The Qau bowl (UC16163), inscribed inside and out with Shepsi’s two letters to his dead parents. Credit: Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL, via Google Arts and Culture.

A red pottery bowl in the Petrie Museum at University College London, catalogued as UC16163, carries two hieratic letters from a man named Shepsi to his dead parents. He addressed his father Iinkhenmut on the inside and his mother Iy on the outside, and according to Gianluca Miniaci’s 2016 study both texts concern land a man named Henu was taking from him. Noel Wheeler excavated the bowl in 1924 at Qau for Flinders Petrie, and scholars date it between the late Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom. Estimates of how many such letters survive range from 19 to 24.

Ancient Content, November 9, 2026

A bowl behind a buried man’s head holds two letters

Wheeler dug the bowl from tomb 7695 in the southern cemetery at Qau, ancient Antaeopolis in Upper Egypt, and G. Brunton published the excavation in Qau and Badari I in 1927, according to Miniaci. The tomb is a shaft about 3.5 metres deep with a chamber to the south. The chamber held one man, and the red pottery bowl lay behind his head with hieratic writing inside and out. The Petrie Museum catalogues it as UC16163.

Sources date the bowl in three ways. The Petrie Museum’s record on Google Arts and Culture gives 2100 to 2050 BCE, and Wikipedia places it in the First Intermediate Period. Miniaci notes that the vocabulary echoes the Coffin Texts and that the handwriting resembles 6th Dynasty papyri from Elephantine, which suggests a date between the late Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom. He cites Gardiner and Sethe (1928) and Kemp (1975) for this.

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A round school exercise tablet in the Library of Congress, left unfired so the clay could be reused.

Schooldays, a Sumerian poem known to scholars as Edubba A, follows a boy through a day at scribal school, a string of canings and a dinner at which his father wins the teacher over with a garment and a ring. Samuel Noah Kramer, who published the reconstructed text in 1949, described the boy’s plan as the first case of “apple-polishing.” Every surviving copy listed by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative comes from Nippur and dates to the Old Babylonian period, about 1900 to 1600 BCE.

Ancient Content, November 7, 2026

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The Fıraktın relief near Develi in Kayseri Province, Turkey, from the 13th century BCE, shows Queen Puduhepa pouring a libation to the goddess Hepat. Credit: Photo by Carole Raddato, via World History Encyclopedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Puduhepa, Great Queen of the Hittites, wrote to Ramesses II as an equal while she arranged her daughter’s marriage to the pharaoh, and her letters from the royal archive at Hattusa show her pleading poverty, defending her dignity and addressing him as “my brother.” Archaeology magazine places her birth around 1290 BCE. Ramesses II and her husband Hattusili III ended their hostilities with a treaty about 1259 BCE, and the marriage followed in the 34th year of the pharaoh’s reign.

Ancient Content, November 6, 2026

A priestess from Kizzuwatna became a Great Queen

Puduhepa was born in Lawazantiya in Kizzuwatna, a region of southern Anatolia that Wikipedia identifies with Cilicia. Her father, whom Archaeology magazine calls Pentipsarris and Wikipedia calls Bentepsharri, was a priest of the city’s goddess Shaushka, whom the Hittites identified with Ishtar. The magazine reads her name as Hurrian and translates it as “the goddess Hepat has engendered.” Wikipedia adds that she became a priestess of the same goddess.

Hattusili III married her before he took the throne. Wikipedia dates his reign to about 1275 to 1245 BCE on the middle chronology and 1267 to 1237 BCE on the short chronology. By his own account he was a sickly child, and he credited Ishtar with saving his life. Archaeology magazine reports that he married Puduhepa after he claimed Ishtar had directed him to Lawazantiya.

As queen she held the title tawananna. Wikipedia reports that she had her own seal, managed palace affairs and judged court cases. Archaeology magazine describes her as second in command to the king, with a larger role in government than most queens, likely because of her personality and her husband’s frequent illness. Jared Miller, quoted in the same article, says her power depended entirely on her husband’s and remained subordinate to it.

The letters come from the archive at Hattusa

The Egyptian Hittite correspondence was found at Boğazköy, now Boğazkale in Çorum Province, the site of the Hittite capital Hattusa. Wikipedia reports that about 30,000 tablets were recovered there, that Hugo Winckler began excavating in 1906 and that UNESCO listed the site in 1986. Elmar Edel published the letters in a two volume edition in 1994, with Akkadian and Hittite texts and German translations. The catalogue record lists Hattusili III, Puduhepa and Ramesses II as the correspondents.

Archaeology magazine writes that Puduhepa corresponded with Ramesses as an equal and that he called her “sister.” Wikipedia reports extensive correspondence bearing her seal and says she rebuked Ramesses for doubting Babylon’s status as a Great Kingdom. The magazine adds that letters found at Ugarit show her pressing King Niqmaddu over tribute and caravans.

The treaty that opened these exchanges survives as Akkadian clay tablets from Hattusa, according to Wikipedia. Two are displayed at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul and a third is in Berlin. Egyptian versions were carved at Karnak and the Ramesseum. Archaeology magazine reports that the final sentences of the Egyptian copy mention Puduhepa’s seal, an honour it says only she received among Hittite queens.

Part of the Akkadian clay tablet of the Egyptian Hittite peace treaty, found at Boğazköy and displayed at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul. Credit: Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What you have read so far is only the beginning.
Below the break are Puduhepa’s dowry arguments and Ramesses II’s replies, her prayer and vows for her husband’s life, and the Fıraktın relief and seals that carry her name.
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Istanbul 2461, the Sumerian tablet billed as the oldest love poem, on display in Istanbul with a label naming Nippur as its findspot.

A small clay tablet in Istanbul carries a Sumerian song in a woman’s voice that Guinness World Records lists as the oldest love poem. Museum records call it Istanbul 2461, Assyriologists call the composition Shu-Suen B, and its ancient subscript labels it a balbale of the goddess Inanna. The poem was composed under King Shu-Sin of Ur, about 2037 to 2029 BC, while the surviving tablet is a later Old Babylonian copy from Nippur. Samuel Noah Kramer, Hatice Kızılyay and Muazzez Çığ published it in 1952, and scholars still disagree on whether it is a love song or a text for a sacred marriage rite.

