Northwest Semitic Epigraphy

This work analyzes Iron Age graffiti from the site of Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, Israel from a form critical perspective, drawing upon parallels in the corpus of Egyptian dedicatory graffiti. I also discuss the tension between orality and literacy in ritual performance, and the evolving importance of writing in Ancient Israel and Judah.

In 2018, a team from the Austrian Archaeological Institute uncovered an alphabetic inscription that was painted onto a fragment of a Cypriote White Slip II milk bowl. The significance of the Lachish Milk Bowl Ostracon (LMBO) for biblical history cannot be overstated, as this ostracon ties the Israelites of Joshua's campaign directly to Canaan at the end of the 15th century BC. This inscribed potsherd from Lachish’s destruction layer, which dates to near the end of the Late Bronze Age I, attests to Israelites in Canaan just before 1400 BC. The ostracon includes a brief but legible writing in the script of the world’s oldest alphabet, whose prior attestation is reserved almost exclusively for inscriptions from Egypt (Lahun, Wadi el-Ḥôl) and Sinai (Wadi Naṣb, Serâbîṭ el-Khâdim), which the author previously demonstrated to be written in the Hebrew language. The LMBO is possibly the most definitive form of evidence of the Israelite conquest of Canaan yet discovered by archaeologists excavating in Israel.

The discovery at Zincirli of an inscribed stele belonging to Katumuwa, servant of Panamuwa, touches upon several longstanding issues concerning the mean-ing of the word nbš (Hebrew נפש). Although the inscription was dedicated dur-ing the lifetime of Katumuwa, the continued provision of his “nbš that is in this stele” raises questions regarding not only the term’s nuance within a postmortem context, but also the nature of feeding the dead. These issues can be addressed by carefully examining the manner by which the term’s abstract and substantive forms relate to concepts of identity. The analysis of Katumuwa’s stele along with a new interpretation of Hos. 9:4 will show that nbš/נפש is a ritually centered object that marks identity. In other words, postmortem identity is reified in the nbš /נפש through ritual actions that include feeding the dead. This interpretation sheds new light on the substantive meaning of nbš/#$pene in inscriptions and in biblical literature, where the term signifies either a stele or a corpse.

This research aims at studying the Nabataean architectural terms throughout their inscriptions. It demonstrates the Nabataean inscriptions which contain architectural terms and expressions seeking to point out linguistic indications.  This  also  compares  the different architectural terms occurred in the Nabataean  inscriptions to their cognates in other Semitic languages, and stab to link them with the monuments in which
the inscriptions were found and the existing  ones. Moreover, the research  reviews  the historical and  geographical distribution of such terms

A complete edition of all known Latino (and Graeco)-Punic inscriptions along with a detailed, comparative grammatical analysis, esp. with regard to phonology and orthographic practice. Several texts are presented here for the first time. These texts from Roman-era Tripolitania (the first centuries A.D.) render Punic systematically, although written with Latin graphemes. Until now they have been largely neglected by Semiticists. They thus provide, among other things, fully vocalised material, unusual for alphabetically written Semitic languages, which can provide us with insight into the historical and diachronic development of the (North-West) Semitic languages, esp. biblical Hebrew. At the same time, these texts are also interesting epigraphic texts documenting the spread of the Punic language into the African interior.

According to generally accepted estimates, the corpus of Phoenician-Punic inscriptions comprises about 10,000 inscriptions from all the countries of the Mediterranean region. The sheer quantity and scattered nature of the documents, spread over a very wide span of time, have severely affected research and caused considerable difficulties in the knowledge, availability and use of these sources. In order to tackle these problems and to try to resolve them, by making Phoenician texts –presented with rigorous and uniform criteria – available to the academic community, the project called CIP (Corpus Inscriptionum Phoenicarum necnon Punicarum, also known as the PhDB or Phoenician Data Base) came into being. For the first time, this project produce a collection and a critical edition of all the Phoenician and Punic epigraphic documents in the form of a data bank; also include all the available information on every Phoenician epigraphic document considered of interest for correctly understanding them. It presents the relevant data in an ordered and programmatic form, together with graphic and photographic material. The project in question, born from an Italian initiative (CNR) that early on made use of collaboration with a Spanish team (CSIC) is directed by Paolo Xella and co-directed by José-Ángel Zamora. The aim of this article is to document the progress of the project, explaining its objectives and illustrating the criteria underlying the work completed so far [as of 2007].

