Ancient Hebrew inscription refers to lousy wine
![]() |
The engraving found on a 3,000-year-old clay jug in Jerusalem [Credit: courtesy] |
However, the meaning of the cryptic inscription eluded researchers until Professor Gershon Galil of the University of Haifa interpreted it as a classification of a type of wine stored in the jug. He published his findings in the journal “New Studies on Jerusalem.”
According to Galil, the first intact letter of the inscription was actually the last letter of a longer word that got cut off and represented the date. The middle portion refers to the type of wine in the jug, a cheap variety. The final letter was also cut off from a longer word, and according to Galil listed the location from which the wine was sent.
Galil estimated that the carving was written in the middle of the tenth century BCE, after King Solomon built the First Temple, his palaces, and the surrounding walls that unified the three areas of the city — the Ophel area, the city of David, and the Temple Mount. These tremendous infrastructural projects contributed, Galil said, to the sudden need for copious quantities of poor-quality wine.
![]() |
Archaeological excavations in Jerusalem’s Old City next to the Temple Mount [Credit: Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90] |
Beyond that, Galil emphasized that the find lends support to claims of an organized bureaucratic system and provides evidence that writing was prevalent at the time.
“The ability to write and store the wine in a large vessel designated for this purpose, while noting the type of wine, the date it was received, and the place it was sent from, attests to the existence of an organized administration that collected taxes, recruited laborers, brought them to Jerusalem, and took care to give them food and water,” Galil said.
“Scribes that could write administrative texts could also write literary and historiographic texts, and this has very important implications for the study of the Bible and understanding the history of Israel in the biblical period.”
Author: Marissa Newman | Source: The Times of Israel [December 31, 2013]
Post A Comment
No comments :