Ancient World Review

A Brief History Of Hell

The myth of Hell can be traced all the way back to the first civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm guessing that the concept of an "underworld of the dead" had its origins in the earliest funerary religions of the Stone Age. The dead were buried under the earth, so the land of the dead was also seen as being somewhere underground.

Hell wasn't called Hell in Mesopotamia and it wasn't a place of punishment for sinners. That's a much more modern idea. Originally, the place we call Hell was just a grim vision of the afterlife waiting for everyone. In other words, back around 3,000 BC or so, everybody went to "Hell" so I guess you could say that Hell was the original Heaven:

"The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue ^'a shadowy version of life on earth^'. This bleak domain was known as Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal. All souls went to the same afterlife, and a person's actions during life had no effect on how the person would be treated in the world to come." Source: Wikipedia.

Closed-captions helpful. Sort of.

The Old Testament Sheol, also known as Hades, is basically identical to the Mesopotamian Kur. According to Wikipedia, "Sheol is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God."

The concept of an underworld where sinners are punished after death seems to have evolved in ancient Egypt and Greece, but several different versions of the myth were floating around the Near East and Mediterranean world back then.

The Greeks, for instance, had a concept of the underworld (Hades) as a "deep, gloomy place" where everyone went after death, but the element of judgment was also present in their mythology. " In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus," a pit or cave in Hades that was used as a dungeon. (Wikipedia) "Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans."

The next clip is from the great 1997 miniseries, The Odyssey, with Armand Assante (highly recommended). It starts off with the scene where Odysseus travels to Hades to ask the blind prophet Tiresias how to get home. The Hades in this scene is more of an underworld of shades than a place of divine punishment.

Hades was not only a place, but the name of the god of the underworld. Originally, he appears to have been one of many anonymous chthonic deities and it was dangerous to mention his actual name:

"...Hades lacked a proper name; as in the case of other nameless chthonians, his anonymity was a precaution. He was referred to by descriptive circumlocutions as 'chthonian Zeus' ... 'the chthonian god,' 'king of those below,' 'Zeus of the departed' ... 'the other Zeus,' 'the god below,' or simply 'lord.' As the Lord of the Dead, he was dark and sinister, a god to be feared and kept at a distance." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).

The history of Hell and its demons is too long and complex to describe in detail here, but our modern concept of Hell apparently originated with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. From what I've read, Judaism sees Hell as a state of shame and atonement rather than a physical place. The full-blown description of Hell as a literal pit of fire and brimstone and eternal torment seems to be an invention of the medieval Christian church. 

Interestingly enough, "[t]he Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom (1)." So the Hell of the New Testament has clear roots in the underworld of the dead as described by the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians.

(1) The word Gehinnom derives from Gehenna, a reference to the "Valley of Hinnom," a garbage dump outside of Jersualem where people burned their garbage. According to Wikipedia, "[b]odies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed. Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection."

The valley is said to be cursed before some of the early kings of Judah sacrificed children to Moloch there.

These days, a majority of Americans still believe in Hell and a 2007 Harris poll revealed that more Americans believe in a literal Hell and Devil than they do in the theory of evolution. Some Christian denominations reject the concept of Hell altogether, while others still embrace the literal version of Hell famously described by Jonathan Edwards in his notorious 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

This is an abridged version. The original sermon is a classic well worth reading.

Back in 2018, Pope Francis created a storm of controversy when he supposedly said that Hell doesn't exist and that condemned souls just disappear, though it's possible that his actual words were misreported. If Francis doesn't believe in Hell, he apparently still believes in demons, however, because the Vatican announced in the same year that it would hold a "training course for priests in exorcism ... amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world."

Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories

The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.

Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence. No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke were apparently written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.

As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of  a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in "Jewish Antiquities" by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus (or Chrestus in some translations) rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless.

Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.

Almost everything we know about the rise of Christianity comes from texts and there are a lot of missing sources and "secret doctrines" so popular with conspiracy theorists. Besides the books in the "official" New Testament, there's a huge body of apocryphal literature which reflects the existence of dozens of "heretical" groups like the Gnostics which were gradually suppressed, often by violent means, as the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its control and standardized Christian dogma. More recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls fill in some of the historical context, but the general picture is still hazy and confused. "Suppressed gospels" and alternate histories have inspired books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the inspiration for the bestselling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history.  Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his classic history "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.

It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews (some of them, anyway) were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.

This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.

