inscription. Incised before firing on a 3,000-year-old pithos (large ceramic storage jar), the inscription was discovered at the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa in Israel. Researchers Yosef Garfinkel, Mitka R. Golub, Haggai Misgav and Saar Ganor have published their study of this inscription in a forthcoming issue of the journal Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (BASOR). The Eshbaal inscription reads “[ ] | ʾšbʿl | ˹bn˺ | bdʿ” (“ʾIšbaʿal son of Bedaʿ”) and was written from right to left in the Canaanite alphabetic script....

Tel Aviv University researchers are writing a computer program that can read Paleo-Hebrew letters inscribed on First Temple period ostraca. Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) are developing a computer program that can read a script used by the Israelites over 2,600 years ago... The project was begun by TAU Professor of Archaeology Israel Finkelstein and Professor of Physics Eliezer Piasetsky six years ago. Since then, the researchers have enlisted the help of epigraphy, archaeology and math experts along with TAU Ph.D. math students Arie Shaus, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and Barak Sober. At the center of this ambitious project are First...

Last month, I read a truly fascinating book, written by John Entine, titled: "Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People". Entine is a genetics expert, and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. http://www.amazon.com/Abrahams-Children-Identity-Chosen-People/dp/0446580635 It mentions that Jews have genetic markers, that can be detected by DNA tests. Of course, genetic markers also exist for Irishmen, Chinese people, Indians, etc. The Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and the Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, have very similar genes. Genetics research and Archaeology are proving that many of the accounts in the Old Testament are true. Jews have...

A newly translated Hebrew text claims to reveal where treasures from King Solomon's temple were hidden and discusses the fate of the Ark of the Covenant itself. But unlike the Indiana Jones movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the text leaves the exact location of the Ark unclear and states that it, and the other treasures, "shall not be revealed until the day of the coming of the Messiah son of David …" putting it out of reach of any would-be treasure seeker. King Solomon's Temple, also called the First Temple, was plundered and torched by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar...

 The University of Oxford and the Vatican have jointly created a digital project that will put online over 1.5 million pages of medieval and biblical texts. The four-year project will digitize the collections of the Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) related to their Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts and fifteenth-century printed books. They include a Gutenberg Bible from 1455, an autographed and annotated manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and the oldest surviving Hebrew codex.The project is funded by a $3.2 million grant from the Polonsky Foundation. Dr Leonard Polonsky said, “In today’s fast-paced, digital-driven world of scholarship, easy...

First discovered near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem last year, the 10th century B.C. fragment has been labeled the Ophel Inscription. It likely bears the name of the jug's owners and its contents. If Petrovich's analysis proves true, it would be evidence of the accuracy of Old Testament tales. If Hebrew as a written language existed in the 10th century, as he says, the ancient Israelites were recording their history in real time as opposed to writing it down several hundred years later.

JERUSALEM – An ancient limestone tablet covered with a mysterious Hebrew text that features the archangel Gabriel is at the center of a new exhibit in Jerusalem, even as scholars continue to argue about what it means. The so-called Gabriel Stone, a meter (three-foot)-tall tablet said to have been found 13 years ago on the banks of the Dead Sea, features 87 lines of an unknown prophetic text dated as early as the first century BC, at the time of the Second Jewish Temple.

Theft, espionage, corruption and a cover-up lasting decades — a new book by a Times of Israel reporter exposes the extraordinary saga of the uniquely revered, 1,100-year-old Aleppo Codex A new book by a Times of Israel reporter reveals dramatic new information about the fate of a manuscript many consider Judaism’s most important book — the 1,100-year-old Aleppo Codex.The manuscript — or the part of it that did not go mysteriously missing in the mid-20th century — is currently held alongside the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is revered as the authoritative version of the Hebrew...