Browse Items (10 total)

After the decree of the Persian King Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return to Jerusalem from Babylon (ca. 538 BCE), they began to rebuild the city. Seen here are a few of the remains of that building project, which was executed over the following…

These two toy-sized ceramic horses with riders are known from the Persian period. They are usually found in a favissa (a repository at a shrine used for objects that had gained sanctity by use in cult ritual and could not, therefore, be returned to a…

When the Persian king Cyrus II (557-529 BCE) conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he had this ten-inch-long clay barrel made and inscribed in the Babylonian language. In the text he says that his victory was made possibly by support of Marduk, the god of…

All three of these vessels can be dated to the late 6th or early 5th century BCE, during the first decades of Persian control of Palestine. However, pottery forms do not change simply because the political control does. As a result, these forms look…

The Elephantine Papyri are correspondences of a Jewish military garrison who occupied an island in the Nile River on ancient Egypt's southern border. They had a temple in which the god of Israel was worshiped under the name Yhwh ('Yahu'), and in this…

Money was invented in the Persian Period, and this particular coin bears the official name of the district in which the Jews lived: 'Yehud' (spelled out by the three letters to the right of the bird). The script is ancient Hebrew and the name is the…

This beautiful urn was made by a well known Greek potter and vase painter around 450 BCE. It was imported to Judah and found in the ruins of a Persian grain storage center at Tel Jemmeh. The reason that an elegant urn from Greece ended up in Judah is…

These three figurines of pregnant women wearing Egyptian wigs and holding one hand on their stomachs are typical of figurines found at other Phoenician sites in Lebanon, Cyprus, and Israel in the Persian period. Scholars usually assume that they were…

This view of the eastern slope of the City of David shows the steps leading down to the Gihon Spring (at the bottom of the photo, in the triangular shadow beneath the double window), 8th-7th century BCE walls and a Jebusite wall (immediately below…

This map shows the extent of the Persian Empire in 500 BCE. With a capital in Persepolis (down and to the right of the center of the map), they expanded their borders all the way into India in the east and to Egypt, North Africa, and Macedonia in the…