Oldest writing from Jerusalem

The oldest written document to be found in Jerusalem has been discovered by researchers from the Hebrew University. The tiny clay fragment dates from the 14th Century BCE and contains cuneiform script in the Akkadian language, which was the lingua franca of that era.


Prof. Wayne Horowitz, a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology, claims to have deciphered symbols meaning "you", "you were", "later", "to do", and "them", although the words are less important than the style of the writing, which apparently is of a very high level, meaning that it was written by a highly skilled scribe, almost certainly working for the royal household. This proves that Jerusalem was at that time an important settlement.

The previous oldest writing found in the city dates from the reign of King Hezekiah, some 600 years more recent than this latest find, which predates King David's reign by 400 years. To put the date into further context, it is contemporary with the reign of Akhenaten in Egypt.