Tel Hadid

Two clay tablets found on this hill record business deals from 698 and 664 BCE, and the names on them belong to people deported here from Mesopotamia.

historicalculture

On a low terrace north of the mound, archaeologists dug out a cluster of houses and found two small clay tablets pressed with cuneiform writing. They record economic transactions, one from 698 BCE and one from 664 BCE. The names written on them are a mix. Some are Mesopotamian, some Aramean, some local. That mix is the point. This was the period of Assyrian rule, and the Assyrians moved conquered populations far from home on purpose. The tablets are the paperwork of people who had been resettled here, doing business alongside the families already living on the hill. The same houses came with something else. Twenty-eight olive presses, plus a few winepresses, all packed into the same small area. Whoever lived here was pressing oil on an industrial scale. Nearby Gezer, an important Israelite town, was destroyed and then rebuilt by the Assyrians, and turned up similar finds.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
Within those structures two clay tablets written in Cuneiform, attesting to economic transactions which took place in 698 and 664 BCE. The names appearing on these tablets are Mesopotamian, Aramean and local.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Qula 5.1 mi A defense tower still standing here was built by Crusader knights, out of stones taken from something older still.
  • Khirbet Badd 'Isa 5.9 mi Someone hid a hundred and forty-seven coins in a building here, and the newest one was struck four years before the revolt that emptied the village.
  • Bar-Ilan University 9.6 mi Israel's second-largest university was dreamed up at a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
  • Antipatris 9.8 mi The oldest winepresses ever found in the southern Levant sit beside an Egyptian governor's house at Tel Afek.
  • Horvat Mazad 11.8 mi On one small hill west of Jerusalem, a Jewish ritual bath was later cut through by Muslim graves facing Mecca.
  • Tel Aviv Museum of Art 12.5 mi Israel's Declaration of Independence was signed inside what was then this art museum.