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Of The Week - Persian King Darius the Great -https://tinyurl.com/2upz776e
By JERUSALEM
POST 1-3-2023
An inscription
bearing the name of the Persian king Darius the Great was discovered in the Tel
Lachish National Park in the first discovery of an inscription bearing the
king's name anywhere in Israel.
The discovery
was made by Eylon Levy, the international media advisor to Israeli President
Isaac Herzog.
Levy
reportedly chanced on a 2,500-year-old potsherd with the inscribed letters of
the ancient king and reported it to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The king's
name on the inscription, Darius the Great, is supposedly the father of King
Ahasuerus, also known as the biblical Achashverosh from the story of Purim and
the Book of Esther.
“When I picked
up the ostracon and saw the inscription, my hands shook. I looked left and
right for the cameras because I was sure someone was playing an elaborate prank
on me," said Levy.
"When I was walking around here with a
friend just exploring the history, I was turning over pieces of pottery and
stones in my hand and suddenly, I found something that had letters on it and I
thought this was too good to be true," Levy added.
When Levy
found the potsherd, he reported it to the Israel Antiquities Authority, where
he said that three people at the organization were skeptical that it was real
but intrigued by what Levy had found.
A few weeks
later, Levy received a phone call from Saar Ganor of the Israel Antiquities
Authority and said that he was "on his way from the Dead Sea Scrolls labs.
We've put it through three scanners. This is authentic. No modern had could do
it and it's from two and a half thousand years ago from before the story of
Purim."
"When I
was walking around here with a friend just exploring the history, I was turning
over pieces of pottery and stones in my hand and suddenly, I found something
that had letters on it and I thought this was too good to be true."
Ganor analyzed
Levy's discovery with Dr. Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
and they both confirmed that the artifact dated to the Persian royal
administration at Lachish in the Achaemenid period, at the turn of the fifth
century BCE.
The inscription
reads “Year 24 of Darius,” which dates back to 498 BCE. The king's reign began
in 522 BCE and ended in 486 BCE.
Eli Escuzido, director of the Israel
Antiquities Authority, stated that "It's amazing that visitors to the site
come across such a rare inscription 'reviving' the Persian King Darius known to
us from the sources! His son King Ahasuerus could never have imagined that we
would find evidence of his father in Israel 2,500 years after the dramatic
events in his royal court!”
Who was King
Darius, King Ahasuerus?
Darius the
Great, also known as Darius I, was one of the most famous rulers of the
Achaemenid Empire, also known as the first incarnation of the Persian Empire.
His rule saw him take over in a time of chaos, though he managed to reorganize
what was then the largest empire of the ancient world into coherent satrapies,
centralized authority with major construction projects, and monetary measures
and promoted the Aramaic language.
Darius was
also mentioned repeatedly throughout the Bible, having made appearances in the
Book of Haggai, the Book of Zechariah and the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah. He is also
believed by some scholars to either be the same person as or one of the
inspirations of Darius the Mede, a central figure within the Book of Daniel.
Darius also
had several sons, and while none of them were named Ahasuerus in Persian or
Aramaic, his most famous son and successor, Xerxes I, also known as Xerxes the
Great (named Khshayarsha in Persian), has been linked to the Persian ruler of
the Purim story, though the exact level of historical accuracy in the Purim
story has been heavily questioned by scholars for years.
Xerxes's
portrayal in the Book of Esther as Ahasuerus has led some to believe he was an
incompetent and always drunk monarch, while in fact, Xerxes was a very active
ruler, though he is most famous for his ultimately failed war against the Greek
city-states. But the fact that he was a very real monarch who indeed ruled over
the region at the time of the Book of Esther is widely accepted.
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