Ancient Content, November 5, 2026

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Ancient Content, November 3, 2026.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus documents ancient Egyptian medicine, including the diagnosis and treatment of injuries. Public Domain

The state subsidised sick leave for the village

Deir el-Medina housed the craftsmen who cut and decorated the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings, and Wikipedia dates its occupation to the 18th through 20th Dynasties, about 1550 to 1080 BCE. Austin’s dissertation, “Contending with Illness in Ancient Egypt, A Textual and Osteological Study of Health Care at Deir el-Medina”, combines village texts with skeletal evidence. Its abstract states that “The ancient Egyptian government provided rations for medical professionals and subsidized sick leave for the workmen.” The abstract adds that villagers also relied on reciprocal care from colleagues and family.

The state paid the workmen in grain. Writing in 2015, when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, Austin reports monthly wages in grain, housing and servants for laundry, grinding grain and carrying water, with provisions reaching wives and children too. She adds that monthly ration records suggest workmen kept their pay when off sick for several days. The strike of year 29 of Ramesses III, reported earlier on Ancient Content, concerned the same community’s grain, which Wikipedia describes as delayed wheat rations.

Nearly a third of recorded absences involved illness

The register is only the beginning. Below are the reasons workmen gave for missing work, the physician and assistant who received days off to prepare medicine and Merysekhmet, who climbed to the royal tomb while too ill to work. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Ancient Content, November 2, 2026

Fragments of the wooden writing tablet from Vindolanda that carries Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation to Sulpicia Lepidina, written in ink about AD 100. British Museum 1986,1001.64. Photograph by Fæ, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Background removed and replaced with a dark background by Ancient Content. This edited version is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The first tablet came out of a deep ditch in 1973

Vindolanda stands just south of Hadrian’s Wall, and its first timber fort dates to about AD 85. According to the British Museum, Robin Birley, the excavation director, was digging a drainage ditch near the south-west corner of the fort when he reached the earliest timber forts about four metres down. The Vindolanda Trust dates the first find to Friday 23 March 1973. An excavator passed Birley an oily fragment of thin dark wood, and when he peeled it apart he saw marks that looked to him like hieroglyphics.

The restored south-west corner of the stone fort at Vindolanda in Northumberland. Robin Birley’s team found the first writing tablets in 1973 in a deep trench at this corner, where earlier timber forts lie about four metres below the surface. Photograph by Andrew Curtis, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph

The wood appeared almost black. Richard Wright at Durham University saw a blank surface and suggested infrared photography, which can reveal carbon-based ink. A few days later Alison Rutherford of Newcastle University’s medical school photographed the fragment and the script appeared. The Trust identifies it as the well-known socks and underpants letter.

The tablets survived because the clay-rich, waterlogged layers held little oxygen. Wikipedia’s summary reports that they are thin slices of locally grown birch, alder and oak, typically 20 by 8 centimetres, written in carbon-based ink made with gum arabic and water. The British Museum places most of them around AD 100, in the reign of Trajan. The numbers below follow the Tab. Vindol. catalogue.

The first fragment is only the beginning. Below are Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation with her own closing words, a decurion’s beer request to his commander and the memo that calls the Britons “Brittunculi”. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Ancient Content, November 1, 2026.

Hieratic papyrus, part of a will made by a woman named Naunakhte, about 1145 BCE, from Deir el-Medina. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, accession AN1945.97.4. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

A widow of about eighty made her case before her village

Naunakhte lived at Deir el-Medina, the village of craftsmen who built the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings. Guy Middleton, writing in a 2023 Cambridge University Press volume, places her statement in the third year of Ramesses V, about 1145 BCE, and gives her age as about eighty. She explained her wishes to a panel of fourteen fellow villagers, and two scribes wrote them down. In Middleton’s account she wanted to leave her property only to the children who had supported her in old age.

The village is the one reported earlier on Ancient Content for the Strike Papyrus. On the figures in this report, three to twelve years separate the workmen’s walkout in year 29 of Ramesses III from her statement. A woman of about eighty at the will would have been in her late sixties or seventies at the strike, if she lived in the village at the time.

The will survives on a papyrus rejoined in Oxford

The document is catalogued as Papyrus Ashmolean 1945.97 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Wikipedia reports that the French Institute found it in 1928, that it began as two separate rolls later recognised as cut from one sheet and physically rejoined, and that it measures 43 centimetres high and 192 centimetres long. Changes of handwriting suggest two scribes. Jaroslav Černý published it with its related documents in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in 1945.

Margaret Taylor Deane, reviewing Koenraad Donker van Heel’s 2016 book on Naunakhte, notes that only four documents concern her directly, although Donker van Heel draws on hundreds of ostraca and papyri from the village. Middleton likewise counts this papyrus and three others. A 2021 study in the legal journal Fundamina argues that texts such as this papyrus contain building blocks of succession law much older than Roman law.

Naunakhte’s court statement is only the beginning. Below are her two husbands and eight children by name, the one-third rule that gave her the power to cut three of them out and the addendum recording a challenge to her will. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Ancient Content, October 31, 2026.

The reverse side of the Complaint Tablet to Ea-nasir, shown upside down on display at the British Museum in 2023. The museum holds the tablet as 1953,0411.71. Photo by Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nanni’s letter demands fine copper and the return of his money bag

The letter is written in Akkadian cuneiform on a palm-sized clay tablet. In A. Leo Oppenheim’s 1967 translation, as quoted by Moshenska, Nanni recalls that Ea-nasir promised fine-quality copper ingots to a man named Gimil-Sin. According to Moshenska’s summary, the ingots handed to Nanni’s messenger, Sit-Sin, were of poor quality. Nanni then sent further messengers to collect a bag holding his money, and Ea-nasir treated them with contempt and sent them back empty-handed through enemy territory.

The question that spread across the internet is “What do you take me for”. A single mina of silver, which the translation calls trifling, features in the quarrel. Nanni also points to copper that he and a man named Sumi-abum had supplied to the palace. Published translations differ on the quantities, so this report leaves the figures aside. The letter closes with a rejection notice, “I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality.” Nanni adds that he will select the ingots himself.

Nanni’s bad copper is only the beginning. Below are the British Museum record of the tablet, the house at 1 Old Street where Ea-nasir’s archive was stored and the 2026 paper on how he became the internet’s trickster. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Tutankhamun’s meteoritic iron dagger (JE 61585) beside its gold sheath. The dry conditions in the tomb kept the blade free of rust. Credit: Egyptian Museum of Cairo, via Eos

When Howard Carter’s team examined Tutankhamun’s mummy in 1925, they found two daggers in the linen wrappings, one with a gold blade and one with a blade of iron. In 2016 an Italian and Egyptian team aimed a portable X-ray device at the iron blade and measured 10.8 percent nickel and 0.58 percent cobalt, a combination typical of iron meteorites. A 2022 Japanese study went further and proposed that the dagger was forged at low temperature and may have reached Egypt as a diplomatic gift from Mitanni, an idea that other specialists have challenged.

