New Evidence for Belomancy in Ancient Palestine and Phoenicia

Abstract

IN TWO SEPARATE COMMUNICATIONS which appeared in the BULLETIN of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1954 and 1956 we were told of some recently discovered inscribed arrowheads from ancient Palestine and Phoenicia. In 1954, Frank M. Cross and J. T. Milik' jointly discussed three newly found javelin-heads of bronze bearing identical inscriptions and written vertically in a very early conventionalized alphabetic script. The first two letters read hs (=arrow-head) followed by 'bdlb't ('abdulabi't), Servant of the Lioness, a personal name epigraphically well attested. As it turned out these arrow-heads were part of a hoard which included 26 uninscribed bronze javelin-heads discovered by a fellah at el-Khadr, a village 5 km. west of Bethlehem. All are of approximately the same type, with variations in size and thickness,-leaf-shaped, oblong with a central flat rib-and are characteristic of either the Late Bronze or the beginning of the Iron Age. With regard to the three inscribed arrow-heads, all lines of evidence, including paleography, converge on a date not later than about 1100 B. C.

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