The thesis concentrates on computational methods pertaining to ancient ostraca - ink on clay inscriptions, written in Hebrew. These texts originate from the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and dated to the late First Temple period (8th – early 6th centuries BCE). The ostraca are almost the sole remaining epigraphic evidence from the First Temple period and are therefore important for archaeological, historical, linguistic, and religious studies of this era. This “noisy” material offers a fertile ground for the development of various “robust” image analysis, image processing, computer vision and machine learning methods, dealing with the challenging domain of ancient documents’ analysis. The common procedures of modern epigraphers involve manual and labor-intensive steps, facing the risk of unintentionally mixing documentation with interpretation. Therefore, the main goal of this study is establishing a computerized paleographic framework for handling First Temple period epigraphic material. The major research questions, addressed in this thesis are: quality evaluation of manual facsimiles; quality evaluation of ostraca images; automatic binarization of the documents and its subsequent refinement; quality evaluation of binarizations on global and local levels; identification of different writers between inscriptions (two distinct methods are proposed); image segmentation (with improvements over the classical Chan-Vese algorithm); and letters’ shape prior estimation. The developed methods were tested on real-world archaeological and modern data and their results are found to be favorable.

Most of this book, _Identifying Biblical Persons_, is available on the Google Books web site:  www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=mykytiuk+identifying&num=10

This book is a revised Ph.D. dissertation in Hebrew and Semitic Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998, which began with a February 1992 graduate seminar paper.

"Establishes the first comprehensive protocols for evaluating potential identifications of persons mentioned in the Hebrew Bible with persons mentioned in Northwest Semitic inscriptions. Applies this system in detail to a small number of Hebrew inscriptions, the Mesha Inscription, and the Tel Dan stele.
Appendixes covering inscriptions published through mid-2002 briefly evaluate potential identifications of over seventy-five biblical persons in over ninety Northwest Semitic inscriptions which are mostly contemporary with the person.
Resulting identifications and non-identifications appear in six categories of strength or weakness, from unmistakable to disqualified. The final product is a first-ever corpus consisting only of inscriptions that name biblical persons. This technical book will appeal to advanced scholars, graduate students, seminarians, clergy, and others who have a working knowledge of at least one Northwest Semitic language, e.g., biblical Hebrew, and to nonspecialists interested in questions about biblical historicity."

"The article itself is available by subscription at : http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=40&Issue=2&ArticleID=4 . 
For the open-access endnotes that tell how archaeology confirms each of the 50 persons in the article, see http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/50-people-in-the-bible-confirmed-archaeologically/#note05r . 
This short, popular-level article identifies 50 persons mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) in Bible-era inscriptions of known authenticity.  Its intent is to set forth a conservativ.e list of strong identifications that can be trusted.  The linked web site contains much factual information.       

These identifications are based on the criteria established in pp. 9-89 of the author's published dissertation (Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E. [Atlanta: Society of Biblical LIterature, 2004]).  The article extends the dissertation's coverage to include Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian inscriptions down to 400 B.C.E.  Inscriptions discovered as recently as 2005 and 2008 are included.  "

Comments and queries about the newly discovered bulla of a seal of Hezekiah, announced by the Hebrew University 2 December, 2015, and widely reported in the media. Though press coverage commonly reports the archaeologists’ claim that the bulla is more important than the eight previously known (and published) unprovenanced bullae with the same inscription because of the circumstances of its discovery, I argue that its true importance lies in its authentication of the unprovenanced bullae. It lifts the long-standing suspicion of forgery from unprovenanced bullae in general.

The problem with using royal inscriptions as historical sources is their inherent bias. The interests of the king drive the narratives of royal inscriptions. Yet this essential feature reveals their underlying concept of history. In royal inscriptions, historical thought is defined by the life and experience of the king. This article will present a hermeneutic for reading royal inscriptions that focuses on the individual king. The article will first look at the concept of historical time in epigraphic Hebrew and Old Aramaic sources before examining the compli-cated ways in which this concept is rendered in the principal genres of royal writings, the memorial and the dedicatory inscription. A survey of features found in memorial inscriptions from Dibon (the Mesha Stele) and Sam’al (Kulamuwa), followed by a study of the Old Byblian dedicatory inscriptions, will explore the complex process of configuring time and narrative around the king. In each genre of royal inscription, the linear time of the ruler intersects with cyclical traditions of kingship, revealing the historicality of respective king.

Abstract: The origin of Mishnaic Hebrew and its differences from Biblical Hebrew have been explained in different ways, e.g., in terms of chronological development (MH is later), register (MH is colloquial), or geographic (MH originated elsewhere than in Judea). None of these accounts explain, however, just why MH is different in the way that it is different, especially in the pronounced and drastic simplification of its verbal system vis-a-vis BH.