Ancient Content, October 30, 2026.

Carter found two daggers in the wrappings of the king’s mummy

Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. In 1925 his team examined the king’s mummy and found two daggers among the bandages. The one with a gold blade lay on the abdomen. The other lay on the right thigh. Its blade is iron, its handle is gold decorated with cloisonné and granulation, and its pommel is rock crystal. The gold sheath carries a lily on one side and feathers ending in a jackal’s head on the other.

The dagger now carries the Cairo Museum number JE 61585 and Carter’s number 256K. It measures roughly 35 centimetres, and its blade is about 22 centimetres long. The dry tomb left the iron free of rust, and the blade is finely made from an apparently homogeneous metal. A few other iron objects came from the tomb, among them 16 miniature blades and an iron Eye of Horus amulet on a gold bracelet.

Howard Carter and an Egyptian foreman work on the innermost coffin of Tutankhamun during the excavation of the tomb. Credit: The New York Times photo archive, via Wikipedia (Public Domain)

Earlier tests gave conflicting answers

Scientists had suspected a meteoritic source for decades. A 1970 analysis mentioned by the researcher Bjorkman in 1973 reported high nickel, but it was never published and its methods are unknown. A 1994 X-ray fluorescence study found only 2.8 percent nickel, a figure that did not fit meteoritic iron. The conflict stood until 2016.

A portable X-ray device measured the blade without touching it

The nickel result is only the beginning. Below are a meteorite found in Egypt in 2000, a diplomatic gift from a king of Mitanni and a published comment that disputes the latest theory. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Pendants and bag traces in situ, house IX 11. Credit: Parco Archeologico di Pompei

The wood has not survived. The wardrobe is known from the cavity it left in the volcanic deposit, from post holes in the walls, and from objects that fell with its upper shelves when the roof came down.

A slope cut back for the Insula dei Casti Amanti project exposed the rooms

The work belongs to the second lot of the restoration project for the Insula dei Casti Amanti. Teams reduced the slope west of the alley that separates insulae 11 and 12 of Regio IX by about 2.50 m, down to roughly 1.50 m above the pavement. The façade of the house was excavated in 1912, and the name Cornelius Maximus was attached to it from inscriptions that are no longer visible. The authors call that attribution highly doubtful.

They label the rooms A to E. Room B, which they think plausibly a triclinium, measures at most 4.30 m by 3.85 m. Its walls carry Fourth Style decoration with a yellow main zone, a black socle, peacocks, birds and stylised dolphins. The authors attribute it to the painters’ workshop of Via di Castricio. The floor is signinum scutulatum set with white limestone chips, which points to a second-century BCE phase of the house. Room B and the adjoining B1 were being redecorated in 79 CE, since the ceiling decoration was still unfinished.

The cavity in the ash records a wardrobe with two arms and an iron-footed frame

The wardrobe stood in the south-east corner of room B in two sections, one along the south wall and one along the east wall. Each was about 2.00 m long. The south section was roughly 0.90 m deep and the east section 0.70 m. Post holes about 1.60 m above the floor mark where it was fixed to the wall. The authors describe overlapping planks for the outer structure, interior shelving, a base of wide boards, and two tall iron feet.

The roof of room B held under the falling lapilli and collapsed when the pyroclastic flow arrived from the north-west. The collapse broke the upper part of the wardrobe and let the flow fill it, which preserved more than half its height.

Two tunnels cut by earlier explorers, whose date the authors cannot fix, crossed this area. One ran along the east wall and left the outer part of the fill intact. Some of the contents lay on the floor along the tunnel’s route. The authors judge that earlier explorers moved them there, probably to collect later, and that these include the bronze vessels the diggers wanted most. Those items have lost their original position.

Some of the vessels and objects from the wardrobe, house IX 11, Pompeii. Photo, Parco Archeologico di Pompei

The shelves held vessels, toilet equipment, lead weights and a marble relief

The upper shelves fell into the collapse. They yielded a calyx-shaped censer, five one-handled jugs, three two-handled urcei, five flasks, a lid, a cooking dish and two pots. They also held a handleless beaker decorated with pine-cone scales, a one-handled cup with roulette decoration, fragments of thin-walled Baetican eggshell ware and the base of a glass dish.

The material from the floor includes bronze vessels, a one-nozzled bronze lamp, a jug, a handleless bucket, a basket-shaped vessel and an elliptical cup. There are two bone spatulas, a tubular glass balsamarium, bronze tweezers and a slate palette for mixing pigments. The authors suggest that some of these items could point to a female sphere, since they served both medicine and cosmetics. They also record a white marble pilaster carved in relief on four sides and pierced lengthwise, comparable to one reused at the Villa of Poppaea at Oplontis. Nothing in the report says where it stood in the house.

The south arm of the wardrobe gave the only finds still in their original position. At floor level in its eastern part lay traces of a small wooden box with a bronze fastening. It held eight lead weights, six with iron fittings. The authors call them potentially compatible with commercial activity, though they could also belong to a more professional setting than a household.

Bronze coins and lead weights as found, house IX 11, Pompeii. Photo: Parco Archeologico di Pompei

Thirty-eight bronze coins lay in a plaited basket, 20 centimetres from the weights

About 20 cm south of the box was a lump of 38 bronze coins inside the remains of a basket. Only part of the base survives, about 0.12 m across. Two of the coins are older and heavily worn, a unit of Ebusus and a sestertius of Claudius issued in the name of Germanicus. The other 36 were struck under Nero, comprising 3 sestertii, 7 dupondii and 26 asses. They come from issues of 64 to 67 CE, with 21 dated to 65 CE.

The team lifted the basket without consolidating it, took it to the Park’s applied research laboratory and examined it under a stereomicroscope. The fibre is a monocotyledon. The authors suggest esparto grass as a possible identification, and the plaiting resembles the technique they call a canniccio. They compare Latin terms for woven containers (cistella, fiscus) and say the difference between them rests on function more than size. They read the coins as a small reserve of low-value money, perhaps for daily expenses.

