James Leslie Starkey

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Starkey (second from right) with Flinders Petrie and Hilda Petrie (center) and Olga Tufnell (1930).

James Leslie Starkey (born January 3, 1895 in London ; died January 10, 1938 in Bayt Jibrin near Hebron ) was a British archaeologist .

Life

James Leslie Starkey was born the son of a surveyor. His interest in school education was not very pronounced. During World War I , Starkey was a member of the Royal Flying Corps and was awarded.

At University College London he deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs with Margaret Alice Murray and came into contact with Flinders Petrie . With Guy Brunton he accompanied him on one of his research stays in Qau-Badari in Upper Egypt , where they worked for Petrie's “British School of Archeology in Egypt”. From 1926 he assisted Petrie in Palestine , first in Tell Jemmeh , then he worked without Petrie in "Tell el-Far'ah, South" and in 1931 in "Tall al-Ajjul".

In 1932 he received his own excavation contract , with the support of Gerald Lankester Harding and Olga Tufnell . On the Tell ed-Duwer ( Lachish ) already measured by Petrie , they found a place of worship from the late Bronze Age, remains of city walls and city gates, and a sun shrine from the Hellenistic period. But above all, thanks to his meticulous method, Starkey was able to locate ostraka written to the commander of Lachish by an outpost shortly before the Babylonian conquest - eighteen pieces in 1935, three more in 1938. They were then the first documents in classic Hebrew .

  • Tell ed-Duwer (undated)

  • Lachish ostracon 3 (replica) with old Hebrew script

  • Reverse of the same ostracon

Grave of James Leslie Starkey in the Zion Protestant Cemetery in Jerusalem

His research came to an abrupt end when, at the age of 43, he was the victim of a gang attack by insurgent Arabs in Bayt Jibrin, on his way from Lachish to the opening of the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. The attackers thought he was a Jew because he had grown a full beard during the long excavation work. Starkey was buried in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem .

Starkey was a board member of the Palestine Exploration Fund and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). In 1924 he married Marjorie Rice. They had three children.

Works

  • Beth-pelet: (Tell Fara) , London British school of archeology in Egypt [etc.] 1930 (with: William M Flinders Petrie; Olga Tufnell; Eann Macdonald; Gerald Lankester Harding)
  • Finds from Biblical Lachish, a city of changing fortunes on the western frontier of Judah: First report of the Wellcome archaeological research expedition to the Near East. , London 1935
  • The Lachish letters, and an alphabetic "missing link"; military despatches of Biblical inscriptions one thousand years older than the Codex Sinaiticus: Second report of the Wellcome archaeological research expedition to the Near East. , London 1935
  • Palestine surgery 2500 years ago; skulls from Lachish marked by operations of the 7th – 8th centuries BC, and other interesting new discoveries at the historic Biblical site. , London 1936
  • Palestine clues to the origin of the alphabet; new discoveries at Tell Duweir, the Biblical Lachish ... , London 1937

literature

  • Yosef Garfinkel: The Murder of James Leslie Starkey near Lachish, in: Palestine Exploration Quarterly 148 (2016), 84-109. DOI 10.1080 / 00310328.2016.1138217

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on Tall al-Ajjul see English Wikipedia en: Tall al-Ajjul
  2. ↑ Olga Tufnell, 1905–1985 pef
  3. ↑ "Fosse Temple", see list of finds at the British Museum (PDF; 126 kB)
  4. ↑ Werner Keller, Joachim Rehork: And the Bible is right. Researchers prove the historical truth (= Ullstein. Volume 37246). New edition, 1st edition, Ullstein, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-548-37246-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Starkey, James Leslie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH January 10, 1938
Place of death Bayt Jibrin at Hebron