Brit-Am Research Sources (31 December 2013, 2013, Tevet 28, 5774)
Contents:
1. Orjan Svensson: Hebrew Words in Irish and Swedish
2. Yair Davidiy: The Irish Sept and the Hebrew Sebt both meaning Tribe.
3. Important New Finds: Phoenician and Israelite Silver Provenance from the Western Mediterranean!
(a) Tarshish: Hacksilber Hoards Pinpoint Solomon's Silver Source. Hacksilber isotope analysis associates Biblical Tarshish with Sardinia
by Noah Wiener
(b) King Solomon's Silver? Southern Phoenician Hacksilber Hoards and the Location of Tarshish
by Christine M. Thompson and Sheldon Skaggs
(c) Comments by Yair Davidiy
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1. Orjan Svensson Hebrew Words in Irish and Swedish
Orjan Svensson wrote:
Shalom,
Yesterday it occurred to me that the Hebrew Word SHeVeT, meaning "tribe", could easily have been given rise to the Irish Tuath, as in Thuatha de Danann.
Because I have seen other examples where an initial Hebrew Shin has become T or TH. For example SHoR, meaning ox in Hebrew, I believe have given rise to Aramaic THoR meaning the same. (By the way in Swedish Tjur, pronounced SHuR, means "bull".)
Thus SHeVeT could easily have become THeVeT, and V is bacially the same as U, which then yields THeUeT.
Not far from Tuath or its Scandinavian equivalent "TJOD"!!
An old name of Sweden was Svitjod, meaning "People or tribe of Svia or Svea". In Icelandic Sweden is still known as [Svithod].
So it looks like the Hebrew Word for tribe is Incorporated in the ancient Word for Sweden!
But what about Svea? What if the usually accepted etymologies are wrong and if Svea or Svia actually came from Hebrew SHiBiYaH, meaning "exiles", "captives"? Svitjod would then I believe mean "tribe of exiles".
Regards,
Orjan
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2. Yair Davidiy: The Irish Sept and the Hebrew Sebt both meaning Tribe.
There is also the word "SEPT".
This is listed as
A corruption of sect, influenced by Latin saeptum ('fence, enclosure').
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sept
It is defined as:
A clan, tribe, or family, proceeding from a common progenitor. (used especially of the ancient clans in Ireland)
This conventional etymology looks like speculation.
We see from above that it can mean tribe or clan. In Hebrew we have SeBeT (Modern Hebrew: shevet) meaning tribe and we know that the "b" and "p" sounds were often interchangeable.
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3. Important New Finds: Phoenician and Israelite Silver Provenance from the Western Mediterranean!
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(a) Tarshish: Hacksilber Hoards Pinpoint Solomon's Silver Source
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/tarshish-hacksilber-hoards-pinpoint-solomons-silver-source/
Hacksilber isotope analysis associates Biblical Tarshish with Sardinia
by Noah Wiener 12/27/2013
'Once every three years the fleet of ships of Tarshish used to come bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks, the king [Solomon] made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones.' 1 Kings 10:22-27
'Tarshish did business with you out of the abundance of your great wealth; silver, iron, tin, and lead they exchanged for your wares.' Ezekial 27:12 (Lamentation over Tyre)
A hacksilber hoard from Tel Dor. According to the Bible, silver from Tarshish brought great wealth to Solomonic Jerusalem. From the Jul/Aug 1998 BAR, courtesy of Ephraim Stern.
In the Bible, King Hiram of Tyre supplies King Solomon with timber, craftsmen and gold for the construction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the alliance with the Phoenician ruler undoubtedly helped Solomon amass his extraordinary wealth. Biblical and other ancient texts suggest that the seafaring Phoenicians brought silver and other precious metals from the western Mediterranean in the 10th century B.C.E., the time of Hiram and Solomon, and archaeology has revealed numerous Phoenician mercantile colonies across the Mediterranean dating to the first millennium B.C.E.
Did the Phoenicians trade in the western Mediterranean before establishing these colonies? Where is Tarshish, the Biblical source of the Phoenician silver trade? A recent Hacksilber Project study published by Christine M. Thompson and Sheldon Skaggs in Internet Archaeology points to Spain and Sardinia as the Biblical world's source of silver in the 10th century B.C.E., lending scientific credence to textual associations between Biblical Tarshish and modern Sardinia.