Miniature pendants from the wardrobe in house IX 11, Pompeii. Photo: Parco Archeologico di Pompei

Twenty-four pierced miniatures lay inside a cloth bag on a middle shelf

Near the middle of the south arm, along the inner south wall, excavators found 24 miniature objects of faience, bone, glass paste and rock crystal. All have suspension holes. The authors identify Bes and Mercury, hands, feet, pine cones or grapes, bead-like elements, a knucklebone pendant and a pendant shaped as a winged sandal.

Traces of cloth show that they were kept in a bag, probably on a middle shelf. A structural post fell inward during the roof collapse, struck the shelf and pushed the bag towards the south wall, where it split. Some pendants were then dragged by the flow. A sample of the sediment with textile traces went to the laboratory. Under magnification the weave has a regular rhythm of about 1 mm.

The authors place the group among crepundia, children’s charms that Roman writers mention. They treat the find as probably a necklace, certainly a protective ornament, received in early childhood and kept through life. They cite comparable sets from the House of Helvius Severus (I 13, 2) and from the House of the Garden in Regio V. At Porta Nocera, the Barbidii tomb 15 ES held a cremation burial of an adult woman, possibly Pithia Rufilla, whose offerings included amber, rock crystal and glass pendants. The authors caution against treating the stage convention of recognition tokens in Plautus as proof of a universal social practice.

Two young wood mice left 117 bone fragments in an amphora on the B1 mezzanine

Room B1 had a wooden mezzanine, shown by seven post holes about 2.00 m above the floor. When the beam fell, the mezzanine sank only about ten centimetres. It carried an amphora of North African type Ostia LIX, several jugs, bowls, lids, cooking pots and a larger storage vessel.

Residue at the bottom of the amphora was sieved and yielded 117 bone fragments of small rodents. Archaeozoologist Younes Naime, one of the authors, found at least two individuals, both not fully mature. The characters fit the wood mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus, which the authors call the most likely identification at present. The mice may have entered by accident or been drawn by organic residue, and the evidence does not settle which. The Park has recorded rodents in the servants’ quarters of the Civita Giuliana villa and in the Herculaneum drains.

The owners’ fate stays open in the report

The authors suggest the objects were left because the household could not retrieve them before the eruption. If the residents were in the area they may have tried to flee and failed to return, or they may have died in the catastrophe. The authors say the evidence does not allow a choice between the two.

Both the report and the Park’s press release invoke Tacitus and the rules for property left without heirs. The report adds that this reference needs philological and legal-historical study before it is tied to the owners of this house. The measure I could trace is in Suetonius, Life of Titus 8.4, which assigns the property of those who died at Vesuvius without heirs to restoring the buried towns.

The textile traces from the bag and the basket remain to be studied by specialists.

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Sources

• Zuchtriegel, G., Comegna, C., De Rosa, S., Esposito, D., Naime, Y., Scarpati, G., Trapani, A. 2026. “Lo scavo di una domus nell’insula IX 11: il rinvenimento di un armarium con crepundia.” E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei 11, 29 October 2026, ISSN 3103-9340, 37 pp. https://pompeiisites.org/wp-content/uploads/E-Journal_2026_11_Armadio.pdf (no DOI).

• Parco Archeologico di Pompei. 2026. Press release “L’armadio di una donna che non tornò più”, 29 October 2026. https://pompeiisites.org/comunicati/larmadio-di-una-donna-che-non-torno-piu/

• Balmer, C. 2026. “Pompeii cupboard opens window onto life before Vesuvius erupted.” Reuters, 29 October 2026 (syndicated). https://kelo.com/2026/10/29/pompeii-cupboard-opens-window-onto-life-before-vesuvius-erupted/

• Suetonius, Life of Titus 8 (trans. J. C. Rolfe). https://lexundria.com/suet_tit/8/r

• Parco Archeologico di Pompei, “Pompeii after the eruption.” https://pompeiisites.org/en/pompeii-map/analysis/pompeii-after-the-eruption/

• Zuchtriegel, G., Corbino, C.A. 2023. “Of Mice and Men.” E-Journal degli Scavi di Pompei 5. https://pompeiisites.org/wp-content/uploads/E-Journal_5-1.pdf

Ancient Content, October 28, 2026

The Strike Papyrus (Cat. 1880) in the Museo Egizio, Turin, records the walkout of the royal tomb builders at Deir el-Medina in Year 29 of Ramesses III. Credit: Museo Egizio, Turin, Cat. 1880 (CC0 1.0)

A scribe of the tomb wrote the report on a papyrus now in Turin

The Strike Papyrus is a Late Egyptian text in hieratic script. The Museo Egizio credits its writing to Amunnakht, a scribe of the tomb, and lists it as Cat. 1880, a sheet measuring 950 by 450 millimetres. Eight entries on the front, spread over three columns, deal with the protests. The text runs from the second month of the winter season, called Peret, to the first month of the summer season, called Shemu, and the sheet is damaged in places. Much of the entry about the Ramesseum is lost, and only the workmen’s own statements survive.

The papyrus entered the Turin collection in 1824 with the purchase of antiquities from Bernardino Drovetti, the French consul in Egypt. The catalogue gives its origin as Thebes, probably Deir el-Medina.

The crew lived in a walled village and drew its pay in grain

Deir el-Medina housed the families of the men who built the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. The workmen formed a gang split into a right side and a left side, each with its own foreman and scribe. A Leiden University dissertation by I. Morfini puts the usual size of the gang at 30 to 60 men, with a peak of 120 under Ramesses IV.

The state paid the crew in kind. The Museo Egizio describes the regular food rations as their pay for work in the Valley of the Kings. Jesús Trello Espada, writing in the Spanish Egyptological bulletin BAEDE, describes the wages as mostly grain, with wheat for bread and barley for beer, plus oil, clothing and fish. The vizier answered for the village’s supplies.

The crew walked out on the tenth day of the second winter month

The papyrus dates the first protest to Year 29, second month of Peret, day 10. Jean-Christophe Antoine places that date in early November. The men passed the guard posts of the necropolis and sat down behind the mortuary temple of Thutmose III. In the translation by Paul Frandsen they say, “We are hungry, for 18 days have already elapsed in this month.” The rations for the month were 18 days overdue.

The Strike Papyrus has only just begun. Below are a police chief’s offer, a vizier’s half ration and a king who did not outlive the crisis by long. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Ancient Content, October 27, 2026

A Seleucid clay tablet with an ephemeris of eclipses, probably from Babylon, about the 4th to 2nd century BC. Babylonian astronomers of this period computed the Moon and planets with tables like this one. The Jupiter trapezoid tablets, also from Babylon, are held at the British Museum. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 1886 (86.11.345), Public Domain.

