Sifting through dirt and debris discarded during a 19th-century excavation, a team of archaeologists have discovered a brief 2,000-year-old inscription, which is significant because of its very ordinariness. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:
A broken chalkstone inscribed with seven rows of mundane text . . . appears to be a merchant’s accounting record that lists names, measures, and numbers. “The more we find inscriptions from daily life—versus monumental, state-sponsored texts—the more I think that there were many who knew to read and write during this period, especially simple instructions such as found in this inscription,” [the Bar Ilan University epigrapher] Esther Eshel told the Times of Israel on Wednesday.
The few words were carved in a simple cursive script using a sharp tool such as a nail into a flat chalkstone slab that was likely taken from an ossuary lid. It is written in a recognized formulaic pattern for similar ledgers. For example, one of the more complete lines includes the final letters of the name “Shimon”—a popular Second Temple name—followed by the Hebrew letter mem, which stands for a measure or economic value.
Although the stone is broken, it joins other examples of inscribed ossuary lids that were discovered dating to the same time range to which Eshel dates the letters based on their shape—from the 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE. It is, however, the first of its kind that was discovered within the confines of ancient Jerusalem.
More about: Ancient Israel, Archaeology, Jerusalem