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The textual evidence from ancient Judah is mainly limited to ostraca, ink‐on‐clay inscriptions. Their facsimiles (binary depictions) are indispensable for further analysis. Previous attempts at mechanizing the creation of facsimiles have been problematic. Here, we present a proof of concept of objective binary image acquisition, via Raman mapping. Our method is based on a new peak detection transform, handling the challenging fluorescence of the clay, and circumventing preparatory ink composition analysis. A sequence of binary mappings (signifying the peaks) is created for each wavelength; their legibility reflects the prominence of Raman lines. Applied to a biblical‐period ostracon, the method exhibits high statistical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceremonies involving intentional burial of animals with humans are acknowledged to bear religious, social and political connotations, and we explored both the ritual activity and the social trajectory of these activities. To date, these ceremonies have rarely been examined within the context of nearby daily activities. We studied faunal remains associated with intramural burials in comparison with contemporaneous daily life in the midsecond millennium bc at Tel Megiddo, as well as comparison with concomitant extramural burials and locations of public feasts. Our study highlights the human interaction with animals that are not often treated as bearing social meaning or having interrelationships with human, the livestock animals. We demonstrate that livestock animals in the second millennium bc had a significant social role as well as economic value. The choice of animals consumed and sacrificed in these rituals is strongly related to the animal's symbolic potency and is based on the desired social message that the population aims to convey. Finally, the form of luxury food that is found in the Megiddo funerary rituals supports the hypothesis regarding the intramural burials' role in creating and enhancing social family bonds. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Late Bronze Age fragment of a clay cuneiform tablet with the Gilgamesh Epic was found in the 1950s on the surface at Megiddo. The presence of scribes in Megiddo is evident from the el-Amarna letters. This is the only first-class literary Mesopotamian text ever to be found in Canaan. The aim of the present study was to examine the origin of this tablet, by mineralogical and elemental methods. The petrographic and NAA results indicate that the tablet was not Mesopotamian, but was written in southern Israel. The implications of this result in view of the small corpus of scholarly cuneiform texts discovered in Egypt and the southern Levant in the second millenniumbce are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our laboratory has demonstrated recently that pulmonary inflammation induced by acute ozone exposure is much more severe in late stage pregnant and lactating rats than in postlactating rats or age-matched virgin females. It is currently widely believed that such pulmonary damage results, at least in part, from the reaction of ozone at sites of unsaturation in phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) molecules located in the epithelial fluid layer lining the lung surfaces and/or the plasma membranes of epithelial cells underlying this fluid layer. The objective of this study was to compare the PLFA composition of lung tissue and surfactant from ozone-sensitive late stage pregnant and lactating rats with comparable tissue from relatively ozone-insensitive age-matched prepregnant (virgin female) rats to explore the possibility that changes in lung PLFA composition during pregnancy and/or lactation contribute to the enhanced sensitivity of these physiologic states to ozone. In addition, the correlation of changes in plasma PLFA composition with those in lung was investigated. There were minor differences in the composition of lung tissue and surfactant PLFAs between prepregnant rats and pregnant rats at day 17 of gestation and only slightly greater differences between prepregnant and lactating rats. Changes from the prepregnant state in the PLFA composition of lung tissue, but not surfactant, correlated with changes in the plasma only in lactating rats and not in pregnant rats. Overall, the double bond index of PLFAs in surfactant and lung tissue was decreased in pregnant and lactating rats compared with prepregnant rats. Thus, the increased sensitivity of pregnant and lactating rats to ozone-induced lung injury cannot be attributed to an increased availability of unsaturated fatty acids. In addition, the arachidonic acid composition of phospholipids did not appear to explain differences between prepregnant rats and pregnant or lactating rats in their... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to compare collagen content in the TM of normal and glaucomatous eyes, and to establish whether collagen levels change with age. Collagen content was measured in 30 normal and 27 age matched glaucoma trabeculectomy specimens by the sirius red dye binding technique, and in 14 normal and 15 age matched glaucoma specimens by amino acid analysis. Both dye binding data and amino acid analysis showed no statistical difference between normal and glaucoma samples. Age had no significant effect on mean optical densities or on the collagen-specific amino acids proline, hydroxyproline, and hydroxylysine. Amino acid variability, however, was statistically different between the two groups. These results indicate that mean collagen levels in the trabecular meshwork of glaucomatous eyes do not differ from those in normal eyes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]