Abstract
In December 2019, an expedition on Mt. Ebal to examine the discarded material from Adam Zertal’s 1982–1989 excavation yielded a small, folded lead tablet. The east dump pile, from which the object emerged, contained the discarded matrix from two structures that he interpreted as altars dated to the Late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I. The earlier and smaller round altar lay underneath the geometric center of the later and larger rectangular altar. The tablet could not be opened without damaging it. A team of scientists performed X-ray tomographic measurements with different scanning parameters. The tomographically reconstructed data were subjected to advanced processing to reveal the hidden text. Epigraphic analysis of the tomographic data revealed a formulaic curse written in a proto-alphabetic script likely dating to Late Bronze Age II. The inscription falls within the literary genre of Chiastic Parallelism and predates any previously known Hebrew inscription in Israel by at least 200 years.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 105 |
| Journal | Heritage Science |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Stripling, the expedition director, expresses appreciation to all team members. Notably among them are the following: Abigail Leavitt (Assistant Director), Steve Rudd (Engineer), Frankie Snyder (Small Finds Expert), Greg Gulbrandsen (Wet-sifting Supervisor), Michael Luddeni (Photographer), Aaron Lipkin (Logistics Coordinator), Boaz Vinereb (Logistics Support), Shuki Levine (Logistics Support), Zvi Koenigsberg (Liaison), Yosi Dagan and the Shomron Regional Council, and Yair Almakyas and the Midreshet Shomron. The authors also thank the following colleagues for reading the article and/or making helpful suggestions: Shmuel Ahituv, Michael Bar-Ron, Bnayahu Broner, Yoram Cohen, Robert Deutsch, Craig Evans, Amir Gilan, Uri Holtzman, Israel Knohl, Abigail Leavitt, Noam Mizrahi, Daniel Sivan, Daniela Urbanova, Mark Weeden, Shamir Yonah, and Wolfgang Zwickel. Urbanova assisted with the detection of the first three letters. The Associates for Biblical Research provided financial support for this research. The work related to the tomographic reading of the interior text was partially supported by Operational Programme Research, Development and Education in Project INAFYM (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000766). The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.
Funding Information:
This research was done with financial support from the Associates for Biblical Research. The work related to the tomographic reading of the interior text was partially supported by Operational Programme Research, Development and Education in Project INAFYM (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000766). The authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article. The authors declare they have no financial interest. SS serves as an unpaid staff member for the Associates for Biblical Research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
Keywords
- Computed tomography
- Defixio
- Late Bronze Age
- Mt. Ebal
- Proto-alphabetic writing
- Wet sifting
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Conservation
- Chemistry (miscellaneous)
- Archaeology
- Materials Science (miscellaneous)
- Archaeology
- Computer Science Applications
- Spectroscopy