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September 08, 2005
14th Century BCE Tablet Found at Sidon
The Daily Star is reporting that a clay tablet has been found at Sidon.
According to preliminary analysis of the writing on the front and back of the tablet, it appears to be a kind of rations list. The markings include a short line which indicates each new entry, followed by a measurement (most probably of barley), a space, and then the name of the recipient. The short line appears to be a marking local to Sidon and the fabric on the cuneiform is local to Sidon as well.
The tablet is from the 14th century BCE. Although the article doesn't tell us, my guess is that it is written in syllabic cuneiform and the language is Akkadian (Peripheral Middle Babylonian, the langue franca of the time) rather than alphabetic cuneiform. I also think if it were in alphabetic cuneiform we would have been told.
This is clearly an administrative text which by itself offers some interest. One of the personal names seems to be Arcadian. As the article says, this may be a further indication that Sidon was among those great 14th century cities that carried on a thriving "international" trade. However, I'm not sure that a single administrative text supports the claim of the sub-headline of the article,
Discovery of cuneiform tablet supports stories about Sidon's past
It doesn't refute them either.
The table is being studied for publication by Irving Finkel the Assistant Keeper in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum in London and was excavated under the direction of Claude Serhal.
Dr. Claude Serhal, director of the excavation, calls this site "extraordinary." She says archeologists there are not rewriting the history of Sidon because the city's history has never been written before. Though Sidon is mentioned 35 times in the Bible and many stories about it are well known throughout the region, no one has ever found any evidence to verify these stories."This is an opportunity to really learn something, to finally have evidence of what occurred in Sidon's history," says Serhal.
From the same period, Sidon is known from at least two cuneiform texts from Ugrarit (RS 11:723:2 and RS 19:182:4). It may also be referred to in the Keret epic from Ugarit (KAT 1.14 IV:36, 39) but there are other interpretations of these lines. Sidon is also mentioned over a dozen times in the roughly contemporaneous El Amarna Letters found in Egypt.
Sidon is mentioned some 35 time in the Hebrew Bible but none of these mentions reflects anything that was going on concerning Sidon in the 14th century BCE.
There are other interesting items in the article. For example,
From the third millennium B.C. level, the team has found a house with four rooms and a kitchen. Inside the kitchen were the bones of lions, hippos, bears, and other sorts of game that had been a source of food, according to the marks on the bones.
Posted by DuaneSmith at September 8, 2005 10:03 AM | Read more on Archaeology |
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