Saturday, September 24, 2022

"Amminadab" in the Tell Siran Inscription

The Tell Siran inscription is the second longest complete Ammonite text. As Kent P. Jackson noted

 

It was written on a 10-cm-long bronze bottle in the Ammonite script, which was derived from the Aramaic script which the scribes of Ammon had adopted near the mid 8th-century . . . Cross dates the text to about 600 B.C. . . . The inscription was first published by H. O. Thompson and F. Zayadine in 1973 . . . (Kent P. Jackson, The Ammonite Language of the Iron Age [Harvard Semitic Monographs 27; Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1983], 35)

 

The opening line of the text, and translation thereof, as provided by Jackson (ibid., 36), reads thusly:

 

1. m’bd ‘mndb mlk bn ‘mn

 

1. The works of ‘AmmÄ«nadab king of the Ammonites