Studies in Historical Geography and Biblical Historiography, 2000
This chapter shows how a dozen items were identified as belonging to the beginning of a contract ... more This chapter shows how a dozen items were identified as belonging to the beginning of a contract and then restored and dated. Since all contracts opened with a single Egyptian or double Babylonian-Egyptian date formula and presentation of the parties with their occupational or military affiliation, a fragment belonging to the opening lines if it has any part of a date and/or a personal name is identified. Returning to the early documents, a set of Elephantine aramaic fragments whose script resembles that of a pair of contracts dated to the Egyptian month of Phaophi, year 3 of Xerxes, and including among its witnesses" one with the Aramean name Nushkuidri is found. The next fragment was easily recognized by both Sachau and Cowley (C65,5) as coming from the beginning of a contract; it clearly belongs in the center third of the papyrus. Keywords: Babylonian-Egyptian; Elephantine aramaic fragments; Nushkuidri; papyrus
Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the ant... more Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the antiquities market and are now scattered in 9 museums and libraries and 21 private collections. Of these, the majority are still not formally published, and in this second volume in the series, Bezalel Porten continues the publication of this important corpus of 4th century B.C.E. economic texts. With the expert epigraphic assistance of Ada Yardeni and hand-copies by her as well, Porten here provides the second volume of texts, organized by “dossier” based on the primary personage cited in the text. Color photographs (where available), ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcription, translation, and commentary are provided for each text, along with tables of seven grain dossiers. This publication will become the primary resource for information on these texts, which provide insight into the economic, social, and religious lives of Idumeans in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods.
Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, 2003
Settlement of the Jews at Elephantine and the Arameans at Syene Bezalel Porten Hebrew University ... more Settlement of the Jews at Elephantine and the Arameans at Syene Bezalel Porten Hebrew University of Jerusalem All migration is a function of push-pull. There are forces that drive persons out of their home territory and counterforces that attract them into their new homes. Jacob and ...
H6elne Lozachmeur has just published "Un ostra-con arameen d'Elephantine," discove... more H6elne Lozachmeur has just published "Un ostra-con arameen d'Elephantine," discovered by Charles Clermont-Ganneau at Elephantine, Egypt ("Collection Clermont-Ganneau n? 125?"), sometime back in 1907 and deposited in the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-...
Studies in Historical Geography and Biblical Historiography, 2000
This chapter shows how a dozen items were identified as belonging to the beginning of a contract ... more This chapter shows how a dozen items were identified as belonging to the beginning of a contract and then restored and dated. Since all contracts opened with a single Egyptian or double Babylonian-Egyptian date formula and presentation of the parties with their occupational or military affiliation, a fragment belonging to the opening lines if it has any part of a date and/or a personal name is identified. Returning to the early documents, a set of Elephantine aramaic fragments whose script resembles that of a pair of contracts dated to the Egyptian month of Phaophi, year 3 of Xerxes, and including among its witnesses" one with the Aramean name Nushkuidri is found. The next fragment was easily recognized by both Sachau and Cowley (C65,5) as coming from the beginning of a contract; it clearly belongs in the center third of the papyrus. Keywords: Babylonian-Egyptian; Elephantine aramaic fragments; Nushkuidri; papyrus
Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the ant... more Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the antiquities market and are now scattered in 9 museums and libraries and 21 private collections. Of these, the majority are still not formally published, and in this second volume in the series, Bezalel Porten continues the publication of this important corpus of 4th century B.C.E. economic texts. With the expert epigraphic assistance of Ada Yardeni and hand-copies by her as well, Porten here provides the second volume of texts, organized by “dossier” based on the primary personage cited in the text. Color photographs (where available), ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcription, translation, and commentary are provided for each text, along with tables of seven grain dossiers. This publication will become the primary resource for information on these texts, which provide insight into the economic, social, and religious lives of Idumeans in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods.
Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, 2003
Settlement of the Jews at Elephantine and the Arameans at Syene Bezalel Porten Hebrew University ... more Settlement of the Jews at Elephantine and the Arameans at Syene Bezalel Porten Hebrew University of Jerusalem All migration is a function of push-pull. There are forces that drive persons out of their home territory and counterforces that attract them into their new homes. Jacob and ...