Four puzzling tablets waited for a fifth to explain them

For decades, a small group of Babylonian tablets in the British Museum made little sense. Four of them describe a trapezoid, a four-sided figure with two parallel sides of different lengths. They discuss its sides, its area and the way the area can be cut into parts, yet they contain no drawing and say nothing about what the shape stands for. Two of these texts had been known since 1955, but their meaning stayed unclear.

Ossendrijver, a historian of ancient science who also holds a doctorate in astrophysics, spent years on the problem. National Geographic reported that he spent 13 years on the texts and described them in his own words as “a small bunch of four weird trapezoid computations”. The key turned out to be a fifth tablet, catalogued as BM 40054, which describes the same calculation in plain arithmetic and names Jupiter as its subject. According to the Topoi research cluster in Berlin, the retired Vienna Assyriologist Hermann Hunger pointed Ossendrijver to the tablet during a visit in 2014 and supplied an old British Museum photograph of it.

The tablets come from Babylon and date to the last three centuries BC

All five tablets were most likely written in Babylon between about 350 and 50 BC. Nineteenth-century collectors dug them up without scientific methods, near the Esagila temple of the god Marduk, and the damage from those digs still limits what scholars can read. Two of the five were unpublished before Ossendrijver’s study and three had appeared in print.

They belong to a much larger body of work. The Atlas Obscura account of the discovery counts about 450 tablets that contain mathematical calculations about the sky, written in the base 60 number system that survives in the 60-minute hour. The Babylonians kept those records for centuries, and the late tablets show astronomers who computed the positions of the Moon and planets with tables and step-by-step procedures.

The new tablet records Jupiter’s speed at three points

The arithmetic tablet follows Jupiter after it first appears in the morning sky. It gives the planet’s speed along the ecliptic, in degrees per day, at three moments. At day 0 the speed is 0;12 degrees a day, which is 12 sixtieths, or 0.2 degrees. At day 60 it falls to 0;9,30, about 0.158 degrees. At day 120 it falls to 0;1,30, about 0.025 degrees.

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Tablet YBC 4644, the best preserved of the Yale culinary tablets. Written in Akkadian cuneiform in the Old Babylonian period, no later than about 1730 BCE, it lists 25 recipes for stews and broths. Credit: Kwag1980 - Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Four clay tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection preserve the oldest surviving recipes, written in Akkadian cuneiform. Three date to the Old Babylonian period, no later than about 1730 BC, and they record dozens of stews and broths cooked about 3,700 years ago. Yale acquired them in 1911 as medical texts, and scholars needed most of a century to recognize them as cookery.

Ancient Content, October 25, 2026

Yale acquired the tablets in 1911 as medical texts

The tablets reached Yale in 1911 as part of a purchase of therapeutic and pharmaceutical texts. Their exact origin is unknown, though they are believed to come from southern Mesopotamia. In 1933 the curator Ferris Stephens read them as medicine recipes. In the 1940s the Assyriologist Mary Inda Hussey suspected they held more than medicine, but colleagues largely dismissed the idea.

The turn came in the 1980s. The French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro had been asked to write an encyclopedia article on ancient cooking, and he examined the tablets at Yale and confirmed that they were recipes. He published “The Culinary Tablets at Yale” in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1987 and followed it with a full edition, Textes culinaires mésopotamiens, in 1995.

One tablet lists 25 stews and gives no measurements

Three tablets belong to the Old Babylonian period. The fourth is Neo-Babylonian and more than a thousand years younger. Yale’s team reports that three different scribal hands wrote the older tablets and that clay analysis points to at least two sources.

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Faces with incised designs from North Pacific cultures. Top row, a Dorset walrus ivory mask about 3,500 years old and two Dorset wooden masks about 1,500 to 1,000 years old. Bottom row, a stone head from the Aleutian Islands, an Old Bering Sea head and a Punuk figure. Credit: Figure 3 from Ponkratova and Lbova, Quaternary Environments and Humans 4 (2026) 100109, CC BY 4.0. Objects from the Canadian Museum of History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and other collections as credited in the paper.

The tools come from a Kamchatka layer dated to about 13,000 years ago

Ushki V is one of five prehistoric sites on the south shore of Ushki Lake, an abandoned bend of the Kamchatka River less than 200 kilometres inland from the Pacific. The Soviet archaeologist Nikolai Dikov found the first of them in the early 1960s and kept excavating at Ushki for almost thirty years. The tools in this story come from layer VII, which Goebel and colleagues dated in 2010 to about 13,000 calibrated years ago. They called it the earliest well-dated late-glacial human occupation in western Beringia.

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“The beer bread I made for you has become too old.”

Taram-Kubi wrote that line to her husband almost 4,000 years ago. She had baked the bread for his homecoming. Then she waited. The loaves hardened. He did not come.

Letter on clay from Kanesh, sent to a wife named Kunanniya, with a small second tablet added when the writer ran out of space. ca. 20th–19th century BCE. Credit: The Met, 1983.135.4a, b.

Innaya was a merchant in Kanesh, in central Anatolia, roughly a thousand kilometres from their home in the city of Assur. Taram-Kubi stayed behind. She ran a household of about a dozen people, wove textiles for export, and sent him instructions about money in the same breath as her loneliness. She told him she wanted to see him in person.

Her letter survives on a clay tablet. So do hundreds more written by women of her world, the wives, sisters and daughters of the Assyrian merchants who built a trade network across the ancient Near East.

They did not sit quietly at home. They lent silver, invested in caravans, argued over prices, scolded their husbands and wrote to their fathers in anger.

Innaya never gave her what she asked for. He was later placed under house arrest for tax evasion and died in Kanesh without returning to Assur.

Taram-Kubi’s tablet is still here.

A trade empire run by post

Picture a donkey caravan leaving Assur, on the Tigris, loaded with tin and woollen textiles. It crosses roughly a thousand kilometres of mountains and plains. It arrives at Kanesh, today’s Kültepe near Kayseri in Turkey, where the goods turn into silver and gold.

Taram-Kubi’s stale bread is only the beginning. Below are a weaver’s angry reply, a furious father and a 4,000-year-old divorce contract. Paid subscribers, keep reading. Free readers, upgrade to unlock the rest.

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Excavated mudbrick remains at the Sanam Temple, Napata, Sudan. Photo: from Lemos et al. 2026, Antiquity, CC BY 4.0.

