Gezer calendar

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The Gezer calendar is a tablet of soft limestone inscribed in a paleo-Hebrew script. It is one of the oldest known examples of Hebrew writing, dating to the 10th century BCE. It was discovered in excavations of the Biblical city of Gezer, 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem, by R.A.S. Macalister in his excavations between 1902 and 1907.

The calendar describes monthly or bi-monthly periods and attributes to each a duty such as harvest, planting or tending specific crops.

It reads:

"Two months of harvest

Two months of planting

Two months are late planting

One month of hoeing

One month of barley-harvest

One month of harvest and festival

Two months of grape harvesting

One month of summer fruit"

Scholars have speculated that the calendar is either a schoolboy's memory exercise or perhaps the text of a popular folk song, or child's song. Another possibility is something designed for the collection of taxes from farmers.

The Gezer Calendar is in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, along with the Siloam inscription and other archaeological discoveries found before World War I.

[edit] Further reading

Albright, W.F. The Gezer Calendar in "Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research" (BASOR). 1943. Volume 92:16-26. Original description of the find.
Sivan, Daniel 'The Gezer calendar and Northwest Semitic linguistics', Israel Exploration Journal 48,1-2 (1998) 101-105. An up-to-date linguistic analysis of this text.