Recent advances in contact linguistics suggest that MH originated out of a very specific kind of contact with Aramaic, namely, the fairly rapid adult acquisition of Hebrew as a second language by Aramaic speakers, which left the language permanently changed. The most likely historical framework for this contact situation is the expansion of the Jewish state under the Hasmoneans in the second and first centuries BCE.

Though the Samaria Ostraca are of limited use as witnesses to spoken Hebrew in the Iron Age, they hold a greater value when it is recognized that they are relics of an ancient writing system. Scholars typically classify the language of the ostraca as a northern dialect of Hebrew. However, they issue becomes one of semantics when the meaning of ‘dialect’ is considered. The Samaria Ostraca were products of royal scribes and represent a distinct form of literature (archival lists) that held a limited purpose (recording deliveries of foods). The best way to approach the language of the Samaria Ostraca is to take into consideration their specific use and social context by examining the ostraca’s form (or register) and content. This essays will explore the Samaria Ostraca as administrative documents written in a standardized language that recorded shipments of prestige goods, and will focus on the terms ‘washed oil’ and ‘aged wine.’ Both terms stand for high-quality products that were unique to the culture of the northern kingdom, in their manner of production. While this fact is generally accepted with the term ‘washed oil,’ it has not been fully recognized in the term ‘aged wine’ until now.

The Karatepe inscriptions contain an intriguing image of a woman walking fearlessly with spindles. This image builds on the symbolism of the spindle in the ancient Near East as an emblem of femininity and highlights the gendered language of the passage in which it occurs. In the context, the figure of the woman with spindles is contraposed with the image of the fearful man. The contrast between them portrays the magnitude of the positive changes accomplished by Azitawada, the ruler who commissioned the inscriptions.

Perhaps one of the more intriguing and enigmatic characters in the OT is Nimrod, though his name appears only 4 times throughout the entire Bible. Opinions about Nimrod's identity, which have abounded since ancient times, include Ninurta, Amenhotep III, and Gilgamesh. This paper demonstrates, however, that exegetical, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence combine to prove conclusively that Sargon of Akkad is the one and only ancient historical character who fits all of the biographical requirements of biblical Nimrod.

For anyone willing to accept that ancient Israel's presence and burdened subjugation in Egypt could be historical, the question arises as to who this unnamed pharaoh might be, and why he remained unnamed. By comparing the biography of the exodus-pharaoh with the reign of Amenhotep II, the pharaoh who would have sat on Egypt's throne at the time (based on a proper synchronization of Israelite and Egyptian history), an evaluation can be made as to whether this pharaoh fits the many detailed requirements that must be true of the exodus-pharaoh. This paper may represent the most thorough effort yet attempted to identify the exodus-pharaoh with a historical ruler of Egypt.

Syriac and the Qurʾān - Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān - 2018

**Syriac was an Aramaic dialect spoken by Christians in and around Arabia during the time of the Qurʾān’s appearance. It or…

**Article Table of Contents

The place of Syriac in Islamic tradition
Modern theories on Syriac and the Qurʾān
Jewish-Christianity between Syriac and the Qurʾān
Syriac intertext, subtext, or urtext?
Syriac rhymed homilies and Qurʾānic prose
Examples of Syriac in the Qurʾān
Syriac vocabulary
Unconnected letters
Rephrasing the Syriac Bible and Apocrypha – The Last Judgement and next life
Rhyme and rhetoric
Echoes of Syriac homilies – The case of Paradise
Bibliography

Carthage was founded around the end of the 9th century BC as one of a series of Tyrian colonies stretching across and beyond the Mediterranean. As the power and influence of Tyre was reduced due to shifting Levantine geopolitics in the early 6th century BC, Carthage became the premier arbiter of both commercial and military interests in the Phoenician-Punic world. A colonial ideology was formalized via a written constitution, preserved today only in secondary classical sources. Combining historical, epigraphic, and archaeological lines of data provides the opportunity to reconstruct the political economy of Carthage as the polity adapted to the rapidly changing regional balances of power in the mid- to late-first millennium BC.

Baruch the scribe of the Prophet Jeremiah is rightfully famous, but the bullae (seal impressions in clay) that appeared on the antiquities market are modern forgeries (as is the seal from which they were made).  The same is true for the Ma'adanah Seal (the images of which is on the modern half-shekel coin from Israel !). This article (published in the Memorial Volume for the great Israeli epigrapher Joseph Naveh of Hebrew University) focuses on the epigraphic evidence against these putative Old Hebrew inscriptions.  Of course, the broader conclusion is that there continue to be a fair number of modern epigraphic forgeries that are making their way onto the antiquities market and into various collections.  Vigilance is required so as to ensure the fact that scholarly discussions about ancient society are not based on inscriptions that are actually modern forgeries (and thus of no value in discussions of antiquity).