December 2, 2010

More On Hazor

Jennie Ebeling has an instructive summary of the recent excavations at Hazor. Head over to Bible and Interpretation and check it out. While all the work there is important, none is more so than the continued discovery of tablets. In the course of the overview, Ebeling provides a brief summary of the status of these finds.

The most recently announced epigraphic find from Hazor is a cuneiform tablet dating to the 18th-17th centuries BCE and containing an inscription similar to that on Hammurabi’s law code (see HaAretz story at http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hammurabi-like-cuneiform-discovered-at-tel-hazor-1.304266). Now being studied by Wayne Horowitz of the Hebrew University, the document includes the words “lord,” “slave” and “tooth.” Nineteen cuneiform tablets have been unearthed at Hazor since Yadin’s first season of excavation in 1956, making this the largest assemblage of such tablets from a site in Israel; the variety of texts may indicate, as Ben-Tor believes, that scribes worked at Hazor in the Bronze Age. Other epigraphic finds include a clay Babylonian liver model and an inscribed fragment of an Egyptian statue that belongs to the “offerings made by the king” type. Both were found in Area A during the 2007 season.

I discussed the most recent discovery of tablet fragments back in July. It doesn’t sound like we know much more now than we knew then. Perhaps the date of the fragments is a little clearer.

Posted by Duane Smith at December 2, 2010 3:56 PM | Read more on Archaeology |

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