By Ariel David
Around 1,400 years ago, or even earlier, somebody scribbled on the wall of a Jewish cemetery in Beit She’arim, in today’s northern Israel. The graffito was first spotted during excavations at this sprawling ancient necropolis in the 1950s, but experts could not make head or tail of it.
Now for the first time, the key to unraveling the mystery has been found after two experts in Iranian history saw the text.
They were the first to realize it was written using Pahlavi script, an ancient alphabet developed for the administration, coinage and royal inscriptions of the once mighty Sassanid Persian Empire. Plus some isolated Hebrew or Aramaic letters. But there was more to the mystery.
“When I saw it I immediately thought it was Pahlavi, but then as I kept reading I realized that while the alphabet was Middle Persian, the language was not,” says Domenico Agostini, a professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University. “I was stunned.”
He also wondered what a Middle Persian graffito was doing at Beit She’arim in the first place. So, it turns out that the seven lines of text were written in Aramaic transliterated into the alphabet that was normally used to write Middle Persian, the form of Persian common at the time of the Sassanid dynasty (3rd-7th century C.E.). It’s kind of what we do today when we write the word “shalom” (Hebrew for “peace”) or the name of this newspaper, Haaretz (“The Land”), using Latin instead of Hebrew letters.
Bury me in Beit She’araim
The find is surprising not only for the unusual, but certainly not unheard of, linguistic play of transliteration.
Beit She’arim was a key spot for Jewish culture and learning in late antiquity. Following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the Sanhedrin Jewish council had its seat for a time in this Lower Galilean town. The settlement’s necropolis is also believed to host the tombs of major Jewish scholars, chiefly Rabbi Judah the Prince, who compiled the Mishnah in the second century.
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