Speaking of conspiracies, Joseph Atwill's book "Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus" argues that Christianity was actually the invention of the Flavian Emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the same Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellion. Faced with the problem of Jewish resistance in the province, the Flavian court (which included the turncoat Josephus) invented the story of a "peaceful messiah" as a form of counter-propaganda to the more militant religious doctrines causing so much trouble in Judea. According to Atwill, the gospels also include a coded message which reveals that the figure of Jesus in the New Testament is actually Titus -- a kind of Roman inside joke. This hidden message can supposedly be unraveled by reading the gospels together with Josephus' account of the war and deciphering the parallels. Atwill's book makes an interesting read and I particularly like his idea that the gospels were a form of early propaganda designed to pacify a rebellious population. Unfortunately, his argument depends on the numerous parallels which are supposed to exist between the gospels and Josephus and these are obscure, to say the least.

"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. I couldn't finish this monstrous tome, but the basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are seen once again as a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.

"The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross" by John Allegro takes a different approach. This is a fascinating, scholarly and difficult book. Allegro believes that Christianity (through Judaism) originated in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult centered around the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. If I understand Allegro's argument correctly, Christianity evolved out of Judaism, which was invented as a "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and the sacred texts of both religions are supposed to be full of references to the magic mushroom. Once again, Christianity is seen as a code to be deciphered, an esoteric, multi-layered conspiracy. This is an excellent book, but Allegro bases his theory almost entirely on linguistic arguments, "deciphering the names of gods, mythological characters...and plant names..." by tracing them back to their Sumerian roots, and the average reader will have a hard time verifying or even following his arguments. Still, if there's nothing to this, how do you explain the mushrooms in Christian iconography? The photograph in this paragraph, for example, shows Adam and Eve standing next to a giant mushroom on a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincourault, France.

Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.

Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there -- all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise -- a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.

Still, you've got to wonder--what is that mushroom doing on a church fresco in France?

Cosmic Impact May Have Destroyed One Of The World's Earliest Human Settlements

"Before the Taqba Dam impounded the Euphrates River in northern Syria in the 1970s, an archaeological site named Abu Hureyra bore witness to the moment ancient nomadic people first settled down and started cultivating crops. A large mound marks the settlement, which now lies under Lake Assad." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"But before the lake formed, archaeologists were able to carefully extract and describe much material, including parts of houses, food and tools -- an abundance of evidence that allowed them to identify the transition to agriculture nearly 12,800 years ago. It was one of the most significant events in our Earth's cultural and environmental history.

"Abu Hureyra, it turns out, has another story to tell. Found among the cereals and grains and splashed on early building material and animal bones was meltglass, some features of which suggest it was formed at extremely high temperatures -- far higher than what humans could achieve at the time -- or that could be attributed to fire, lighting or volcanism."

It appears that this ancient settlement was wiped out by a comet exploding in the atmosphere, a catastrophic event knownas the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis which is thought to have caused mass extinctions:

"...Based on materials collected before the site was flooded, [researchers] contend Abu Hureyra is the first site to document the direct effects of a fragmented comet on a human settlement. These fragments are all part of the same comet that likely slammed into Earth and exploded in the atmosphere at the end of the Pleistocene epoch ... This impact contributed to the extinction of most large animals, including mammoths, and American horses and camels; the disappearance of the North American Clovis culture; and to the abrupt onset of the end-glacial Younger Dryas cooling episode."

The validity of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, it should be noted, is still a matter of debate.

Part two of this video can be found here.

The Teutonic Knights - Founding, Organization, Differences With Other Medieval Military Orders

"The Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem ...  commonly the Teutonic Order ... is a Catholic religious order founded as a military order c. 1190 in Acre, Kingdom of Jerusalem." (Wikipedia)

"The Teutonic Order was formed to aid Christians on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to establish hospitals. Its members have commonly been known as the Teutonic Knights, having a small voluntary and mercenary military membership, serving as a crusading military order for protection of Christians in the Holy Land and the Baltics during the Middle Ages."

Related: The Early Years of the Teutonic Order.

"The order was led by a Grand Master ... who was chosen by an electoral college and who was expected to consult his senior officers and commanders. In the 15th century CE, there was a second master in Livonia who became increasingly independent from the order based at its then headquarters in Prussia. It did sometimes happen that a master was ousted by his officers, indeed there was one case of murder of a particularly unpopular master. The order controlled many lands across Europe and the Middle East, the territories split into administrative provinces or balleien, each governed by a landmeister." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

All videos from the excellent Real Crusades History channel.

Note: The Teutonic Order still exists, though it has been purely religious since the early 1900s, I think. They have a website (German only).

Related: Ten Interesting Things You Should Know About The Teutonic Order.

