In the Spring semester of 2020, I taught “Seminar in the Archaeology of Israel” in the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. This upper-level undergraduate course was divided into two sections to give students both a broad picture of ancient Israel and the opportunity to examine Israel’s archaeological record in detail. The first section provided an overview of the archaeological history of Israel from the Bronze Age through the Roman period and the second section invited students to explore notable archaeological features of sites in ancient Israel. During the first section of the course, as part of our survey of the Iron Age, we encountered our first examples of recognizable early writing in Israel. Here we explored the topic of writing, literacy, and texts. I took this as an opportunity to think with my students about writing as a physical enterprise and text as material artifact. To accomplish this, I decided I would have my students make their own ostraca (sg. ostracon), or small sherds of inscribed pottery, in class.[1]
The reading for the day of the activity introduced the students to writing in the ancient near East and specifically written material from the Iron Age. In class, I showed additional examples of writing in ancient Israel. The activity would take the students beyond seeing such examples to handling material for themselves. I wanted them to be able to consider the physical aspects of writing in antiquity for themselves. Since ostraca featured prominently among the evidence for writing in Iron Age Israel, this was a natural choice of material for the class activity. By experimenting with the material of ancient writing, I deliberately emphasized the medium of writing over against the text written, which usually receives the lion’s share of attention in studies of inscriptions and ancient writing.
BACKGROUND
For the class day, I had my students complete the following selections of reading. I found these to be accessible without being simplistic.
• Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9-49.
• Christopher Rollston, “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription,” BAR 38:3 (May/June 2012): 32-40, 66-68.
Van der Toorn’s selection helpfully problematizes the concept of “book,” which is the regnant model for thinking of writing today. And Rollston’s article solidified the concept of ancient writing by presenting specific examples of early Hebrew ostraca and linked the topic to our overall course goal of understanding the interpretive work of studying history. (I would add that Rollston’s Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel could be a helpful, if more advanced, addition to this class’s reading.)
We began by recapping what the class had already learned about the Iron Age, including the general political atmosphere in ancient Palestine and the surrounding area. We reviewed the system of two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, and recalled the social strata that occupied the city-centers in both polities (e.g., elite figures like monarchs, priest-scribes, and court prophets).
Next, I provided a brief history of writing in the ancient Near East, pointing back to the readings from van der Toorn and Rollston. Here I found I needed to clarify some terms and ideas from the readings, which was not a surprise, as none of my students had a background in Semitics or Hebrew Bible. We walked through Rollston’s analysis of “early Alphabetic” and reviewed his criteria for discerning the earliest Hebrew inscription. My students easily grasped the importance of being able to decipher the texts written on ostraca and the importance of having precise language for categorizing these texts according to their linguistic families. They linked these issues to our larger considerations of interpreting and writing history through the lens of archaeological research. But I wanted to push them to think about the material as material.
ACTIVITY
Although tempted to break a clay vessel during class and ask my students “what can we do with these sherds?”, I opted to bring in sherds that I had prepared beforehand. I purchased a couple of terracotta pots from The Home Depot and dropped them on my brick patio at home. This made plenty of sherds of varying sizes for the class to work with. For the writing materials, I purchased calligraphy ink and several thin paintbrushes, as well as a set of reed styluses, so that students could try a couple of different writing implements.
I passed around the writing materials and encouraged the students to approach the writing task in whatever ways they wanted. I projected an Early Alphabetic (Paleo-Hebrew/ proto-Canaanite) script on the board alongside the more familiar Aramaic square script so that students had a couple of options to play around with. Both alphabets had transliterations beside each letter. I encouraged students to write their names in the scripts provided, but also to use whatever language they preferred to write a longer message or note. I gave the students several minutes to work, and after finishing the task, I led the class in a discussion of the activity.
DISCUSSION
Almost immediately, my students had questions about the writing materials. These questions, none of which surfaced during our earlier discussion of the text written on the ostraca, immediately jumped to the fore in the context of our experiment.
• What was the ink made of?
• What kinds of writings appeared on ostraca?
• Was the general population aware of writing?
