Samaria Ostraca

Template:Short description The Samaria Ostraca are 102 ostraca found in 1910 in excavations in ancient Samaria (modern-day Sebastia, Nablus) led by George Andrew Reisner of the Harvard Semitic Museum. These ostraca were found in the treasury of the palace of Ahab, king of Israel, and probably date about his period, 850–750 BC. Authored by royal scribes, the ostraca primarily record food deliveries, serving an archival function.

The ostraca are written in the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which very closely resemble those of the Siloam Inscription, but show a slight development of the cursive script. The language is typically seen as a northern Hebrew dialect.

Of the 102 ostraca found, only 63 are legible. The primary inscriptions are known as KAI 183–188. They are currently held in the collection of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.

Description

File:Samaria Ostraca House.jpg

Diagram of the excavation

They are written on fragments of five different types of vessels—large thick amphorae, with a drab or grey surface; large thin amphorae, with a drab or grey surface; jugs of soft brown ware with a reddish slip; basins of the same ware; and bowls of coarse ware with a red or yellow slip, all of these presumably being vessels that were used in receiving and storing the revenue. Sherds with a smooth surface or a slip would naturally be preferred for writing.

These ostraca are evidently part of a somewhat clumsy method of book-keeping. Either they were a "day-book," notes of daily receipts to be written up in some form of "ledger" afterwards, or they were the sole record kept of the amount of wine and oil received in various years from various places. It is possible they were written and handed in by the payer, not by the receiver.

All of them began with a date, such as "In the ninth, tenth, or fifteenth year" presumably of the reign of Ahab. This is followed by the amount and quality of wine or oil received, with the name of the place where it came from and of the giver, such as "in the tenth year wine of Kerm-ha-Tell for a jar of fine oil" where evidently wine was accepted in place of fine oil. "A jar of old wine" and "a jar of fine oil" are the most usual descriptions.

Names of places

Some names are of the villages or districts, and others are names of the peasant farmers who paid their taxes in the form of jars of wine. Of the places mentioned on these Ostraca, Shechem is the only one that can be identified with a text occurring in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament). In Kerm-ha-Tell, and Kerm-Yahu-'ali, the word Kerm must mean "the village, or vineyard," Tell means "mound", maybe referring to modern Tulkarm in Samaria. Six of these place-names occur in the Hebrew Bible as "tribal subdivisions of Manasseh", in Joshua 17:2. and :

• Abi-'Ezer
• Khelek
• Shechem
• Shemida'
• No'ah
• Hoglah

The names of the seventeen places occurring on these Ostraca are:

• Abi-'ezer
• Azat Par'an (?)
• Azzo, possibly the current village of Azzun
• Beer-yam
• Elmatan, possibly Immatain
• Gib, possibly the current village of Gaba or Jaba'
• Haserot, possibly Asira ash Shamaliya  
• Yasot, possibly the current village of Yasid
• Kerm-ha-Tell, possibly the current town of Tulkarm
• Sepher, possibly the modern-day Saffarin
• Shemida'
• Shiftan, possibly the current village of Shoufa
• Kheleq
• Khoglah
• No'ah Shekem
• Shereq

See also

• List of artifacts significant to the Bible
• Arad ostraca
• Lachish letters