H6elne Lozachmeur has just published "Un ostra-con arameen d'Elephantine," discove... more H6elne Lozachmeur has just published "Un ostra-con arameen d'Elephantine," discovered by Charles Clermont-Ganneau at Elephantine, Egypt ("Collection Clermont-Ganneau n? 125?"), sometime back in 1907 and deposited in the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-...
This important volume contains 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine a... more This important volume contains 175 documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan), which yielded hundreds of papyri in hieratic, Demotic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Coptic, spanning a period of 3,000 years. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines, such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language, and onomastics. The volume includes seven sections, each containing carefully translated and extensively annotated documents of one language group. Excellent cross-referencing allows the user to trace forerunners and successors. Each section is preceded by an introduction; the Aramaic, Demotic, and Greek sections are concluded with a prosopography. The book closes with a select topical index.
Praise for the first edition “This is a groundbreaking work, intensely focused in its conception, comprehensive in scope, a priceless resource for students of law, society, and history. I wish I had written it.” — Joseph Mélèze-Modrzejewski, Professeur à la Sorbonne-Université de Paris-I and author of Droit et justice dans le monde grec et hellénistique (2011) and The Jews of Egypt (1997)
“This publication, unique in its conception, provides the English reader with a window into three thousand years of continuity and change in the archival documents of a major Ancient Near Eastern site. It is an essential resource for all those interested in the social, political, religious, legal, or linguistic history of Upper Egypt and those who lived in it and ruled it from earliest historical times up to the rise of Islam.” — Stephen A. Kaufman, Professor of Bible and Cognate Literature, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio; Editor-in-chief, the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project
Praise for the second revised edition “There have been many books and articles about the ancient Jewish community of Elephantine in Egypt, first discovered more than a century and a half ago. But this book is unique: the only one to set that community within the sources for Elephantine and its environs over three millennia of Near Eastern history, from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to the early Islamic period. Porten’s book thus opens up Elephantine as a laboratory for studying long-term historical continuity and change in many dimensions. The challenge here is greatly enhanced by the meticulous presentation of the diverse textual sources for Elephantine, carried out by Porten and his associates; accompanying the careful translations are concise and yet comprehensive introductions to the texts and their historical contexts, detailed philological notes, and indices to the persons and topics mentioned. For the present new edition, the whole has been brought up to date, reconsidering issues of translation and historical background, and supplying missing textual elements. One can only congratulate Bezalel Porten for a major achievement: giving new life and accessibility to a volume that will remain an essential reference on Elephantine and much more in the ancient and classical history of the Near East.” — Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, Harvard University.
Since the early 1990s, about two thousand Idumean Aramaic ostraca have found their way into museu... more Since the early 1990s, about two thousand Idumean Aramaic ostraca have found their way into museums, libraries, and private collections. Four major publications covering some of these texts have appeared, three of which encompass the ostraca held by individual collectors only. This multivolume work classifies the ostraca according to subject matter and brings them together in a single publication. Volumes 1 and 2 covered fifty personal name dossiers (TAO A1-50). Volume 3 contains more than two hundred more such dossiers (TAO A51-255a) and numerous fragments. Each text is accompanied by a color photograph and hand-copy, a facing transcription and translation, and a ceramic description and commentary. The translation uniquely provides marginal captions identifying the phrases. In addition to the presentation of individual texts, there are six dossiers of tables covering all the commodity chits, parallel tables that classify them according to month or size, and comparative lists of entries.
Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the ant... more Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the antiquities market and are now scattered in 9 museums and libraries and 21 private collections. Of these, the majority are still not formally published, and in this second volume in the series, Bezalel Porten continues the publication of this important corpus of 4th century B.C.E. economic texts. With the expert epigraphic assistance of Ada Yardeni and hand-copies by her as well, Porten here provides the second volume of texts, organized by “dossier” based on the primary personage cited in the text. Color photographs (where available), ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcription, translation, and commentary are provided for each text, along with tables of seven grain dossiers. This publication will become the primary resource for information on these texts, which provide insight into the economic, social, and religious lives of Idumeans in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods.
