Photo: Daniel Vavřík and Jaroslav Valach, Czech Academy of Sciences
Academic articles are usually only read by a vanishingly small number of people, but a paper published in mid-May of this year in the journal Heritage Science has already become one of the world’s most-read scientific papers, with 36,000 views. It is the work of an international team of scientists, including some Czechs, who deciphered a text hidden inside a Bronze Age lead tablet in Israel – and found that it contained proto-Hebraic curses.
In the 1980s, Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal came across two altars on Mount Ebal in Samaria on the West Bank of the river Jordan. He found that one of the altars dated back to the Late Bronze Age – he dated it to the mid-13th century BC – and additionally discovered that under this altar was a lead tablet that had presumably originally been part of one of the altars, but had been buried under piles of stones for the past 3,200 years.
He spent the better part of a decade studying this archaeological find, but never discovered what was written inside the tablet – or even knew that there was anything to find. But recently, an international team decided to re-examine his excavations, and found that the tablet contained inscriptions hidden inside it.
See the rest here.
Authors: Anna Fodor, Karolína Burdová, Source:iROZHLAS.cz