The Tel Dan Inscription

[Minimalist]

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Min

Excellent post.

With your permission, I'd like to post it in full on Historum forum in a thread on the same topic.

[Minimalist]

Be my guest, mon ami.


(I speak French whenever possible because it annoys the shit out of the tea-bagging morons running around this country unsupervised!)

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

[Minimalist]

[Angrboda]

Is Aramaic read from right to left? That seems necessary to make sense of A9, or am I missing something?

[Minimalist]

Yes, I believe so.

[Justtristo]

I am going to play the devil's advocate here.

As I see it the main flaw of archaeology to reconstruct history is that very little from the distant past actually get preserved in the archaeological record. A good analogue would be trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only some of the pictures, what you get is a incomplete picture.

To use an example in Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, there is a record migration of a tribe called the Helvetti which even accounting for overestimation in numbers, was many thousands of people. However the archaeological evidence for this migration is nil. The same scant archaeological evidence for a lot of mass scale migrations attested in historical writings.

[Phil]

Is Aramaic read from right to left?

Oui mon ami.

[Minimalist]

Actually Just, as I recall, Bibracte is an active archaeological site and some evidence of a fight has been found. Of course, Caesar was perfectly willing to lie to inflate the numbers of enemies he destroyed - he was a politician after all - and archaeology cannot be expected to support exaggerations.

But, then again, there is no sign on the siege ramp at Masada which says "Built by Legio X under T. Flavius Silva" either....but the remains of the ramp are still there. Somebody built it.


Archaeology can give us a big picture only. Was there a city? Was it destroyed? Is there evidence of fighting or might it have been an earthquake? Texts can give us human motives but, as you noted, people lie too.