Archaeologists have uncovered a workshop that made faience, the glassy blue and green ceramic of the ancient Nile valley, directly behind the Sanam Temple at Napata, the capital of the Kushite kingdom in what is now Sudan. Dated to about the middle of the seventh century BCE, it appears to have supplied funerary figurines for the royal cemetery at Nuri, and its makers used crushed Red Sea shells in place of limestone.

Ancient Content, October 19, 2026

Three firing pits and two basins stood just outside the temple wall

The Sanam Temple lies in Napata, near the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in northern Sudan. King Taharqo, a Kushite ruler of the 25th Dynasty who also held Egypt, built it in the seventh century BCE and dedicated it to Amun-Bull-of-Nubia of Sanam. The British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith dug there for a single season in 1912. A team led by Rennan Lemos of Durham University and Kathryn Howley of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts returned from 2018 to 2020, the first excavations at the site in more than a century.

Above, an Egyptian marl storage jar rim from the compacted layer beneath the faience workshop at the Sanam Temple, Napata, Sudan. Below, multicoloured faience disk beads, vessel fragments and wasters from the workshop. Photo from Lemos et al. 2026, Antiquity, CC BY 4.0.

Behind the rear of the sandstone temple they found the workshop. It consisted of three firing pits and two mudbrick basins, set in compacted, ashy layers that also held hundreds of blue, green and white disk beads, fragments of faience vessels, small shells and wasters, the failed pieces that potters discard. The builders had laid a thin, hard surface of broken storage jars beneath it, apparently to give the fires a stable floor.

Faience needs a firing temperature of roughly 900 degrees Celsius. The authors note that simple kitchen-style ovens can reach it, and the evidence does not show whether the Napatan workers used purpose-built kilns or removable covers.

A clay mould inside the temple matches a faience shabti from the workshop

Shabtis are small funerary figurines placed in tombs to work on behalf of the dead. In 1912 Griffith recovered clay moulds for shabtis and amulets at Sanam and published them in 1922, but without a clear archaeological context. The American archaeologist George Reisner had meanwhile excavated faience shabtis at Nuri, the royal cemetery of the Napatan kings. Griffith’s moulds match those figurines closely.

The new excavations tie the two together. A clay mould found inside the temple matches a fragmentary green faience shabti, without an inscription, that came out of the workshop. The authors conclude that the faience funerary goods in the royal tombs at Nuri were probably made in temple workshops of this kind.

The date rests on pottery. No radiocarbon dates are reported. Rims of Egyptian marl storage jars point to the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, while local jars of Nile silt suggest a slightly later date. The abstract places the workshop in the mid-seventh century BCE.

Workers crushed Red Sea shells because Nubia has no limestone

Faience is made from silica mixed with an alkali and lime, fired until the surface turns glassy. Sudanese Nubia has no local limestone, and the Sanam workers found another source of lime. The team recovered thousands of small gastropod and bivalve shells, and the shells were crushed in the mudbrick basins before going into the faience paste.

The bivalves are most likely Transkeia globosa, a species from the Red Sea. The gastropods could not be identified with confidence, and the authors say the war in Sudan has prevented further analysis. Lemos describes the recipe as “technical innovation and not simple imitation”, according to Archaeology News Online Magazine. The authors argue that a shell supply brought from a distant coast points to control over raw materials.

Smoke beside a temple suggests the crown valued the link

In Egypt, temples controlled workshops, and temple-linked faience production is known from New Kingdom sites such as Amarna and Piramesse. Egyptian workshops were often placed at the edge of settlements so that fumes would blow away. At Sanam the furnaces stood beside a temple, which the authors read as a sign that tying faience to royal authority mattered more than the inconvenience.

They argue that the workshop shows state control over raw materials, production and elite use of shabtis, a degree of centralisation that resembles Dynastic Egypt. Kushite political models are often described as polycentric, so the claim has limits. The paper itself suggests that non-state household workshops likely supplied other groups, and it points to a house-associated pottery workshop at Napatan Kerma. That is presented as a hypothesis and not as a finding.

The faience has not yet been analysed chemically

The paper reports no compositional analysis of the faience, and it states that Nubian faience has yet to be fully investigated with scientific methods. Griffith generally stopped a few centimetres above the temple floors in 1912, and Howley has reported that the 2018 to 2020 seasons showed undisturbed deposits remain. The Sanam Temple Project describes the faience production areas as the only known ones of the Napatan period.

Sources:

• Antiquity paper, open access

• Naukatv report

• Archaeology News Online Magazine

• NYU Sanam Temple Project

• Egypt Exploration Society, Sanam Temple Project

• Howley, Sudan Archaeological Research Society newsletter (PDF)

Michel’s gravesite, which became a place of pilgrimage. Credit: Offenbacherjung - CC BY-SA 3.0

Anneliese Michel weighed 31 kilograms when she was found dead in her bed in Klingenberg am Main on 1 July 1976. She was 23 years old and 1.66 metres tall. Between September 1975 and June 1976 priests had led 67 exorcism sessions with her under the Roman Ritual, with the permission of the Bishop of Würzburg, and the last one took place the day before she died. The autopsy recorded severe malnutrition, with pneumonia in her final phase.

Father Arnold Renz ran a tape recorder from the second session onward, and recordings of the sessions still circulate online.

Excerpt from a circulating recording of the Anneliese Michel exorcism sessions, Klingenberg am Main, 1975 to 1976. The audio contains screaming and may disturb some listeners:

Accounts put their number at more than forty. On them, several voices give their names as Lucifer, Cain, Judas, Nero, Hitler and Fleischmann, a priest of the 16th century. Some listeners hear something that cannot be human. Others hear a person in severe distress. This article traces the belief behind those sessions to its earliest written sources, then checks the best known cases against the records and against what medicine now says.

Michel had a seizure diagnosis six years before the first exorcism

Her first seizure came in September 1968, when she was 16. After another in August 1969, an EEG led to a diagnosis of a seizure disorder, later described as temporal lobe epilepsy with psychosis. From autumn 1970 she was prescribed anticonvulsants, including carbamazepine, although it is unclear how regularly she took them. Accounts of her illness describe demonic faces appearing while she prayed and an inability to bear sacred objects.

Equipment used to monitor and record EEG and electro-oculographic (EOG) activity during astronauts’ sleep. NASA, 1970.

Her parents first asked Bishop Josef Stangl of Würzburg for an exorcism in 1973, and he declined. In August 1975 he allowed Father Ernst Alt to perform a minor exorcism. On 16 September 1975 he ordered the full rite, which Father Renz began on 24 September.

