Na'aman received his doctorate in 1975 from Tel Aviv University with
Yohanan Aharoni as
supervisor, with a thesis on the importance of the
Amarna letters for the history of Israel. He subsequently worked as a lecturer in archaeology and history of the ancient Near East at TAU. In 1984, Na'aman became Associate Professor of Jewish History. From 1989 until his retirement in 2007, he held a chair in Jewish history at TAU. In 2012, he was elected a member of the
Israel Academy of Sciences.
Azekah Inscription In 1974, Na'aman published his first article, which contained a discovery of considerable importance for research. He found that what had been regarded as two separate
clay tablets written in
cuneiform in the
Akkadian language, each attributed to another king of
Assyria,
Tiglath Pileser III and
Sargon II, respectively, are actually fragments of one single tablet that had been broken at some point. This tablet became known as the
Azekah Inscription. Earlier, in one of these two pieces, researchers read the name of
Azariah, King of Judah, and therefore assumed that he took part in the war that was going on in central Syria. The fragment of the second tablet mentions the attack on the city of
Azekah, which was attributed to Sargon, king of Assyria. When the two fragments of the tablets were put together, it became clear that they describe, in considerable detail, the Assyrian King
Sennacherib's campaign against
Hezekiah, king of Judah. As a result, what was written earlier about Tiglath-Pileser and Sargon's campaigns to the Land of Israel was removed from scholarship, and instead, important details were added about Sennacherib's campaigns into Judah in 701 BCE.
Provenance of el-Amarna letters Na'aman teamed up with archaeologists
Israel Finkelstein and
Yuval Goren to try to determine the origin of the
Amarna tablets. They conducted the examination of the composition and origin of clay of which the tablets were made. Yuval Goren removed samples from hundreds of tablets, tested and determined what material they were made of and from where in
Canaan a material with such a chemical and mineralogical composition could have originated. Thus, in combination with the historical data emerging from the tablets and the archaeological data from sites throughout Canaan, the researchers determined the provenance of these tablets. The three authored the book
Inscribed in Clay, in which they presented the data from their research, including conclusions about the origin of the tablets and what this implies for the study of the Amarna documents. In this way they could determine the origin of many tablets in which the sender's name was lost through damage, or was not mentioned at all. There are also cases where the names of places are mentioned, but researchers disagreed on their identification, thus a
petrographic examination of the clay made it possible to decide the debate.
Other contributions Na'aman also took part in the
Brook of Egypt debate, identifying this biblical river as the
Besor Stream. The identification of the site of
Khirbet Qeiyafa proved to be problematic. Na'aman also contributed significantly to this debate. He held that the ruins were Canaanite, based on strong similarities with the nearby Canaanite excavations at
Beit Shemesh. The tribute volume upon his retirement was published in 2006. == Selected publications ==