by Ilan Gattegno
Researchers at Tel Aviv University use multispectral imaging technology on a shard of pottery dating back almost 3,000 years, find previously unseen Hebrew writing that includes new words
The inscription discovered on the pottery
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Researchers at Tel Aviv University have
uncovered a Hebrew inscription on a shard of pottery dating back to the
First Temple era (the 11th to 5th centuries BCE) using new multispectral
imaging technology, the "Plos One" multidisciplinary scientific journal
reported Wednesday.
The shard, discovered decades ago, was
believed to have been inscription-free on one side, but the
multispectral imaging technology revealed it was used as part of a
delivery of supplies to a military unit sent to Tel Arad, west of the
Dead Sea.
"Every Arad inscription has been thoroughly
studied since the 1960s, and some of them are regularly exhibited at the
Israel Museum," doctoral candidate Barak Sover said.
"We developed a new method of photography and
re-examined the faded inscriptions to ensure the human eye didn't miss
anything. As it turns out, we discovered a brand new inscription that
eluded experts for 50 years while it [the shard] was in the museum."
Using the new multispectral imaging
technology, researchers were able to read additional letters and words
in the existing inscription on one side of the clay, and to their
surprise, three "new" lines dealing with the delivery of supplies to a
military unit became visible on its other side, previously considered
"clean."
Dr. Anat Mendel Geberovich, of the department
of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at Tel Aviv
University, explained that "the importance of this find doesn't lie with
text itself, but with the fact that we have very few First Temple-era
texts and every additional mark provides us with a wealth of
information.
"In these three lines and on the front of the
inscription we identified new words that have so far been unfamiliar to
researchers, as they don't appear in the Bible," she said.
In the early 1960s, archaeologist Yohanan
Aharoni, formerly chairman of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv
University, uncovered a trove of 91 pottery fragments in the Tel Arad
Fortress -- the largest corpus of Hebrew inscriptions dating back to the
First Temple -- believed to have been written on the eve of the Kingdom
of Judah's destruction by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II.
The researchers now plan to use the new
technology on all First Temple-era relics, saying that in the future
multispectral photography will be an integral part of any new
excavation.
Ilan Gattegno
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=43145&hp=1
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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