Excavation director Dr. Ayala Zilberstein holding the inscription. Credit: Emil Aladjem/Israel Antiquities Authority.

Archaeologists working near Temple Mount in Jerusalem were exploring a pile of earth from an ancient drainage canal. They found a few artifacts, including a seemingly unimportant broken piece of pottery. Just 3 centimeters across, the piece has faint wedge-shaped marks pressed into its surface. Those marks turned out to be cuneiform script, a message written nearly 2,700 years ago.

That fragment has now turned out to be the first known Assyrian inscription ever discovered in Jerusalem. It rewrites what we know about the city’s turbulent past under the shadow of one of history’s most powerful empires.

“It is a small fragment of great significance,” said Dr. Peter Zilberg, an Assyriologist at Bar-Ilan University who helped analyze the artifact. “This is somewhat of a flashlight in the fog of history.”

Message from the Empire

The discovery, announced on October 22, 2025 by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), is startling for its context. The clay shard bears a royal Assyrian message, written in Akkadian and stamped with a sealing—likely a bulla, or official seal. This was meant to mark a letter sent from the Assyrian court to a king of Judah.

The inscription, though only partially preserved, speaks volumes: it demands tribute.

The Assyrian pottery sherd with cuneiform text that inquires about a delayed tax payment from the Kingdom of Judah. Image credits: Israel Antiquities Authority.

The tribute should be paid “by the first of [the month of] Av”— or else. Av is the fifth month of the religious calendar. The fragment also names a royal chariot officer, described in the text as “the holder of the reins,” a title for high-ranking messengers known from other Assyrian records. It’s a rare record that shows a balance of power between kingdoms in the region.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime find,” said Moriah Cohen, the staff member who uncovered artefact at the Emek Tzurim National Park. “Even though so many fascinating finds have been discovered here … we’ve never, ever found anything like this.”

The artifact dates to somewhere between the late 8th and mid-7th centuries BCE. Assyrian rulers exerted military pressure, demanded tributes, and faced revolts across the southern Levant during this period. At that time, the Assyrian Empire ruled vast swaths of the Near East. The Kingdom of Israel had already been crushed, and Judah—its southern neighbor—had become a vassal state.

Yet even within that subjugation, there was tension.

“It echoes the biblical story of delaying paying taxes to the Assyrians, and this is really important,” said Zilberg in an interview with The Times of Israel.

Hezekiah’s Gamble Didn’t Work

The inscription appears to reflect that very moment of tension. In the Hebrew Bible, King Hezekiah of Judah rebels against Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. He withholds tribute—prompting a devastating campaign. There seems to be some historical truth to that biblical writing.

“In the 14th year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria marched against all the fortified towns of Judah and seized them,” reads 2 Kings 18:13–14. “King Hezekiah… said to the king of Assyria at Lachish: ‘I have done wrong; withdraw from me; and I shall bear whatever you impose on me.’”

The price of rebellion was 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold—an enormous sum at the time. A talent was an ancient unit of weight whose exact measure varied through history.

Until now, we have known about this episode mainly through Assyrian sources like the Sennacherib prisms and the Hebrew Bible. But the inscription offers, for the first time, physical evidence of this political friction from the heart of Jerusalem itself.

“This is the very first evidence of its kind of the official, and perhaps even tense, communication that took place between Jerusalem and the world’s most powerful superpower,” wrote Zilberg and Dr. Filip Vukosavović, another Assyriologist with the IAA.

Experts believe Assyrian officials likely addressed the inscription to Hezekiah’s court or to that of his successors—such as Manasseh or Josiah—who also ruled during Judah’s time as a vassal of the Assyrian Empire. However, that is just an assumption as the top portion is missing.

“The very existence of such an official appeal would seemingly attest to a certain point of friction,” Zilberg and Vukosavović noted in a joint statement.

Clay from a Distant Land

The fragment’s foreign origins also tell a different type of story.

According to Dr. Anat Cohen-Weinberger, a petrographic researcher with the IAA, the clay used to make the bulla is “entirely different from the local raw materials typically used to produce pottery, bullae, and clay documents in Jerusalem.”

Instead, its mineral composition matches the geology of the Tigris Basin, home to the ancient Assyrian capitals of Nineveh, Ashur, and Nimrud.

“This strengthens our understanding of the depth of the Assyrian presence in Jerusalem,” said Dr. Ayala Zilberstein, who directed the excavation at Davidson Archaeological Park.

The building where the artifact was found—a large structure from the First Temple period—may have served as an administrative center. Archaeologists have recovered other, still-unpublished bullae from the site, suggesting it served as an elite bureaucratic hub where officials managed correspondence and tribute.

“We have been finding more and more evidence of administrative activities at a high level,” Zilberstein told The Times of Israel. “This inscription proves that we are talking about a very important place.”

Why It’s So Special

Archaeologists and historians actively debate Jerusalem’s First Temple period, which lasted from around 1000 to 586 BCE and remains one of the city’s most politically charged eras. Much of our knowledge comes from later biblical texts or inscriptions found in foreign capitals. The first are unreliable, and the second are very sparse.

This find is extremely special.

It reveals how deeply Assyria extended its grip into Judah’s capital—enough to send sealed letters to the king, enough to demand tribute with a deadline.

It also shows the blend of cultural systems at the time. The inscription dates the demand using the Mesopotamian calendar, which scholars note is strikingly similar to the Hebrew calendar still used today.

The fragment is now undergoing further analysis, including chemical tests to determine its exact origin within Assyria. Meanwhile, the IAA plans to unveil the inscription to the public at the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of the Land of Israel.