Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the specialist words used on this site. Throughout the site, a dotted underline marks a word you can hover or tap to see its definition.
- Aedile
- A Roman city official in charge of public buildings, streets, markets and games. Aediles often paid for public works themselves to win honor.
- Akkadian
- The language of Assyria and Babylonia, written in cuneiform.
- Anachronism
- Something placed in the wrong period, such as a detail from a later time written into an earlier story.
- Annals
- Official year-by-year records of a king's reign and military campaigns.
- Aramaic
- A Semitic language related to Hebrew. It became the common language of the Near East from about the 8th century BCE and was spoken by Jesus.
- BCE / CE
- "Before the Common Era" and "Common Era": the same years as BC and AD.
- Bronze Age
- In the Levant, roughly 3300–1200 BCE: the age of the Patriarchs, Egypt's New Kingdom and the Canaanite city-states.
- Bulla (plural bullae)
- A small lump of clay pressed with a seal and used to close a document or package. The impression shows who sealed it, often with a name, a father's name or a title.
- Casemate wall
- A double city wall with rooms built between the two walls, used for storage or housing.
- Coracle
- A small round boat made of a woven frame covered with hide or sealed with bitumen.
- Cuneiform
- Wedge-shaped writing pressed into wet clay with a reed, used across Mesopotamia for about 3,000 years for Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages.
- Destruction layer
- A layer of burned debris, collapsed walls and ash left when a town was destroyed, often by war or fire.
- Epigraphy
- The study of ancient inscriptions: reading them, dating them and judging whether they are genuine.
- Hieratic
- A flowing, simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphs, written in ink on papyrus.
- Hieroglyphs
- Egyptian picture-writing, used mainly on monuments and in tombs.
- Iron Age
- In the Levant, roughly 1200–586 BCE: the age of Israel's judges and kings, ending with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem.
- Lamassu
- A protective spirit with a human head, a bull's or lion's body and wings. Huge stone lamassu guarded the gates of Assyrian palaces.
- Levant
- The lands along the eastern Mediterranean: modern Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
- Low Chronology
- Israel Finkelstein's proposal to redate many buildings once credited to David and Solomon about 50–100 years later, to the 9th century BCE.
- Masoretic Text
- The standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament, carefully preserved by Jewish scribes (the Masoretes). Its oldest complete copies date to the 10th–11th centuries CE.
- Mesopotamia
- "The land between the rivers": the Tigris and Euphrates valley, mostly modern Iraq, home of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria.
- Minimalist (and maximalist)
- Minimalists see the Bible's history as largely written centuries later, with little reliable early detail. Maximalists see far more of it as historically grounded.
- Open cluster
- A group of young stars born together that drift through space as a group for a while before slowly dispersing. The Pleiades are one.
- Ossuary
- A stone box for bones. Around Jerusalem from roughly 20 BCE to 70 CE, a body was left to decompose in a tomb for about a year, then the bones were gathered into an ossuary.
- Ostracon (plural ostraca)
- A piece of broken pottery used as cheap scrap paper, written on in ink. Letters, receipts and lists often survive this way.
- Paleography
- Dating a text by the style of its handwriting, which changed over time in recognizable ways.
- Papyrus (plural papyri)
- Writing material made from strips of the papyrus reed of Egypt, pressed into sheets and rolls.
- Prefect
- The title of Roman governors of Judea before 41 CE, including Pontius Pilate. It was confirmed by the Pilate Stone.
- Prism (clay prism)
- A six- or eight-sided clay column covered with cuneiform, used by Assyrian kings to record their annals, such as Sennacherib's Taylor Prism.
- Proconsul
- The governor of a Roman province run by the Senate, such as Gallio in Achaia (Greece).
- Procurator
- The title used for Roman governors of Judea after 44 CE. Later writers, including Tacitus, applied it to Pilate too.
- Provenance
- The record of where and how an object was found. An unprovenanced object (bought, not excavated) is much harder to authenticate and is a favorite of forgers.
- Qumran
- A settlement by the Dead Sea near the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, 1946/47–1956.
- Radiocarbon dating
- Dating once-living material (wood, seeds, bone) by measuring how much carbon-14 has decayed. Useful back to about 50,000 years.
- Seal
- A carved stone or ring used to stamp an owner's mark into clay or wax. Its impression in clay is a bulla.
- Septuagint
- The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, made in Egypt in the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE. Early Christians used it widely.
- Six-chambered gate
- A city gate with three guard rooms on each side of the passage, found at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer.
- Stele (plural stelae)
- An upright stone slab carved with an inscription or picture, often set up by a king to record a victory or a dedication.
- Stratum (plural strata)
- A layer of an archaeological site, usually one phase of settlement. Lower layers are generally older.
- Sumerian
- The oldest known written language of Mesopotamia (southern Iraq). It is unrelated to any other known language.
- Talmud
- The great collection of Jewish rabbinic teaching and debate on the law, compiled from about 200 to 500 CE.
- Tell (Tel)
- A mound built up by thousands of years of towns rebuilt on top of each other's ruins, as in Tel Dan or Tell es-Sultan (Jericho).
- Testimonium Flavianum
- The passage about Jesus in Josephus' Jewish Antiquities (Book 18). Most scholars think its core is genuine but that Christian copyists added to it.
- Ugaritic
- The language of Ugarit, a city in northern Syria. Its texts from about 1400–1200 BCE share many words and images with the Hebrew Bible.
- Urartu
- A kingdom around Lake Van in eastern Turkey, 9th–6th centuries BCE. Its name is the same as the Bible's "Ararat".
- Vulgate
- The Latin translation of the Bible made mainly by Jerome around 400 CE, the standard Bible of the Western church for a thousand years.
- Ziggurat
- A massive stepped temple tower of mud brick, built in Mesopotamian cities, with a shrine on top.