The researchers: lead isotope analyses provide ore-provenance data on the Phoenician silver hoards, corroborating textual records of a Phoenician silver trade in the western Mediterranean before their colonial endeavors. The authors of the study collected samples from 48 silver artifacts from Akko, Dor, Ein Hogez and Tell Keisan in southern Phoenicia, identified as the 'Cisjordan Corpus' of Iron Age hacksilber hoards, all of which date between 1200 and 800 B.C.E. Longtime Tel Dor excavation director Ephraim Stern described the Dor hoard in BAR in 1998:
Most of the hoard is made up of small, flat tokens cast in the shape of small coins, as well as other pieces of cut silver sometimes referred to as hocksilber. In short, this was a hoard of an early form of money, that is, silver weighted for payment.
The Hacksilber Project researchers describe the Cisjordan Corpus as 'the largest identified concentration of pre-coinage silver hoards in the ancient Near East, and all of the silver in them is necessarily related to inter-regional trade.' The lead isotope data 'substantiate both Sardinia and Spain as candidates for Tarshish.' In order to identify Tarshish, the researchers turned to the text.
Tarshish comes up some two dozen times in the Hebrew Bible and is mentioned in ancient Near Eastern and classical texts. The Phoenician text on Sardinia's ninth-century Nora Stone begins with the words 'at Tarshish,' leading many scholars (including the fragment's esteemed translator, Frank Moore Cross) to associate the island with the Biblical site. In the 1990 BAR excavation report 'Searching for the Phoenicians in Sardinia,' Joan G. Scheuer describes Cross's analysis of the stone:
There Frank Cross showed us the Nora Stone with its famous inscription. Found in 1773, on Sardinia's southern coast, at the site of Nora, a Roman city built, like Tharros, over an earlier Phoenician-Punic settlement - the Nora Stone is a slab of stone, called a stela, 3.5 feet high and nearly 2 feet wide, on which there is an eight-line inscription.
Cross believes the top of the stela has been broken off and that two lines from the top of the stela are missing. The Semitic letters are incised in Phoenician style. Based on an analysis of the letters' shape and stance, Cross has concluded that the Nora Stone was inscribed in the second half of the ninth century B.C. His reading of the inscription supports the idea of a Phoenician presence in Sardinia as early as the ninth century B.C. According to Cross, the two missing lines told that Phoenicians fought with the local Sardinians. The inscription begins with the words - at Tarshish, perhaps a reference to the place where the battle may have occurred?
Cross thinks that the Tarshish of the Nora Stone was probably a metal-refining town in Sardinia, since the Semitic root means 'to smelt.' There were, in fact, many places known as 'Tharsis' or 'Tarsis' or 'Tharros' or 'Tarshish' in the ancient world. Other scholars, too, have noted that these places take their names from the Semitic root, that they were the 'Smelt-towns' of the ancient world.
Thompson and Skaggs's analyses provide the first archaeometric source data corroborating Cross's association between Sardinia and Tarsish. ...
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(b) King Solomon's Silver? Southern Phoenician Hacksilber Hoards and the Location of Tarshish
by Christine M. Thompson1 and Sheldon Skaggs2
http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue35/thompson_index.html
Evidence from silver hoards found in Phoenicia is linking Tarshish, the legendary source of King Solomon's silver, to ores in the western Mediterranean. Biblical passages sometimes describe this lost land as a supplier of metals (especially silver) to Phoenician sailors who traded in the service of Solomon and Hiram of Tyre in the 10th century BC. Classical authors similarly attribute the mercantile supremacy of the Phoenicians to their command of lucrative supplies of silver in the west, before they colonised the coasts and islands of its metalliferous regions around 800 BC. Conservative rejections of such reports have correctly emphasised a lack of evidence from silver. Lead isotope analyses of silver hoards found in Phoenicia now provide the initial evidence for pre-colonial silver-trade with the west; ore-provenance data correlate with the ancient documents that indicate both Sardinia and Spain as suppliers, and Sardinia as the island of Tarshish.
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(c) Comments by Yair Davidiy
The silver finds were provenanced from the Western Mediterranean. This could mean either Sardinia and Spain. Spain is the more probable despite the fact that the word Tarshish was found on an inscription in Sardinia. Other reports concerning this inscription indicate that it had been brought to Sardinia from elsewhere.
Dor was a city of Phoenician culture but in the territory of Manasseh and in our opinion in the end populated by Israelites.
Artifacts examined were 48 silver artifacts from Akko, Dor, Ein Hogez and Tell Keisan in southern Phoenicia. Most of these places appear to have been Israelite.
The name Tarshish is traced int he articles above to a root connoting "furnace" or "smelter".
Cyrus Godon linked it to the Greek "Thalas" connoting the Sea. This is consistent with a Talmudic Reference equating Tarshish with the Sea.
The name Tarshish was also considered [Aruch HaShalem] to be synonymous with the Atlantic Ocean.