During the sessions Michel stopped eating and made repeated genuflections until her knees gave way. Reports describe her drinking her own urine and eating insects. From mid-April 1976 she could not leave her bed. No doctor was called, and the court later found that one should have been.

On 21 April 1978 the regional court in Aschaffenburg convicted her parents and both priests of negligent homicide. Each received a six-month sentence, suspended for three years. Proceedings against the bishop had been dropped in July 1977. Her grave in Klingenberg is still visited by pilgrims.

The rest of this article follows the belief back to a Babylonian tablet and a late Egyptian stela, then checks Loudun, the Maryland boy and the Gary case against the records and against what medicine says today. The full article is for paid subscribers.

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Possible travois drag marks at White Sands. Credit: K.B. Springer, USGS, in Springer et al., Science Advances (2026)

The paper has 15 authors. The first author is USGS research geologist Kathleen Springer, and her co-authors come from the US Geological Survey, the National Park Service, the University of Arizona, Bournemouth University and other institutions. It draws on expanded excavations at Locality 2 in White Sands National Park, the site the team regards as holding the oldest human footprints in the Americas.

Twenty footprint layers and 152 measured tracks

The team extended the trench first described in 2021. They found 20 stratigraphic horizons with human footprints preserved in place, together with megafauna trackways and linear marks attributed to travois. They measured 152 human footprints in the gypsum-rich sediment. The authors did not build profiles of individuals. They pooled the track data to make broad observations and caution that their estimates of the track-makers’ ages are only approximate.

The preservation is striking. Co-author Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona said that after more than 20,000 years in gypsum mud the prints “look like someone walked out on the playa yesterday.”

The drag marks have a history of their own. Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University led a study published in Quaternary Science Advances that described parallel and single-line drag traces at White Sands in February 2025. To test the idea, the team built replica travois and pulled them across mudflats in Dorset and on the coast of Maine, and the marks they left resembled the fossil traces. The new paper illustrates linear features on horizon TH2 and interprets them as travois pulled by people, probably while moving resources.

Human footprints and a canid track. Credit: Springer et al., Science Advances (2026)

Pollen dating narrows the age to 23,500 to 21,700 years

The 2021 dates came from seeds of the aquatic plant Ruppia. Critics argued that lake water carrying old dissolved carbon could make such seeds read too old. In 2023 the group published radiocarbon dates on terrestrial pollen from the same layers as the seeds, plus optically stimulated luminescence ages, and concluded the original chronology held.

The new study refines that pollen work. According to the University of Arizona, the team developed procedures to isolate up to 75,000 pollen grains per sample and refined its measurements at the USGS Radiocarbon Laboratory. The paper reports that the uncertainties on pollen radiocarbon ages at Locality 2 fell fivefold, which let the researchers test the accuracy of the Ruppia seed ages. Combining conifer pollen with aquatic seed ages puts the footprint-bearing sequence between 23.5 and 21.7 thousand years ago. That falls inside the Last Glacial Maximum, which Live Science dates to between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago.

The tighter chronology allowed the team to examine climate at roughly 50-year steps, about one human generation. The university describes that resolution as rare for land-based climate records of this age in the American Southwest.

Lake Otero retreated as forest gave way to oak and sagebrush

Around 24,200 years ago a large lake filled the basin, and the surrounding mountains carried pine, fir and spruce, Live Science reports from the study. Bennett and Sally Reynolds, both co-authors, wrote in The Conversation that average annual temperatures were then about 4°C below today’s.

From about 23,600 years ago temperatures rose and the lake began to shrink. Over the following two millennia conifer forest declined while oak and sagebrush spread.

Tierney’s group measured hydrogen isotopes in fossil leaf waxes and combined them with the pollen record to track temperature, rainfall and aridity. They found swings in water availability within a single century. At one point, according to the university, vegetation shifted from pine forest to pinyon and juniper in about 100 years. Pollen from Ruppia rises and falls through the sequence, showing that the lake level fluctuated over about 1,500 years before Lake Otero dried to a flat playa.

A drought around 23,200 years ago matches a Greenland warming event

The sharpest swing came around 23,200 years ago. Rainfall dropped, the lake grew saltier and drought-tolerant plants expanded, Bennett and Reynolds write. The paper links this major aridification to Dansgaard-Oeschger event 2 at 23.2 thousand years ago and says the drying shrank Lake Otero, opening the old shoreline to people for nearly two millennia. Dansgaard-Oeschger events are abrupt warmings recorded in Greenland ice cores.

The earliest footprint horizon in the expanded sequence sits close to that transition. Further horizons appear at intervals as the shoreline retreated. Springer said the people in the basin witnessed rapid environmental change within their own lifetimes. Tierney said aridity at White Sands tracked global climate shifts closely, and the team now wants to establish how warming over Greenland could have dried out the Southwest.

A computer model shows footprint layers record moments of preservation

Live Science reports that the researchers raised the possibility that people returned to the basin when a shrinking lake concentrated animals and plants. Bennett and Reynolds also set out why that reading needs care.

In August 2026 they published an agent-based computer model in the journal Fossil Studies. It simulates people moving around a fluctuating lake. Most tracks in the model fade from the mud, and a surface becomes fossil when rising water buries it at the right moment. Population size had comparatively little influence on how many footprints survived. The timing of climate swings, the shape of the basin and the way people moved across it mattered more.

When the authors compared the model with White Sands, the real footprint horizons appeared as irregular pulses clustered around periods of climatic and hydrological change, which matches the model’s prediction. Each horizon confirms that people were present at that moment. The gaps between horizons can hide times when people were also there, and a crowded surface can come from a handful of people crossing soft ground many times. “Footprints are snapshots, not a movie,” Bennett and Reynolds write.

Reynolds told Live Science that people continued to visit and live in the area through all these changes.

Co-author Ed Jolie connects the tracks to living Indigenous peoples

Ed Jolie, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and associate curator of ethnology at the Arizona State Museum, is Oglala Lakota and Hodulgee Muscogee. In the university’s release he said the findings bring a human face to the deep Indigenous past of the Americas, and that these ancient populations are the ancestors of today’s Indigenous peoples.

Critics and supporters continue to test the White Sands dates

The dates still have critics. In a 2024 paper in PaleoAmerica, David Rhode and colleagues argued that hard-water effects in the dated plants, reworked pollen and partially bleached quartz grains could all push the ages too old. Pigati, Springer and colleagues replied in the same journal, rejecting each objection and declaring the Locality 2 chronology resolved.

