Page 397 - עידן האימפריות

in Mizpah immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem and it explains
the concentration of most of the mwṣh jar handles in this site (30 out of 43
stamped handles). Few stamped handles of this type were found at a few
other sites, which included Jerusalem (4 handles), Gibeon (4 handles) and
Jericho (2 handles). Only one mwṣh stamped handle was found in Ramat
Raḥel, and this is the only stamp impression system in which this site had not
occupied a central place.
The use of the stamped jar handles continued in the early Persian Period.
The main change to be noted at this stage is the fact that the seals no longer
include iconography. During the next two hundred and fifty years, jars with
stamp impressions written mostly in Aramaic, bearing the province name
of yhwd (four letters), yhd (three letters), or even yh (in two letters that
sometimes were connected to each other [=ligature] and looked like one
sign), prevailed in Judah. Only in some types which can be attributed to the
beginning of the Persian Period can we still find the remains of the early
tradition, in which the private names of the seal bearers and sometimes even
their title – ‘the Governor’ – were also written. A total of 582 jar handles
from this large series of yhwd stamp impressions are known, with about
17 different main types of stamp impressions and 51 sub-types (=seals).
Dividing the yhwd stamp impressions into early types (128 handles), dated
to the end of the 6th century and the 5th century BCE, the middle types
(312 handles) dated to the 4th–3rd centuries BCE, and the late types (142
handles) dated to the 2nd century BCE, enables analysis of the history of
Judah during the Persian, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid periods of
rule in Judah and the changes undergone by the administration during this
lengthy period. The yhwd stamp impression system continued to exist up to
the Hasmonean Period, when the use of the stamp impressions on jar handles
came completely to a halt. The 307 stamped handles (about 53 percent of
the corpus) that were found in Ramat Raḥel, mainly of the early and middle
types, make this site the center of the yhwd stamp impression system.
The series of the yršlm stamp impressions brings the period of the Judean
jar systems with stamp impressions to an end. In this family, iconography
was reused, and a pentagram with five letters – yršlm (the abbreviation of
Jerusalem – the capital of the Hasmonean Kingdom) – is engraved in the
center of the seal. Archeological and epigraphic research indicate that the
period of these stamp impressions, which is parallel to the end of that of

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