บุคคลโยเซฟ นาเวห์Joseph Naveh

Naveh was born in Mukachevo, then Czechoslovakia, on 21 January 1928. He worked for the Israel Department of Antiquities from 1955 to 1971 and was a district archaeologist from 1958, then taught in the Department of Ancient Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1971 to 1991. His field was West Semitic epigraphy: the shapes of letters, and what the shapes date.

That is the skill the amulet material needs. A rolled silver or bronze lamella and a bowl written in a spiral both carry script and nothing else datable — no stratigraphy in a bowl bought on a market, no style in a thin strip of metal. "The Development of the Aramaic Script", his 1970 dissertation, and "Early History of the Alphabet", 1997, are the tools; the amulet volumes are what he used them on.

With Shaked he produced "Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity" and then "Magic Spells and Formulae" in 1993. Inference — the dating in this atlas for any Aramaic amulet or bowl rests on that letter-by-letter work, whether or not the record says so.

He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1994. He died on 21 November 2011.

The bowls keep arriving on the antiquities market without find-spots, which is the reason his palaeography stays load-bearing and also the reason the objects are contested. This project has not read a published provenance study of the bowl corpus and does not assert what share of it was excavated.