In June 2025, Vance Holliday and colleagues published independent radiocarbon dates from new sites around the old lake in Science Advances, and their stratigraphy closely matched the earlier work. Live Science notes that the footprints remain debated because they are far older than most accepted sites in the Americas.

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Sources:

Primary

• Springer, K. B., Pigati, J. S., Tierney, J. E., Honke, J. S., Jiménez-Moreno, G., Bustos, D., Urban, T. M., Odess, D., Jolie, E. A., Smith, A. J., Hunt, A. J., Martinez, P. J., Santucci, V. L., Reynolds, S. C. and Bennett, M. R. (2026). Humans experienced abrupt environmental changes at White Sands during the Last Glacial Maximum. Science Advances 12(42). Published 14 October 2026. DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aeh0707

• Springer, K. B., Pigati, J. S., Tierney, J. E. et al. (2026). Data release for Humans experienced abrupt environmental changes at White Sands during the Last Glacial Maximum. U.S. Geological Survey. DOI 10.5066/P13W7HTM (CC0)

• Bennett, M. R. and Reynolds, S. C. (2026). Tracks of Coincidence. How Climate and Human Presence Shape the Fossil Footprint Record. Fossil Studies 4(3), 22. Published 11 August 2026. DOI 10.3390/fossils4030022

Earlier White Sands studies and the dating debate

• Bennett, M. R. et al. (2021). Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. Science 373, 1528–1531. DOI 10.1126/science.abg7586

• Pigati, J. S. et al. (2023). Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands. Science. DOI 10.1126/science.adh5007

• Rhode, D., Neudorf, C. M., Rachal, D., Davis, L. G., Madsen, D. B. and Dello-Russo, R. (2024). Unresolved. Persistent Problems with the White Sands Locality 2 Geochronology. PaleoAmerica

• Pigati, J. S., Springer, K. B., Gray, H. J., Bennett, M. R. and Bustos, D. (2024). The geochronology of White Sands Locality 2 is resolved. PaleoAmerica 10(1), 28–44. DOI 10.1080/20555563.2024.2376298

• Holliday, V. T., Windingstad, J. D., Bright, J., Phillips, B. G., Butler, J. B., Breslawski, R. and Bowman, J. E. (2025). Paleolake geochronology supports Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) age for human tracks at White Sands, New Mexico. Science Advances 11(25), eadv4951. DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adv4951

• Bennett, M. R., Urban, T. M., Bustos, D. F., Reynolds, S. C., Jolie, E. A., Strehlau, H. C., Odess, D., Springer, K. B. and Pigati, J. S. (2025). The ichnology of White Sands (New Mexico). Linear traces and human footprints, evidence of transport technology? Quaternary Science Advances 17, 100274

  Secondary

  • University of Arizona (14 October 2026). Footprints in the (white) sand. Humans experienced abrupt environmental shifts during the last ice age. EurekAlert. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147806

  • Bennett, M. R. and Reynolds, S. C. (October 2026). Early humans in America endured climate chaos, new research. The Conversation, republished by Mirage News. https://www.miragenews.com/early-americans-endured-climate-chaos-study-1761173/

  • Pester, P. (14 October 2026). Ancient Indigenous people in New Mexico lived through extreme climate change 23,000 years ago, study suggests. Live Science

A panel of the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, set up at Nimrud about 825 BC. The figure bowing at right is generally read as Jehu of Israel or his envoy, and the cuneiform above reads “tribute of Jehu, son of Omri.” British Museum. Credit: Marco Prins, Livius.org, CC0.

In July 1993 Gila Cook, the architect on Avraham Biran’s excavation at Tel Dan in northern Israel, noticed a block of black basalt with writing on it in the rubble of a later wall near the city gate. Two smaller pieces turned up the next year and fitted. Together they are part of an Aramaic victory inscription, most likely set up by Hazael of Damascus in the ninth century BC. The king claims to have killed Joram son of Ahab, king of Israel, and Ahaziah son of Joram, of the House of David.

Two details matter more than the famous phrase. The author was an enemy of both kingdoms. And his account disagrees with the Bible, which has Jehu kill both kings in 2 Kings 9, while Hazael takes the credit himself. A text written to flatter the biblical story would not look like that. A few scholars have argued for other readings of “House of David”, and the majority reading has held.

Tel Dan Stele,Israel Museum. Highlighted in white: the sequence B Y T D W D. Credit: Oren Rozen CC BY-SA 4.0

Most of the strongest evidence for the people of the Bible has this shape. The kings of Israel and Judah survive in the records of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Moab and Aram, written by rulers who had no stake in the Bible and no idea it would exist. What follows takes the best of those finds, then the New Testament people and places that have turned up in stone, then the large things that have not been found.

Israel appears first in an Egyptian victory hymn, and Egypt files it under people rather than cities

Flinders Petrie found the Merneptah Stele in 1896 in the pharaoh’s mortuary temple at Thebes. The black granite slab, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, dates to the fifth year of Merneptah, about 1208 BC. It boasts of a campaign in Canaan. Ashkelon is carried off, Gezer seized, Yanoam made as though it never was, and then comes the line “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.”

The stele in 2023. Image credit: By 𐰇𐱅𐰚𐰤 - CC BY-SA 4.0

The scribe marked the first three names with the hieroglyph for a city. Israel gets the sign for a people, a seated man and woman over three strokes. So by 1208 BC Egypt knew of a group called Israel in Canaan, without a city or a state to name. The stele says nothing about slavery in Egypt, and the claim of annihilation is the usual boast. A possible earlier mention on a pedestal in Berlin, proposed by Manfred Görg in 2001, remains contested.

Ahab, Omri and Jehu appear in Assyrian and Moabite texts, and Jehu is shown bowing to the Assyrian king

The Kurkh Monolith was found in 1861 at Kurkh, in what is now southeastern Turkey, and is in the British Museum. It records Shalmaneser III’s battle at Qarqar in 853 BC against a coalition of western kings. Among them is “Ahab the Israelite”, credited with 2,000 chariots and 10,000 men. The Bible never mentions Qarqar. The numbers are probably inflated.

The Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III. Courtesy Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Black Obelisk, set up at Nimrud around 825 BC, records tribute in 841 BC from “Jehu, son of Omri”. Jehu was no son of Omri. He seized the throne in a coup. The Assyrians simply named the kingdom after Omri’s dynasty. A kneeling figure on the obelisk is generally read as Jehu or his envoy.

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