Ostraca

Building a temple in Ancient Egypt began with the Foundation Ritual and ended with the consecration of the completed monument to its gods. The moment when the temple was ready for its cultic functions is by a majority of authors placed at the end of the process. The importance and complexity of the Foundation Ritual shows that directly after its completing the Egyptians might have treated extent of the future temple as a sacred space which already during the construction of the temple required some sort of cult. There seems to be no royal document referring to the official worship, but a number of ostraca from Deir el-Bahari and another longer document may be linked to this early stage unmaterialized existence of the temple. All these documents record the offerings presented in the temple by different officials of the time of Hatshepsut. At least some of them predate the completion of building operation.

Since 1991, some 2,000 Aramaic ostraca deriving from the south of Israel have appeared on the antiquities market and are now scattered in 9 museums and libraries and 21 private collections. Of these, the majority are still not formally published, and in this second volume in the series, Bezalel Porten continues the publication of this important corpus of 4th century B.C.E. economic texts. With the expert epigraphic assistance of Ada Yardeni and hand-copies by her as well, Porten here provides the second volume of texts, organized by “dossier” based on the primary personage cited in the text. Color photographs (where available), ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcription, translation, and commentary are provided for each text, along with tables of seven grain dossiers. This publication will become the primary resource for information on these texts, which provide insight into the economic, social, and religious lives of Idumeans in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods.