New Inscription from Jerusalem

I was just reminiscing about the summer of 2008. Remember the new inscriptions from Zincirli and Khirbet Qeiyafa? Well, it has been a while since anything interesting was pulled out of the ground with writing on it, but Jim Davila posted an IAA press release this morning for an inscription on a large pithos dated to 10th century Jerusalem.

The script is described as “Canaanite” and Ahituv (I assume) reads it from left-to-right as m q p ḥ  n [l]   n which means ???? (note the press release reads h but I assume a diacritic has dropped because it looks like ḥ to me). Well, beggers can’t be choosers, right? The shapes of the mem and nun are consistent with other 10th century writing (see Ahiram and Gezer Calendar). The qaf and pe are oriented toward the right rather than the left, which suggests the left-to-right order. The qaf looks more like a resh to me, though, so an alternative reading could be m r p ḥ n.

As always with these sort of things, the headline teases “Inscription from the Time of Kings David & Solomon” while the press release explains the fact that it does not seem to be Hebrew by attributing it to one of the “non-Israeli” [huh?] residents of Jerusalem like our good friends the Jebusites. You can’t seem to get rid of those guys.

Of course, this analysis wrongly conflates script with language while completely confusing things by invoking ethnicity. What is described as “Canaanite” script is better understood as simply the typologically older common script used across the region — it does not necessarily indicate that you are a Canaanite (a term that is problematic in itself). Distinctive national scripts begin to develop from the 10th into the 9th centuries, but as the Tel Fakheriya bi-lingual demonstrated, the typologically older script was still in use into the 9th century as well.

UPDATE: Just noticed that George Athas has also given some comments on the inscription. He also reads the qaf as a resh. I am not sure why Ahituv read it as a qaf which I would expect to look more like a line with a circle on top, but perhaps the reading is not Ahituv’s. George further notes problems with the pe, which he tentatively reads as tsade. I noticed that the pe seems too “closed”, but I don’t really see a tsade at all. It needs some “squiggle”. I would further note that having only seen a hi-res photo I am just having some summer armchair epigrapher fun with this, so take my opinions with a large grain of salt.

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