Thus we will have a
largely undisturbed site to excavate to full depth. This is an old city whose existence spanned
at least 1400 BC through 200 AD and likely another thousand years before that. Trade would have used this route from the
very beginning to move goods and information from the Mediterranean littoral
through to Mesopotamia and a city like this was inevitable. That it has not been ground up with modern
development is a blessing.
I expect that actual
foundations of these cities throughout the Levant to ultimately date back to at
least 2500 BC as that coincides with the apparent rise of the global sea based
trade of the Atlantean world. This area
was clearly peripheral but also capable of sustaining cities and so they must
exist even if it was all mud.
Recall that these hills
then were well forested.
Ancient City
Discovered Beneath Biblical-Era Ruins in Israel
By Tia Ghose, Staff
Writer | November 16, 2013 10:43am ET
Burned ruins and fired mudbrick collapse, as
well as smashed pottery, reveal the late Bronze Age destruction at the city. On
the left is the room where several pottery vessels, a scarab of Amenhotep III,
a cache of cylinder seals, as well as stone implements were found.
Archaeologists
have unearthed traces of a previously unknown, 14th-century Canaanite city
buried underneath the ruins of another city in Israel.
The traces include an Egyptian amulet of
Amenhotep III and several pottery vessels from the Late Bronze Age unearthed at
the site of Gezer, an ancient Canaanite city.
Gezer was once a major center that sat at
the crossroads of trade
routes between Asia and Africa, said Steven Ortiz, a
co-director of the site's excavations and a biblical scholar at the
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
Biblical city
The ancient city of
Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age,
because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that
connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.
The city was ruled
over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical
accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the
city to King Solomon as
a wedding gift after marrying his daughter.
"It's always
changed hands throughout history," Ortiz told LiveScience.
The site has been
excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the
10th through eighth centuries B.C. Gezer also holds some of the largest
underground water tunnels of antiquity, which were likely used to keep the
water supply safe during sieges.
But earlier this
summer, Ortiz and his colleague Samuel Wolff of the Israel Antiquities
Authority noticed traces of an even more ancient city from centuries before
King Solomon's time. Among the layers was a section that dated to about the
14th century B.C., containing a scarab, or beetle, amulet from King Amenhotep
III, the grandfather of King Tut.
They also found shards of Philistine pottery.
During that period,
the ancient site was probably a Canaanite city that was under Egyptian
influence.
The findings are
consistent with what scholars suspected of the site, said Andrew Vaughn, a biblical
scholar and executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research,
who was not involved in the study.
"It's not
surprising that a city that was of importance in the biblical kingdoms of
Israel and Judah would have an older history and would have played an important
political and military role prior to that time," Vaughn told LiveScience.
"If you didn't control Gezer, you didn't control the east-west trade
route."
But once the
location of that major road moved during the Roman period, the city waned
in importance. It was later conquered and destroyed, but never fully rebuilt.
"Just like today
when you have a ghost town — where you move the train and that city goes out of
use," Ortiz said.
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