Arad Ostraca

Tel Arad, a royal Judahite fortress in the northeastern Negev, yielded more than 100 Hebrew ostraca, ink inscriptions on potsherds, during Yohanan Aharoni's excavations of 1962–1967. Many of the latest, from around −600, are addressed to Eliashib son of Eshiyahu, the commander of the fort, whose personal seals were also found. They order him to issue wine, oil and flour to the Kittim, probably Greek or Cypriot mercenaries, and to send troops to Ramat-negev "lest Edom should come there." One letter mentions "the house of YHWH," probably the Temple in Jerusalem.

The fortress also contained a small Judahite shrine with incense altars and a standing stone, one of the few known outside Jerusalem. In 2016 a Tel Aviv University team applied computerized handwriting analysis to 16 of the ostraca and identified at least six different writers, evidence that reading and writing reached officers and quartermasters in a remote outpost, well below the scribal elite, on the eve of the Babylonian conquest.