A 2,600-year-old Jerusalem seal carries a biblical name and a fingerprint pressed in the clay

A small lump of hardened clay, sifted out of soil removed decades ago from beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, has turned out to carry an inscribed name that may connect directly to a minor but named figure from the Hebrew Bible. Pressed into the clay alongside the lettering is something even rarer: a clear human fingerprint, left by whoever sealed the document the object once secured. Researchers say the combination of a legible name and personal biological detail makes it one of the more evocative small finds to emerge from the ongoing excavation project in years.

The object is a bulla, a small clay seal impression once pressed onto a cord to close and authenticate a papyrus document, a common administrative tool in the ancient Near East. Officials, scribes, and merchants used such seals routinely, which means most surviving bullae carry ordinary names with no wider historical resonance. This one is different because the name on it matches, closely enough to draw attention, a minor official mentioned twice in the biblical text.

Recovered Through a Painstaking Soil-Sifting Project

The bulla was discovered by archaeologist Mordechai Ehrlich as part of the long-running Temple Mount Sifting Project, which processes soil removed from the Temple Mount decades ago to recover small artifacts that were never properly excavated at the time, according to a report on the discovery. Researchers date the seal to the late First Temple period, roughly the late seventh to early sixth century BCE, making it around 2,600 years old. The clay is inscribed in ancient Hebrew script with the phrase “Belonging to Yedayah, son of Asayahu,” a standard formula used on personal seals of the period to identify an owner by name and lineage.

A Fingerprint Left by the Original Owner

Beyond the inscription, the bulla still bears a clear fingerprint pressed into the clay, almost certainly left by the person who sealed the original document. Fingerprints occasionally survive on ancient clay sealings because the material was soft enough to record fine detail before it hardened, but a legible print on a piece this old, paired with a readable name, is an unusual combination. For researchers, it turns an administrative artifact into something closer to a personal trace of a specific individual who lived and worked in Jerusalem roughly twenty-six centuries ago.

A Possible Link to King Josiah’s Inner Circle

The name Asayahu appears in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles as a trusted royal official, described as “the king’s servant” and sent, along with several others, to consult the prophetess Huldah during King Josiah’s religious reforms after the discovery of a long-lost scroll of the law. Researchers studying the new bulla note that if the seal’s owner, identified as the son of an Asayahu, is connected to that same official or his family, the object would represent a tangible link between an administrative document and a specific episode described in the biblical narrative. Archaeologists studying the find are careful to frame the connection as plausible rather than proven, since the name Asayahu was not necessarily unique to a single official in ancient Judah.

Why Small Seals Carry Outsized Evidence

Individually, a bulla is a modest object, often no larger than a thumbnail, but collectively they form one of the richest sources of evidence for who actually staffed the administrative apparatus of ancient Judah, since they name real people rather than the kings and prophets who dominate the biblical text itself. Each verified name recovered from the Temple Mount soil adds a small data point to a broader effort by researchers to cross-reference archaeological finds against the biblical record, testing which figures mentioned only briefly in scripture left a physical trace in the archaeological layers beneath Jerusalem.

Recovering Artifacts from Soil Removed Decades Ago

The sifting project that recovered this bulla exists because a large volume of soil was removed from beneath the Temple Mount years ago without the kind of careful, layer-by-layer excavation that archaeologists would normally use at a site of such significance. Rather than treating that removed soil as a lost cause, the project methodically screens it by hand, searching for small artifacts, pottery fragments, coins, and seal impressions that would otherwise have been discarded entirely. The approach is slow and labor-intensive, relying heavily on volunteers working through material in controlled conditions, but it has already yielded a steady stream of finds that offer a rare, if imperfect, window into the site’s ancient history.

Why Names on Clay Carry Special Weight

Seals like this one mattered because they functioned as a signature does today, marking a document as authentic and tying it to a specific, accountable individual. That is precisely why archaeologists treat inscribed bullae as unusually reliable evidence compared with other categories of artifacts: a name pressed into clay by its owner, sealed onto a real document, is a far more direct link to a specific historical person than an object simply found in the same soil layer. When that name plausibly overlaps with a figure named in a much later copied and recopied text, the physical object offers a rare chance to test the historical grounding of the biblical narrative against material evidence recovered from the ground itself.

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited by Morning Overview staff.