The 'metal books from Jordan'

The internet is awash with reports about the alleged discovery in Jordan of 70 books, all or partly metal and supposedly of Christian origin. The reporting can be infuriating, such as when Christian Today in the opening line of its article claimed that 'If the finding is found to be authentic, it would constitute the earliest known Christian writings.'

What bunkum!

If the findings are genuine they would only constitute the earliest known Christian writings if they were shown to be older than all others. I also find it very hard to see how such texts, if genuine, found without a datable archaeological context could ever be dated as early as Christian documents already known. You can't give an archaeological date to either a flooded cave or to something that's been in the family for 100 years.

Now a lot of good scholars will simply refuse to comment until they have seen the artefacts, or until proper information is published. However, I do not think it is illegitimate to comment on what one can see in the photos. This is not to affirm that the artefacts are genuine.

What can be seen?

The fourth image down here with three binding rings, shows on its third page (i.e. quite well into the book) that an entire page is covered with a picture. Likewise the image at Wikipedia which is of a book with five binding rings similarly shows a middle page entirely dominated by an image.

In other words most of what is being shown to us is picture books.

The only bit of writing I've been able to spot was on this photo from the BBC above.

What I see, starting second from the right on the bottom line is a jumble of palaeo-Hebrew taw, followed by a misshaped palaeo-Hebrew lamedh followed by a Greek digamma etc. Or it could be a Palmyrene aleph, followed by a Palmyrene nun, followed by a letter which doesn't occur in the Palmyrene alphabet. It could be a previously unknown script or a forgery. However, given the nature of the way scripts evolve, it is very hard to imagine that a group of Christians who fled from Judaea in the first century would use a script like this.

If the dots (?) over the fifth and sixth letters from the left are diacritics then the script is probably no earlier than the fourth century.

If the script is genuine and is in an intelligible Semitic language, I would predict that the letter like a capital gamma would be a vowel letter, probably waw or yodh.

The x letter, which occurs twice is likely to be an aleph or a taw.

Any more thoughts on decipherment?

Are there any more images with 'letters'?