Samaria Ostraca are inscriptions upon ceramic shards in a regional Samarian dialect of Ancient Hebrew script. Most of the aforementioned inscriptions were unearthed scattered in the makeup fill for the infamous “Ostraca house”, one of the structures comprising the royal complex at Samaria (Sebastia). Over 100 such inscriptions were found. While most of them were discovered during the 1910 Harvard University-led expedition, a few additional texts were discovered during the activity of the so-called “joint expedition” in the 1930s. They document the transportation of “aged wine” and “washed oil”. Furthermore, occasionally these records included info regarding the place of origin, the name of the sender, the name of the receiver of the delivery, and as mentioned the contents of the delivery. These records sometimes elaborate on the date of the transfer by mentioning a year of the reign of an unmentioned Israelite king. Much scholarly attention was directed towards who is the king in question. Two of the most prominent dating theories date the creation of the records to the reign of Joash (800-784 BCE) and his successor Jeroboam II (788-747 BCE) or solely under the early rule of the latter. Thus, an overwhelming majority of the records were dated to the early Iron Age IIb (the first half of the 8th century BCE).

The dating of the Ostraca is of pivotal importance for the overall research of the Kingdom of Israel, and Israelite paleography in particular. Research regarding numerical assumptions of literary players in Samaria yielded that a maximum of only two scribes created these documents. This conclusion, alongside parallel evidence from this era, gave rise to the conclusion of a limited and small in scale literary activity and know-how at the times of the Northern Kingdom. Initially, researchers saw these documents as testimony of the complex stately mechanisms of the Israelite kingdom. In contrast, contemporary research perceptions view the Samaria Ostraca index as evidence for only an early stage of state formation. The claim is backed by the tribal affiliations and relations attested to within the texts, namely those interactions between the receivers at Samaria to the manassite tribal regions’ elite. In 2021 it was proposed that the texts represent a specific moment in time of the Israelite Kingdom, affiliated more to acts of worship than to courtly affairs.