Pieter Gert van der Veen

Overview

Pieter Gert van der Veen is a Dutch-born biblical archaeologist and epigrapher who teaches at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, where he holds the rank of Privatdozent, a post-doctoral lecturer, in the archaeology of Palestine. His work centres on inscribed seals and seal impressions of the Iron Age, early West Semitic writing, and the chronology of the Bronze and Iron Ages. He is not an Assyriologist; his field is the archaeology and inscriptions of the southern Levant.

Academic Career

Van der Veen took his doctorate at Bristol in 2005 with a study of Iron Age seals and bullae, and completed his habilitation at Mainz in 2018. He lectured at Mainz from 2014 to 2018 and served there as acting professor of biblical archaeology from 2019 to 2020. He is a co-founder of BICANE, a forum for discussing alternative chronologies of ancient Egypt and its neighbours.

Major Works and Contributions

He was one of the two epigraphers on the team that published the lead tablet recovered from the excavation dumps at Mount Ebal, and is a co-author of the 2023 paper presenting its inscription as an early Hebrew curse naming the God of Israel, the Mount Ebal Curse Tablet. The reading has been challenged, and he later published a reply to one critic with Scott Stripling. Earlier, with Christoffer Theis and Manfred Görg, he argued that the name-ring on the Berlin Pedestal may refer to Israel and so place Israel in Canaan before the reign of Merneptah.