TY - JOUR
T1 - Algorithmic handwriting analysis of the Samaria inscriptions illuminates bureaucratic apparatus in biblical Israel
AU - Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira
AU - Shaus, Arie
AU - Sober, Barak
AU - Turkel, Eli
AU - Piasetzky, Eli
AU - Finkelstein, Israel
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Faigenbaum-Golovin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2020/1/1
Y1 - 2020/1/1
N2 - Past excavations in Samaria, capital of biblical Israel, yielded a corpus of Hebrew ink on clay inscriptions (ostraca) that documents wine and oil shipments to the palace from surrounding localities. Many questions regarding these early 8th century BCE texts, in particular the location of their composition, have been debated. Authorship in countryside villages or estates would attest to widespread literacy in a relatively early phase of ancient Israel’s history. Here we report an algorithmic investigation of 31 of the inscriptions. Our study establishes that they were most likely written by two scribes who recorded the shipments in Samaria. We achieved our results through a method comprised of image processing and newly developed statistical learning techniques. These outcomes contrast with our previous results, which indicated widespread literacy in the kingdom of Judah a century and half to two centuries later, ca. 600 BCE.
AB - Past excavations in Samaria, capital of biblical Israel, yielded a corpus of Hebrew ink on clay inscriptions (ostraca) that documents wine and oil shipments to the palace from surrounding localities. Many questions regarding these early 8th century BCE texts, in particular the location of their composition, have been debated. Authorship in countryside villages or estates would attest to widespread literacy in a relatively early phase of ancient Israel’s history. Here we report an algorithmic investigation of 31 of the inscriptions. Our study establishes that they were most likely written by two scribes who recorded the shipments in Samaria. We achieved our results through a method comprised of image processing and newly developed statistical learning techniques. These outcomes contrast with our previous results, which indicated widespread literacy in the kingdom of Judah a century and half to two centuries later, ca. 600 BCE.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078169669&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0227452
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0227452
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C2 - 31968002
AN - SCOPUS:85078169669
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 15
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 1
M1 - e0227452
ER -