The following selection is adapted from the “New Bible Handbook.” It provides a helpful overview of the early development of archaeology.
The Birth of Archaeology
Until the 19th century, nearly all knowledge of the ancient world came either through the Scripture, or through the historical works of authors like Josephus and Herodotus. But in the past two hundred years, a torrent of archaeological discoveries has cast a flood of light upon the early history of mankind.
For centuries, monuments stood in silence, bearing mute witness to the lives of those long gone. Then came a turning point: the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This event unlocked the stories hidden in stone. It was soon followed by Henry Layard’s excavations in Mesopotamia, and the decipherment of the Babylonian cuneiform script. The path had been cleared to recover, translate, and understand the written records of the ancient world.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, originally pictographs, each represent either a word or a syllable, and are typically found engraved on stone or other hard materials. In contrast, Babylonian cuneiform writing, composed of wedge-shaped marks, was typically pressed into clay tablets using a stylus with a triangular end.
Here’s how cuneiform worked: an ancient scribe would kneel beside the Euphrates or Nile, select a suitable lump of clay, flatten and smooth it, and—while the clay was still moist—impress symbols into it with his stylus. The resulting text would then be baked or sun-dried, rendering it astonishingly durable—capable of surviving thousands of years.
And survive they did. We now possess thousands of tablets—dug from ancient sands—that narrate the past in a variety of genres: from myth to poetry, from contracts to catalogues, from state decrees to grocery receipts. These include:
- Law books
- Letters and correspondences
- Commercial records
- Official orders
Even more, archaeology has illuminated ancient life through non-written artifacts: homes and tombs, kitchens and sanctuaries, golden ornaments and painted pots, models of bakeries and boats, musical instruments and hairpins. These aren’t just museum pieces. They are fragments of human culture, vivid testimonies to the customs and creativity of the ancient world.
As Sir Leonard Woolley rightly described it, the task of “digging up the past” has become a scientific discipline. Mounds—called “tells”, the layered ruins of ancient cities—are selected, dug, and analyzed methodically. Why are they mounds? Because the Eastern custom was to build new cities atop the ruins of the old. Thus, every tell is a layered cake of history, with the newest remnants above and the oldest below.
Take Jericho, for example. Near the surface, archaeologists uncovered remains from the Byzantine period. Beneath that were ruins of the city built by Hiel the Bethelite (1 Kings 16:34). Deeper still lay evidence of the burned city Joshua conquered (Joshua 6:24), including charred house remains and 15th-century B.C. artifacts. Under that were remnants of an even older fortified city, pre-dating 2000 B.C. Then came a stratum with Neolithic tools and pottery. Finally, scattered across a floor of compacted earth, were Paleolithic flints, testifying to prehistoric human occupation.
But how are such ancient layers dated?
Some are tied to artifacts like inscriptions, coins, or dated scarabs. Others rely on the style and material of discovered items—just as we date European ruins by the presence of Roman bricks or Gothic arches. In the East, building materials, weapon shapes, and pottery types serve as archaeological timestamps.
A turning point came in Palestine fifty years ago, when Professor Flinders Petrie undertook a detailed analysis of thousands of pottery fragments. By documenting the location and associated items for each piece, he was able to identify regional and period-specific pottery styles—a method still considered “the best criterion an archaeologist can have.”
Exact dates are elusive, but sequence-dating allows us to distinguish between the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Ages in Palestine—corresponding roughly to 2500, 2000, and 1600 B.C.
Before metal, there was flint. In the Paleolithic (Old Stone) age, tools were crudely chipped. In the Neolithic (New Stone) age, they were smoothed, polished, and artfully formed, indicating a growing sophistication in both technique and society.
These periods do not align across regions. For instance:
- In Mesopotamia, the Neolithic era closed by the fourth millennium B.C.
- In Palestine, it lingered somewhat longer.
- In Britain, it continued almost to the Christian era.
Attempts to date the Paleolithic period remain speculative, with scholarly estimates widely divergent.
The Transmission of the Record
The discoveries of archaeology have not only expanded our understanding of the ancient world—they have also reshaped how we view the biblical record itself. In earlier centuries, the patriarchal narratives of Genesis were often dismissed by skeptics as mere legend. Even Abraham, the father of faith, was regarded by some as a mythological figure. But no longer.
Today, scholars such as Sir Leonard Woolley suggest that Abraham’s existence is likely “vouched for by written documents almost, if not quite, contemporary with him.” Inscriptions uncovered in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, dating back well before 2000 B.C., have confirmed the existence of legal codes and written records from the very era in which Abraham lived.
It is even possible, Woolley speculates, that Abraham himself may have recorded for his household “so much of the familiar laws of Sumer… as he thought applicable to their nomad life.”
Supporting this idea, archaeologists have found genealogical tablets in both Babylonia and Egypt—remarkably similar in form and style to those we find in Genesis. These are not just lists of names, but records introduced with phrases nearly identical to the biblical, such as “these are the generations of…” (Genesis 2:4, 5:1).
The Hebrew word sepher—translated as “book”—means a record or register, and the town Kirjath-Sepher (Joshua 15:15) literally means “city of records.” These facts lend possible support to the view that Moses copied earlier patriarchal tablets, passed down from Abraham and his descendants, and integrated them into the book of Genesis.
Consider this: the promises of a “seed”—to Eve, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—are meticulously preserved alongside their genealogies. The shift in tone beginning in Genesis 12 is striking: the narrative becomes personal, detailed, even confessional. The raw honesty with which Abraham and Jacob’s doubts and failures are recorded speaks not of myth but of memory. These feel like autobiographical accounts, drawn from those who lived the events.
This idea gains further credibility from historical parallels. The actions and customs of Abraham and Jacob mirror what we now know of the laws and cultures of their time. A Hurrian legal tablet, for instance, states that the man who possesses his father-in-law’s household gods becomes the rightful heir—illuminating Rachel’s theft of Laban’s teraphim (Genesis 31:34). Likewise, Egyptian customs and thinking explain much about the life of Joseph and the setting of Exodus.
Even the Bible’s earliest references to writing—often doubted in the past—have been confirmed by archaeology. Ancient genealogies, legal codes, and war records (cf. Genesis 5:1; Exodus 24:4; Numbers 21:14) were common across the ancient Near East. Inscribed pottery, erasable ink, and the use of iron pens (Jeremiah 17:1) have all been found. Egypt and Babylon even had professional scribes (Judges 5:14).
We now know of three major writing systems used in that era:
- Hieroglyphic (Egyptian),
- Cuneiform (Babylonian),
- A proto-Hebrew alphabet, dating from the time of Moses or earlier.
This last form—less pictorial, more abstract—was found at Serabit in the Sinai peninsula, carved by Semitic workers in Egyptian turquoise mines. Similar examples have turned up in Byblos, Gezer, Beth-shemesh, and Lachish, dated between 2000 and 1500 B.C.
Another extraordinary discovery was made at Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast: a library of tablets written in a cuneiform alphabet with twenty-nine characters, in a language akin to Hebrew.
Scripture itself supports this use of writing: “You shall write them on the doorposts of your house” (Deuteronomy 6:9), and “When a man takes a wife and writes her a certificate of divorce…” (Deuteronomy 24:1). These examples, combined with the evidence above, make it entirely reasonable to believe that writing was known and used among the Hebrews during Moses’ lifetime.