The Statutes Of The Teutonic Knights: A Study In Religious Chivalry (PDF).

Oldest Known Melody: The Hurrian Hymn No. 6, 1400 BC

"The Hurrian songs are a collection of music inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the ancient Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit, a headland in northern Syria, which date to approximately 1400 BCE. One of these tablets, which is nearly complete, contains the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal (also known as the Hurrian cult hymn or A Zaluzi to the Gods, or simply h.6), making it the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world. While the composers' names of some of the fragmentary pieces are known, h.6 is an anonymous work." (Wikipedia)

Fragments from some of the other Hurrian songs can be heard in the next video.

 

Was The Byzantine Empire Roman?

Documentary from 2014.

"The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire [see comment]  in the Greek-speaking, eastern part of the Mediterranean. Christian in nature, it was perennially at war with the Muslims, Flourishing during the reign of the Macedonian emperors, its demise was the consequence of attacks by Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, and Ottoman Turks." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

Comment: The Byzantine Empire is usually referred to as the "Roman empire in the East," but I've never thought there was anything particularly Roman about the Byzantines. Romans weren't Greek-speaking Christians; they were pagans who spoke Latin. If you ask me, the real Roman empire had already ceased to exist for all practical purposes by the time Italy and the western provinces were overrun by Germanic tribes in the fifth century AD. The Byzantines retained Roman institutions, but they were essentially an Oriental kingdom, a kind of hybrid of western and eastern traditions.

According to this view the Roman Empire collapsed as a culture long before it was conquered militarily. When Rome fell in the West, that was the end of it. Parts of its territory still remained, however, most of it in the East, but it's hard to see these surviving territories as Roman.

The picture is very complicated, naturally. There were similarities and differences beween the Roman and Byzantine empires. It would be surprising if nothing had carried over from the old world. As a general rule, civilizations aren't suddenly obliterated, leaving no trace behind. Collapse doesn't work that way. Kingdoms and empires rise and fall and evolve into new political systems, usually after a period of chaos and warfare. Zombie civilizations are common in history -- nations that still exist long after their cultures have died or changed out of all recognition. Christian Rome and the Roman Byzantine Empire are both good examples, I think, of zombie empires.

The Byzantine empire was a "continuation" of the Roman Empire in the sense that it was once part of the Roman empire with all of its legal and political institutions, but it was Roman in name only. The main difference, I think, was religious. Paganism had been outlawed and driven underground, replaced by Christianity, an essentially Oriental religion.

Here's a modern analogy. Let's say that the United States becomes a Muslim caliphate, but keeps all of its current institutions in place. There's a White House, a Congress, a Supreme Court, and so on. People still vote, but all the candidates are Muslims. The county courthouse still looks the same, but Christianity is illegal and the courts enforce Shariah Law. Then the western half of the country is invaded and overrun by savage barbarians who settle down and take over the existing legislative machinery. The eastern half of the country still survives as an independent nation, but is it American? The answer is obvious.

Related: Continuity and change in the Byzantine Empire.

Ancient "Outlaw Temple" Discovered In Israel

Report from 2012.

"The discovery of an Iron Age temple near Jerusalem has upended the idea that the ancient Kingdom of Judah, located in what is now southern Israel, had just one temple: the First Temple, also known as Solomon's Temple, a holy place of worship in Jerusalem that stood from the 10th century B.C. until its destruction, in 586 B.C." Source: Live Science.

"The newfound temple — whose roughly 150 congregants worshiped Yahweh but also used idols to communicate with the divine [emphasis added] — was in use during the same period as the First Temple. Its discovery shows that, despite what the Jewish Bible says, there were other contemporary temples besides the First Temple in the kingdom."

Video from 2019.

Note: "Archaeologists have known about the Iron Age site at Tel Motza, located less than 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) outside Jerusalem, since the early 1990s. However, it wasn't until 2012 that researchers discovered the remains of a temple there [see top video], and it wasn't until just last year that they excavated it further, ahead of a highway project."

Comment: This discovery not only contradicts the Biblical story that the First Temple was the only temple in Judah, but it also shows that the Jewish prohibition of idolatry wasn't strictly enforced at the time the Tel Motza temple was in use. Strangely enough, the temple with its idols existed at the same time that King Hezekiah and King Josiah [1] were passing religious reforms that "consolidated worship practices to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem and eliminated all cultic activity beyond its boundaries." The Tel Motza temple was apparently allowed to operate for various reasons discussed in the Live Science article.

[1] There is no archaeological evidence that Josiah ever existed; the only source for his reign is the Bible. There is some archaeological and non-Biblical evidence for Hezekiah, however.

