This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Cynthia Graber.

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The Hebrew Bible was first written down some 2,600 years ago,

and scholars have argued that only a population with sufficiently

widespread literacy could have accomplished the task.

Now there's new evidence for such literacy in the form of notes from that same time period

written in ink on shards of pottery.

Scientists have debated whether the first significant phase of the

compilation of biblical texts happened before or after the fall of the First Temple

and 586 B.C. E.

To get at the potential answers to that question,

a group of researchers in Israel

analyzed mundane inscriptions about the needs of daily life

on 16 ceramic shards written about 600 B.C.

From an ancient military fortress in Arad at the northern edge of the Negev Desert.

These notes had no direct connection with biblical texts, which were more frequently written on papyrus or parchment

and would not have survived the region's climate,

but they reveal that literacy did not belong to a privileged few, the studies in the proceedings of

the National Academy of Sciences.

The research team was able to determine that the documents,

detailing military movements and food expenses, were written by a minimum of

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