Israel has acquired an “extremely rare” papyrus, about 2,700 years old and with an inscription in Hebrew, which was in the possession of an inhabitant of the US state of Montana, the Israeli antiquities authority announced on Wednesday.
The piece of papyrus, slightly larger than a postage stamp and bearing four lines of angular writing, is one of the few in the region from the late Iron Age, the archaeologists said.
The manuscript, dating from the late 7th or early 6th century B.C. C., is written in Paleo-Hebrew typography typical of the period of the first Jewish temple in Jerusalem.
It consists of four lines, beginning with the words “Le Ishmael tishlakh” (Send to Ishmael, in Portuguese), and may be a fragment of a letter with instructions to the recipient.
We don’t know exactly what was sent or where,” Joe Uziel, director of the Antiquities Authority’s Judean Desert Manuscripts Unit (AFP), told AFP.
Joe Uziel explained that the corresponding carbon-14 dating and paleographic style make him “very confident” that this is not a modern forgery.
The papyrus was probably looted sometime in the last century from a cave in the Judean desert, he added.
Its origin and journey from the desert to Montana six decades ago and now to Jerusalem remains unclear.
The Antiquities Authority refused to identify the Montana residentBut he noted that man’s hand obtained the artifact during a visit to what was then East Jerusalem, occupied by Jordan in 1965, and brought it to the United States.
Jordanian law in force at the time severely restricted the sale of antiquities and prohibited the export of artifacts without authorization from the antiquities minister, and it was also unclear whether the woman had such authorization.
Numerous parchment fragments from the arid region near the Dead Sea that have turned up on the antiquities market in recent years, including several at the Washington Museum of the Bible, were later identified as forgeries.
The antiquities authority showed the papyrus to the press at its laboratories in Jerusalem, along with two other ancient Hebrew fragments it has saved, one found in a cave near the Dead Sea in the 1950s and a second that was seized on the market. antiquities black in 2016 and is believed to have been looted from a cave.
Eitan Klein, head of Israel’s Antiquities Theft Prevention Unit, mentioned that the Montana man’s mother may have purchased the item from Khalil Iskander Shahina Bethlehem antiquities dealer, better known as “Kando”, who dealt in many of the originally discovered objects, or may have received the papyrus from the curator of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.
An Israeli researcher noticed a photo with this previously undocumented text in a colleague’s unpublished scientific paper and notified Eitan Klein, who tracked down the owner, the antiquities authority said.
Klein added that the man was invited to travel to Jerusalem in 2019 and the two parties reached an unspecified “agreement” for the papyrus to be handed over to Israeli authorities.
Source: Observadora
