Lachish Letters

The Lachish Letters are a group of ancient Hebrew ostraca, fragments of pottery inscribed in carbon ink, unearthed at the site of Tel Lachish in the southern Levant. Excavator James Leslie Starkey found the pieces in 1935, and scholars date the writing to around 590 BC, in the final years before the Babylonian army of King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Lachish in 588 or 586 BC during the reign of Judah's King Zedekiah. The surviving texts record correspondence between a subordinate officer named Hoshaiah and a superior named Yaush, likely the commander of the garrison, and their contents range from military reports on the approaching Babylonian threat to a personal defense against an accusation leveled at the writer. Most of the seventeen best known ostraca are held by the British Museum in London, with further pieces in the Israel Museum and the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/