Christopher Rollston has written a brief analysis of the recent IEJ report on the Jerusalem cuneiform tablet fragment.

Strikingly, the authors conclude that “given the fact that the tablet is written on clay from the Jerusalem region and that its find site is close to what must have been the acropolis of Late Bronze Age Jerusalem, there is good reason to believe that the letter fragment does, in fact, come from a letter of a king of Jerusalem, mostly likely an archive copy of a letter from Jerusalem to Pharaoh” (emphasis mine).  It is also contemplated that, for Jerusalem 1, the “Jerusalem King in question could be Abdi-Heba,” but the authors also state “but again perhaps not, since Jerusalem 1 does not include any specific feature that would tie it directly to El Amarna 285-290.”  They then conclude that “in short, the ductus of our letter fragment would be appropriate for a finely written letter from a king of Jerusalem to the Egyptian court.”  It is with the probability of these historical conclusions and Sitz im Leben that I wish respectfully to differ.

He then makes eight observations before concluding that the text “could be one of various things . . . e.g., an epistolary text, a legal text, an administrative text, a literary text.”

You can read the whole piece here.

HT: Paleojudaica

The Jerusalem Post reports on the cuneiform tablet noted here yesterday.  The story includes a photo.

Hebrew University excavations recently unearthed a clay fragment dating back to the 14th century BCE, said to be the oldest written document ever found in Jerusalem.

The tiny fragment is only 2 cm. by 2.8 cm. in surface area and 1 cm. thick and appears to have once been part of a larger tablet. Researchers say the ancient fragment testifies to Jerusalem’s importance as a major city late in the Bronze Age, long before it was conquered by King David.

The minuscule fragment contains Akkadian words written in ancient cuneiform symbols.

Researchers say that while the symbols appear to be insignificant, containing simply the words “you,” “you were,” “them,” “to do,” and “later,” the high quality of the writing indicates that it was written by a highly skilled scribe. Such a revelation would mean that the piece was likely written for tablets that were part of a royal household.

[…]

According to [Wayne] Horowitz, the high quality of the tablet piece indicates that it was most likely part of a message sent from a then-king of Jerusalem to the pharaoh in Egypt.
Horowitz said that the fragment, which is made of Jerusalem clay, indicated that Jerusalem was one of the central cities of the area at the time.

“This shows Jerusalem was not a provincial backwater, [but] one of the main cities of the area,” he said.

Mazar called the fragment “one of the most important finds we’ve ever had” and said she hoped it would lead to further big discoveries.

“A piece this small wouldn’t have been sitting there all by itself; there have to be more pieces like it,” she said.

The full story is here.

UPDATE (7/12): The AFP has a larger image here.  The story is now reported by Arutz-7 and Bloomberg.  For more thoughts on the find, see Paleojudaica, Abnormal Interests, and Ferrell Jenkins.

UPDATE #2 (7/12): Joe Lauer sends along links to the Hebrew University press release in English and Hebrew.  The university dates the Late Bronze period to the second century B.C., providing new insights into the abilities of the Hasmoneans to correspond in Akkadian (not really; this is obviously a mistake for millennium).  One point that the press release makes is that the discovery was made during off-site wet-sifting of the debris.  I haven’t seen it in any of the notices, but I believe the fragment was found in early January. 

UPDATE #3 (8/8): For a report on the discovery, see here.

The Haaretz article is here.  Eilat Mazar, in a red blouse, poses with the fragment and Wayne Horowitz here.

Some months ago Eilat Mazar made a unique discovery in her excavations south of the Temple Mount.  The find was kept under wraps until careful analysis could be conducted and the results published in the Israel Exploration Journal.  The discovery is a fragment of a cuneiform tablet that likely dates to the 14th century BC.  Duane Smith has a summary of the article.  In part, he writes:

The tablet is so fragmentary that, other than a few general observations, no meaningful interpretation is possible. As Horowitz and Oshima say, “. . . it is clear that we know next to nothing about the original contents and circumstances of the letter. The main significance of this new find does not lie in what we can learn by reading the tablet, but in the historical and archaeological context of the tablet itself.”

He notes that there are a total of six lines, but no line has more than five readable signs.  But this discovery is quite significant because of what it may tell us about Jerusalem at this time.

The tablet appears to be a copy of an “Amarna Letter,” sent by the king of Jerusalem (Abdi-Kheba?) to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten living in Amarna (then known as Ahketaten).  More than a century ago, nearly 400 of these texts were discovered in Egypt.  They were initially thought to be forgeries because they are written in cuneiform and not hieroglyphics.  But international correspondence of the day was in Akkadian and scholars soon agreed on their authenticity. 

The Amarna Letters only give us one side of the story, because only the correspondence from Egypt’s neighbors is preserved.  This new discovery suggests that more writings from this period could be discovered in Jerusalem.  Lest you’re tantalized by the possibility that an archive may be a dig away, note that this tablet was discovered in Iron Age fill.

One interesting line of inquiry is a comparison of what we know about Jerusalem in the Late Bronze Age from archaeology versus what we know about Jerusalem at that time from textual sources.  Hint: they don’t seem to match.  I’ve been waiting for a book entitled The Amarna Letters Unearthed, but I’ve haven’t seen it yet.