Text Reconstruction: Filling in Ancient Blanks
How did you do? What were the assumptions you made that turned out to be right, and which turned out to be wrong? Did you get the placement of the margins right? Did you anticipate the hyphenation at the end of lines 3, four and five? Did you remember the names “Turkey Lurkey and “Foxsy Loxsy” and put them in the right places? If so, they may well have proved useful in helping you judge line length. Did you pick up on the slight formulaic variation in line four where the scribe has Chicken Little cry “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” but not the added phrase used elsewhere: “We must go tell the king”? Just to make you feel better, we have never seen anyone get it entirely right. Because of this, we tend to take our own reconstructions with a grain of salt.
(From Puzzling Out the Past: Making Sense of Ancient Inscriptions from Biblical Times [An Exhibition at the Dubin/Wolf Exhibition Center, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, April 5th to November 15th, 1987].)
Article Categories
Non-Biblical Ancient Texts Relating to the Biblical World: Non-biblical inscriptions and documents from ancient times that improve our understanding of the world of the Bible.
Biblical Manuscripts: Images and commentary on ancient and medieval copies of the Bible.
Dead Sea Scrolls: Images and commentary on selected Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts.
USC Archaeology Research Center: Images of artifacts from the teaching collection of the University of Southern California.