History
The calendar was discovered in 1908 by R.A.S. Macalister of the Palestine Exploration Fund while excavating the ancient Canaanite city of Gezer, 20 miles west of Jerusalem. The calendar inscribed on a limestone plaque describes monthly or bi-monthly periods and attributes to each a duty such as harvest, planting, or tending specific crops. It reads:
- Two months gathering (September, October)
- Two months planting (November, December)
- Two months late sowing (January, February)
- One month cutting flax (March)
- One month reaping barley (April)
- One month reaping and measuring grain (May)
- Two months pruning (June, July)
- One month summer fruit (August)
Scholars have speculated that the calendar could be a schoolboy's memory exercise, the text of a popular folk song or a children's song. Another possibility is something designed for the collection of taxes from farmers.
"Abijah" is probably the name of the scribe. The name means "Yah (abbreviated form of YHWH, the Hebrew name of the God of Israel) is my father". This name appears in the Bible for several individuals, including a king of Judah (1 Kings 14:31).
The Gezer calendar was taken to Istanbul, where it is displayed at the Museum of the Ancient Orient, a Turkish archaeology museum, along with the Siloam inscription and other archaeological artefacts unearthed before World War I.
Read more about this topic: Gezer Calendar
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)