 

Curse Tablets In The Ancient World

A clip from HBO's fantastic, but short-lived series Rome.

"A lead curse tablet, dating back around 1,700 years and likely written by a magician, has been discovered in a collapsed Roman mansion in Jerusalem..," according to Live Science (2013).

"[...] The text is written in Greek and, in it a woman named Kyrilla invokes the names of six gods to cast a curse on a man named Iennys, apparently over a legal case."

Comment: Belief in curses, magic, witchcraft, amulets and the occult in general was widespread in the ancient world, just as it is today in places like Africa, for example, and the Middle East, not to mention the United States, where a 2005 poll found that a majority of the population believes in ghosts. As far as I can tell, the modern world is just as superstitious as the ancient world and these beliefs go all the way back to the emergence of humans as a species.

According to Arcana Mundi: Magic And The Occult In The Greek And Roman Worlds (Second Edition, p.16), "[w]hen we talk abut Greco-Roman magic, we usually mean Hellenistic magic, as documented in the [Greek magical papyri.] This syncretistic, multicultural conglomerate took shape in Egypt when it was ruled by Macedonian kings, before it became a province of the Roman Empire."

Curse tablets were very common in the Roman empire. Hundreds of them have been discovered and translated. According to "Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World," (Oxford University Press, 1992, ed. John G. Gager), most of the curses were inscribed with bronze styluses on sheets of lead while the rest "..consist of alloys of lead and tin, sometimes fused with copper." (Intro. p.3)

"In the ancient world, it was common practice to curse or bind an enemy or rival by writing an incantation on a tablet and dedicating it to a god or spirit. These curses or binding spells, commonly called defixiones, were intended to bring other people under the power and control of those who commissioned them." (Ibid, back cover).

Related: Ancient Roman Curse Tablets Invoke Goddess Sulis Minerva to Kill and Maim.

The Roman Frontier In Jordan

"Until the 1980s, the Roman frontier in modern Jordan was among the least studied of the empire’s far-flung border regions. From 1980 until 1989, the Limes Arabicus Project investigated the frontier east of the Dead Sea. Excavation focused on the late Roman legionary fortress of el-Lejjun as well as soundings of four smaller but contemporaneous forts. The project’s regional survey recorded over five hundred other archaeological sites in the area, dating from the Paleolithic to the Late Islamic periods." Source: "The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan, Final Report of the Limes Arabicus Project," 1980-1989, Harvard University Press.

"This frontier, known as the Limes Arabicus, spanned more than 1,300 kilometers from northern Syria to southern Palestine and the edges of the Arabian Peninsula. Recent research and excavations have done much to augment scholarly knowledge of this frontier, which served as the south-eastern defense of the Roman Empire for over six centuries, until it was eventually overrun by the Arab Muslim conquerors in the 630s. This frontier consisted not only—nor even primarily—of fortifications and watchtowers, but also of major nomadic tribal confederations, allied to Rome, which patrolled the desert and ensured the security of the eastern provinces by exercising control over nomadic movements both within and, to a certain degree, beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire." Source: Ballandalus.

Related: Archaeological Explorations of the Roman Frontier in North-East Jordan.

Limes Arabicus and Still-Standing Buildings

Two Writers Penned Landmark Inscriptions In 8th Century BC Samaria

This 2016 video shows an ostracon discovered at a site near Jerusalem in 2008.

"A new study reveals that only 2 writers penned landmark inscriptions on an 8th-century BCE Samarian ostraca. The discovery illuminates the bureaucratic apparatus of an ancient kingdom of Israel." Source: Science Daily.

Note: According to the Jewish Virtual Library, ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments aka potsherds), were "common writing materials in antiquity ... used mainly for writing receipts, temporary records, lists of names, etc., but some letters written on potsherds have also been found."

"The ancient Samaria ostraca -- eighth-century BCE ink-on-clay inscriptions unearthed at the beginning of the 20th century in Samaria, the capital of the biblical kingdom of Israel [1] -- are among the earliest collections of ancient Hebrew writings ever discovered. But despite a century of research, major aspects of the ostraca remain in dispute, including their precise geographical origins -- either Samaria or its outlying villages -- and the number of scribes involved in their composition.

"A new Tel Aviv University (TAU) study finds that just two writers were involved in composing 31 of the more than 100 inscriptions and that the writers were contemporaneous, indicating that the inscriptions were written in the city of Samaria itself."

[1] "According to Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, ideas of a united monarchy are not accurate history but rather 'creative expressions of a powerful religious reform movement,' possibly 'based on certain historical kernels.'" (Wikipedia)