Quick questions on Israelite art, architecture and writing: the Samaria ivories, ashlar masonry and epigraphic evidence (HSC Ancient History)

In 1910 the Harvard Expedition found around 100 inscribed pottery sherds (ostraca) in a storeroom on the acropolis; roughly 63 are legible. Written in ink in Hebrew/Phoenician script, most are dated by associated pottery and formula to the reign of Jeroboam II (c. 786-746 BC). They record deliveries of "aged wine" and "washed oil" from named estates or clans to the royal court, giving a regnal year, a place name, a sender, a recipient and a commodity.

The Siloam Inscription, six lines of Paleo-Hebrew carved into the wall of Hezekiah's Tunnel beneath Jerusalem and found in 1880, describes two teams of tunnellers digging toward each other from opposite ends until they heard each other's picks through the rock and met in the middle. It is usually linked to King Hezekiah's water project (2 Kings 20:20), undertaken ahead of Sennacherib's siege of 701 BC, roughly two decades after Samaria's fall. It matters here for comparison: it is the kind of substantial, formal royal-engineering inscription that survives from Judah's capital but has no true northern equivalent from Samaria itself, no comparable monumental royal narrative text has been recovered there, so Israelite writing must be reconstructed almost entirely from short administrative dockets, seals and the later Biblical text rather than a grand inscribed record of its own.