ABSTRACT
Figure 52. Palestine in the Achaemenid era Gibeon in the north-centre, Bet-hakkerem in the south-centre, Mizpah and Jericho in the north, Keilah and Zanoah in the south-east and Bet-Sur and Tekoa in the south-west. Like other provinces, Judea (Yĕhûd) minted its own coins (for local use) and the seals found there include official ones (also with the words Yhd or Yhwd) and some belonging to public officials (bearing their names and sometimes a title such as ph 9w’ ‘governor’, or spr ‘scribe’). However, both bullae and seals nearly all come from the antique market and include many forgeries; hence it is not prudent to use them. A precise understanding of
the system and its variations is made even more difficult because the imperial Aramaic words for ‘governor’ (peh 9āh) and for ‘province’ (mĕdīnāh) also appear to be used at more than one level of hierarchy. Under this administrative structure, the local communities kept their representative bodies, both restricted (‘elders’ and ‘judges’) for dispensing justice, and plenary (‘ēdāh, qāhāl are typical words used in the post-exile language), plus a variety of political leaders according to local tradition. Some city-states had their own reigning dynasties, as we know for the Phoenician coast thanks to inscriptions of the kings of the Persian period in Sidon (Eshmun‘azar I and II, Tabnit: SSI, III, 27-28) and Byblos (Yehawmilk: SSI, III, 25). This is also confirmed by classical sources like Herodotus (7.97). We should note that during the fourth and third centuries the ‘autonomous’ cities (those with their own kings) along the Phoenician coast (Arwad, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon) and in Philistia (Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza) also minted high denomination coins bearing their own emblems and distributed regionally, while Samaria and Jerusalem only minted small value coins with the imperial emblems, for local use. Other ‘kingdoms’ had an ethnical-tribal nature, especially in Transjordan, where our information mainly concerns the ‘kings’ of the Ammonites, and in the Arab world mainly the ‘kings’ of Qedar (in particular from the Tell Maskhuta inscription SSI, II, 25). These local political structures were obliged to coexist (especially in the city-states) alongside the third-level Persian administrative structures.
