Since the early 1990s, about two thousand Idumean Aramaic ostraca have found their way onto the antiquities market and are now scattered across a number of museums, libraries, and private collections. This fifth and final volume of the Textbook of Aramaic Ostraca from Idumea completes the work of bringing these ostraca together in a single publication. Volumes 1–4 published some 1,600 ostraca that gave us insight into agriculture, economics, politics, onomastics, and scribal practices from fourth/third-century BCE Idumea and Judah. The ostraca in volume 5 come from the same milieu, but the information they provide is entirely new and different. This volume presents 485 ostraca, including 99 land descriptions, 168 uncertain texts, and 218 assorted remains, scribal exercises, and forgeries, along with useful indexes and tables and a comparative list of entries. The land descriptions—which record local landmarks, ownership boundaries, and land registration—provide rich complementary material to the rest of the Idumean ostraca. The “uncertain texts” are fragmentary, in poor condition, or contain other abnormalities. As the TAO corpus becomes better understood and as imaging techniques improve, these texts will help to fill gaps in knowledge. The final section includes the remains of scribal practices and forgeries, important because they help to show the authenticity of the other two thousand pieces. A unique collection of documentary sources for fourth/third-century BCE Idumea—and, by extension, Judah—this multivolume work will be a powerful resource for those interested in onomastics and social and economic history.

Since the early 1990s, about two thousand Idumean Aramaic ostraca have found their way onto the antiquities market and are now scattered across a number of museums, libraries, and private collections. This multivolume textbook classifies these ostraca according to subject matter and brings them together into a single publication. With this fourth installment, Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni continue their comprehensive edition of Aramaic ostraca from Idumea. Volumes 1-3 published and cataloged 255 Personal Name Dossiers containing 1,152 texts. Volume 4 contains 377 texts divided into six dossiers, including 54 payment orders, 77 accounts, 74 workers texts, 62 names, 87 jar inscriptions, and 23 letters. The payment orders document officially authorized transfers of goods, while the accounts show how those goods were inventoried. The workers texts illustrate the distribution and supply of laborers, the name lists show people as individuals, and the jar inscriptions track vessels in motion. Color photographs, ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcriptions, translations, and commentaries are provided for the texts, along with figures and tables, and introductions and summaries of each dossier. A unique source for the onomastics and social and economic history of fourth-century Idumea-and, by extension, of Judah-this multivolume work will become the primary resource for information on these texts.

This work is a KWIC (key-word-in-context) concordance and prosopography of the Aramaic documents from ancient Egypt as published in the four-volume edition edited by B. Porten and A. Yardeni: Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Most of the documents indexed here are from the Persian period; they are legal, epistolary, and administrative. This comprehensive concordance will prove very useful to students of Aramaic who wish to have access to the collocations presented, students of the society and history of Persian-era Egypt, as well as those interested in personal names and their contribution to our understanding of both history and language. Published by Eisenbrauns for the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon project.

Some 340 Aramaic ostraca of the Persian and Hellenistic periods have been excavated at 32 sites in Israel, from Yokneam in the north to Eilat in the south, with Arad and Beersheba being the main contributory sites. By far, however, the largest cache of texts is what has come to be known as “the Idumean ostraca”. These did not come from formal excavations but began to appear on the antiquities market in 1991. Since then, some 2,000 ostraca have reached 9 museums and libraries and 21 private collections. Of these, the majority are still not formally published, and in this volume (and those to follow), Bezalel Porten undertakes to provide a comprehensive edition of all these texts, in many cases as an editio princeps. Porten, with the expert epigraphic assistance of Ada Yardeni and hand-copies by her as well, here provides the first volume of texts, organized by “dossier” based on the primary personage cited in the text. Color photographs (where available), ceramic descriptions, hand-copies, transcription, translation, and commentary are provided for each text, along with figures and tables, and introductions and summaries of each dossier. An included CD contains a catalogue of all the texts and three color key-word-in-context concordances, for words, personal names, and months for the entire corpus. This publication will become the primary resource for information on these texts.