Some of these I answered. Black ink, I explained, was generally made from carbon-based substances.[2] But other questions I turned back on the students. “What kinds of things might you expect to find on ostraca?” We had already encountered some examples in our reading. Abecedaries, or alphabet exercises, could be found, along with other scribal exercises, on many ostraca from the ancient Near East. But also notes, missives, reminders, and even deeds, legal records, and in some cases, literary texts. We noted the cheap cost of ostraca, as they are a product of reuse, which made them accessible to many in a way clay tablets or papyrus were not.
When I asked my students how it felt to write on the ostraca, they made some notable observations, which we elaborated on together. One student noted the difficulty of writing on a potsherd. The limitations on size and material quality circumscribe the length and quality of your note or message. The same student mentioned the difficulty of using the reed stylus, which is closer to what ancient scribes would have used, over against the thin paintbrush, which is much closer to the pens we write with today. Another student mentioned the mechanics of writing, asking about the shapes and orientations of ancient scripts, as well as the conventions for making specific letter strokes. For my part, I observed that some students laid the sherds flat on the classroom table as they wrote on them, as if writing on a piece of loose-leaf paper. I suggested that this was a modern (or at least post-classical) writing convention; whereas, in antiquity, when inscribing an ostracon, it was not unlikely that a scribe would clutch the sherd in the palm of one hand and write with the other.[3] This led us to think of some innovative analogies for describing the use of ostraca, including ostraca as the original iPad—mobile, quick, and easy for taking notes (although not necessarily cheap!).
As a classroom activity that was not assigned ahead of time, the students relied on me for walking them through the kinds of questions we should ask when we think about ostraca, writing in ancient Israel, and the social context of this material. When I asked what we can learn from ostraca, the students brought up the spread of literacy, the various contexts in which writing was used (administrative, cultic, etc.), and the early composition of the Hebrew Bible, which we had already been thinking about in terms of an elite literary project carried out over centuries. They began drawing comparisons and contrasts to the ways we keep records, take notes, and write messages today. They also anticipated some of our discussion of parchment manuscripts, which would be deferred to our class on the Dead Sea Scrolls later in the term.
I received positive feedback from the students, who appreciated the unexpected realization that the experience of writing in antiquity was far different from how we experience writing today. With this experiment, we were able to look at a topic from a different perspective and invite questions we would likely have ignored otherwise. If done again, I might make the lesson a two-part series that would introduce the topic on one day and have a fuller activity on the next class day, including an experiment with clay tablets and papyrus. I might also include a follow-up written assignment that asks the students to reflect on the physical aspects of the materiality of ancient writing compared to writing today. I found the few analogies that we started to develop to be extremely fruitful ways of rethinking how we classify and understand ancient writing, and it could be a productive exercise to have students produce analogies of their own in such a written assignment.
In a class on the archaeology of Israel, which necessitates thinking and learning about ancient material, I found this exercise to be a helpful way to concretize an abstract topic like writing, literacy, and text by grounding it in an experience of materiality. This experiment gave my students a chance not just to think about the materiality of writing, but to think materially about writing. I’ve already made a note on one of my potsherds to do this again.
Patrick Angiolillo is a doctoral student in the Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies at New York University, where he studies the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple period Jewish literature, including the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
[1] For an overview of the social world of writing in ancient Israel and Judah, with helpful attention to inscriptions and ostraca, see Christopher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (Atlanta: SBL, 2010).
[2] Rollston, Writing and Literacy, and Roger Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Greco-Roman East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Some black ink of antiquity was created from iron-gall.
[3] There is some significant art historical evidence for the writing practices of scribes in the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. While not perfect facsimiles of ancient practice, such depictions of scribes holding scrolls or tablets in their laps or hands as they write do suggest the reality of this practice, especially when weighed against the lack of depictions of scribes working at tables or other writing surfaces. In the case of ostraca, which often have small writing surfaces and were used mostly for short notes, missives, or accounts, it makes sense that a scribe would handle the writing materials entirely in his hands. A helpful collection of art historical depictions of scribal writing in practice was compiled by Dr. Philippa Steele, Principal Investigator for the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) Project, and can be found on the CREWS blog here: https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/depicting-writing/.