This is the first up-to-date, and complete grammar of Egyptian Aramaic as presented in texts of E... more This is the first up-to-date, and complete grammar of Egyptian Aramaic as presented in texts of Egyptian provenance dating from the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. and as edited by B. Porten and A. Yardeni in their Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (Jerusalem, 1986-). The grammar covers not only the phonology and morphology, but contains a substantial section on morphosyntax and syntax. It is a descriptive grammar enriched with the expert knowledge and familiarity of one of the co-authors with the contents and background of the texts in question. It is meant to replace P. Leander's Laut- und Formenlehre des Ägyptisch-Aramäischen (1928), but also supplements it substantially, because it had no syntax. Due to the utmost importance and interest of these ancient texts, this grammar is a vade mecum for every Aramaist, Semitist and Historian in the field.
Some 340 Aramaic ostraca of the Persian and Hellenistic periods have been excavated at 32 sites i... more Some 340 Aramaic ostraca of the Persian and Hellenistic periods have been excavated at 32 sites in Israel, from Yokneam in the north to Eilat in the south, with Arad and Beersheba being the main contributory sites. By far, however, the largest cache of texts is what has come to be known as “the Idumean ostraca”. These did not come from formal excavations but began to appear on the antiquities market in 1991. Since then, some 2,000 ostraca have reached 9 museums and libraries and 21 private collections. Of these, the majority are still not formally published, and in this volume (and those to follow), Bezalel Porten undertakes to provide a comprehensive edition of all these texts, in many cases as an editio princeps. Porten, with the expert epigraphic assistance of Ada Yardeni and hand-copies by her as well, here provides the first volume of texts, organized by “dossier” based on the primary personage cited in the text. Color photographs (where available), ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcription, translation, and commentary are provided for each text, along with figures and tables, and introductions and summaries of each dossier. An included CD contains a catalogue of all the texts and three color key-word-in-context concordances, for words, personal names, and months for the entire corpus. This publication will become the primary resource for information on these texts.
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Praise for the first edition
“This is a groundbreaking work, intensely focused in its conception, comprehensive in scope, a priceless resource for students of law, society, and history. I wish I had written it.”
— Joseph Mélèze-Modrzejewski, Professeur à la Sorbonne-Université de Paris-I and author of Droit et justice dans le monde grec et hellénistique (2011) and The Jews of Egypt (1997)
“This publication, unique in its conception, provides the English reader with a window into three thousand years of continuity and change in the archival documents of a major Ancient Near Eastern site. It is an essential resource for all those interested in the social, political, religious, legal, or linguistic history of Upper Egypt and those who lived in it and ruled it from earliest historical times up to the rise of Islam.”
— Stephen A. Kaufman, Professor of Bible and Cognate Literature, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio; Editor-in-chief, the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project
Praise for the second revised edition
“There have been many books and articles about the ancient Jewish community of Elephantine in Egypt, first discovered more than a century and a half ago. But this book is unique: the only one to set that community within the sources for Elephantine and its environs over three millennia of Near Eastern history, from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to the early Islamic period. Porten’s book thus opens up Elephantine as a laboratory for studying long-term historical continuity and change in many dimensions. The challenge here is greatly enhanced by the meticulous presentation of the diverse textual sources for Elephantine, carried out by Porten and his associates; accompanying the careful translations are concise and yet comprehensive introductions to the texts and their historical contexts, detailed philological notes, and indices to the persons and topics mentioned. For the present new edition, the whole has been brought up to date, reconsidering issues of translation and historical background, and supplying missing textual elements. One can only congratulate Bezalel Porten for a major achievement: giving new life and accessibility to a volume that will remain an essential reference on Elephantine and much more in the ancient and classical history of the Near East.”
— Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, Harvard University.
Due to the utmost importance and interest of these ancient texts, this grammar is a vade mecum for every Aramaist, Semitist and Historian in the field.