Good day anons,
Thomas anon wanting to make an update about the Phoenician archive.
Early today, I met my old mentor whom participated in Tyr digs, looking for the archive. He added new information.
He said, there is a huge section of the "old" city that is still untouched, not excavated because the shiite grave yard which was near the non excavated area, expanded to the area and it created a huge problem when the gvt wanted to remove the unlawlful extention of the graveyard. So the gvt just left that big section untouched, then the so called civil war kicked in and the shiite grave yard kept on expanding. So according the him it's highly possible the archive rooms were located in that big section area of Tyr.
Then he talked about an old abandoned well discovered a few miles away from Tyr. In that well, the antiquities department in Lebanon had recovered around 200 small ceramic jugs. While cleaning them and reconstructing them, they found A FEW of them which had a couple of Phoenician letters or inscriptions carved into them. He then added that in the entire exacations done in the area, it was probably terribly rare to find ONE or TWO objects with a couple of Phoenician alphabet on them. He noted that it's very ODD.
let me explain:
Imagine you are teh governor of the city and you want to make a pottery order or a bread order. You bring in a scribe to your "office" and you tell him what you need, the scribe writes it down on a piece of pyparus, skin roll or a small piece of clay. That "ordonnance" is then sent via messanger to the "shop" in the industrial area so that the required items may be prepared by the craftman. the messanger leaves the written ordonnance in the shop, he doesn't take it back with him to the governor's place. so how come we cannot find such inscriptions in the industrial sector?
Another example is tombstones, we couldn't find ONE dating back to the Phoenician era with phoenician alphabet on it.
Another example is in the residential area or the hyppodrome, also, we couldn't find one spek of alphabet, not even one letter.
Which is terribly odd, and it's even more odd that it's extremely rare to find any sort of Phoenician writtings all around the Med sea eventhough Pheonicians were all over the place for a long long time.
So us old guys agreed there might have been a coordinated effort to gather and hide whatever inscription or writtings there is in Phoenician alphabet. And this was done during the Herod the Great rule. We must not disregard the possibility of the archive rooms being in that untouched sector in Tyr, but that is terribly challenged by the fact we are not able to find one spek of letter anywhere in the city itself. it's impossible. we shouldn't ignore the possibility of the archives being buried under that sector, but in the same time we shouldn't ignore the oddity of the "vanishing" inscriptions not just in Phoenicia but all over the Med.