Advisor to Israel’s President Finds Rare 2,500-Year-Old Inscription with Name of Persian King Darius

JERUSALEM, Israel – A few months ago, Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s Media Advisor, Eylon Levy, and a friend of his, Yakov Ashkenazi, were walking in Tel Lachish National Park in southern Israel when they came across a small pottery shard, a broken piece of pottery material, with some kind of inscription on it.

They notified the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which sent it to a laboratory. To the great surprise of the experts, the shard was 2,500 hundred years old and provided evidence of the government of Persian King Darius the Great at Lachish at the turn of the 5th century BC.

Darius (not the one mentioned in the book of Daniel) receives mention in the book of Ezra as a king who was friendly to the Jews, and building on the 2nd Temple began under his reign.

According to a news release by the IAA, “This is the first discovery of an inscription bearing Darius the Great’s name anywhere in the Land of Israel.”

The inscription on the shard reads, in Aramaic, “Year 24 of Darius,” which would put the date at 498 B.C. The king’s name is recorded in the text as the father of Ahasuerus, who was the king written about in the book of Esther. Ahasuerus was persuaded by the evil Haman to issue a decree to kill the Jews in Persia. His Jewish wife, Hadassah or Esther, risked her life to uncover Haman’s plot and the king reversed his decree hanging Haman instead on gallows he had built to hang Esther’s cousin, Mordechai. The biblical story is celebrated each year, as a directive of the Lord, by Jews around the world during the Feast of Purim. (celebrated this year on March 6th.)

Levy, who discovered the shard, first thought it might be a joke. “When I picked up the ostracon (shard) and saw the inscription, my hands shook,” he said. “I looked left and right for the cameras, because I was sure someone was playing an elaborate prank on me.”

Researchers Saar Ganor of the IAA and Dr. Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem point out that British excavations at Tel Lachish nearly 90 years ago uncovered evidence of elaborate building from the time of Persian rule, “built on top of the podium of the destroyed palace-fort of the Judean kings.”

The IAA release notes, “It appears that the inscribed ostracon, discovered in the area of the Persian building, may have been an administrative note, akin to a receipt of goods or for their dispatchment.”

Israel Antiquities Authority Director Eli Escuzido expressed his excitement about the find, noting, “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 Ahahsuerus, who ruled ‘from India to Cush’, 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!”

The find will be published in the IAA journal Atiqot, Vol. 110:

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