(Times of Israel) Amanda Borschel-Dan - Using a revolutionary new technique for performing multispectral imaging, a team from Tel Aviv University has discovered never-before-seen Hebrew inscriptions on a First Temple-era shard. The discovery raises the possibility that other "blank" shards from the period may also contain undiscovered texts, and there are now plans for a wider reexamination of all shards from that time period. Some 91 ink-on-clay shards written on the eve of the Kingdom of Judah's destruction were unearthed at Tel Arad in the 1960s. The legible writing was deciphered by top scholars, and for the past 50 years they have been prominently displayed in the Israel Museum. Now, previously invisible words and sentences have been discovered on the back side of one of the first shards to be examined with the new technology. The new text was discovered by chance. While photographing the known text, Michael Cordonsky, the imaging lab and system manager at the School of Physics and Astronomy, flipped the shard - just in case - and found three lines of writing from two and a half millennia ago.
2017-06-15 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive