archeology - the archaeology of palestine from the neolithic through the middle bronze age

The Archaeology of Palestine from the Neolithic through the Middle Bronze Age

G. Ernest Wright

Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 91, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1971), pp. 276-293.

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THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF PALESTIXE FROM THE NEOLITHIC THROUGH THE RIIDDLE BRONZE AGE*

These three fascicules of CAHZ were written by two of the most distinguished figures in Near Eastern archaeology. Their surveys span a period of over 5000 years. The nature of the treatment of the various periods is examined and the general agreements which have been reached are summarized. Particular attention is paid, however, to the areas where problems exist. At critical junctions what may be termed minority viewpoints were adopted by the authors, even though eloquently expressed and defended in the literature. I t seemed worth the effort, therefore, to discuss those areas in every period where alternate solutions to specific problems are not only possible, but are held by a variety of people. Some different viewpoints are defended on the basis of new data and bibliography. Among such problems are the sequence of cultures in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, how to interpret and label the material in the era leading up to the full urbanism of the third millennium, the chronology, data and terminology of the period between ca. 2300 and 1550 B.c., etc.

THESETHREE FASCICULES of the revised CAH gently collects all important material known up provide us with 117 pages of text and bibliogra- to the time of writing (ca. 1964-1965), but dis- phy which summarize what is known about the plays it with such insight and skill that one is archaeology of Palestine (mainly the land occu- given an immediate and clear impression of the pied by Israel, but in the work of de Vaux that cultural situation, both its highlights and its also by Jordan) from ca. 8000 to 1550 B.C. This, shadows, in the country's first period, from villages of course, involves a radical compression of data. to cities, from the Neolithic revolution through The usefulness of such a survey, then, depends the initial period of the urban revolution. completely upon the good judgment of the writers Before the appearance of these two fascicules, in what to include and what to exclude, and in I would have recommended without hesitation their insight and skill in generalization to extract Emmanuel Anati's Palestine Before the Hebrews from the data an overall picture of the country (1963) as the best general introduction. Without in the periods in question. downgrading the value of Anati's work, I believe

With such a tight limitation placed upon an that de Vaux's seventy-seven pages are the best author it is obvious that learning and judgment and most authoritative brief introduction now go hand in hand and that such a procedure will available. Of course, Palestine should not be, produce occasional masterpieces on the one hand and cannot be, understood without its whole and, on the other, pieces which do not do justice Near Eastern context; and anthropologists in to what is known so that other sources must be particular have been producing excellent litera- recommended. ture on the subject of the Neolithic revolution,

To the first category clearly belong the two even though each treatment is outdated in detail chapters on the early periods by de Vaux. Here before it can be published.' we have the work of a master, who not only dili-

Xmong the pioneering works which focus on the fresh * R. de Vaux, O.P., Palestine During the Xeolithic and perspectives, one might cite Robert J. Braidwood, The

Chalcolithic Periods and Palestine in the Ear ly Bronze Age Xear East and the Foundations of Civilization (1952); (Cambridge Ancient History, revised ed., Fasc. 47 and 46, Robert Redfield, T h e Primitzve World and i ts Transfor- 1966 [Vol. I , Chap. IX(b) and Chap. XV]; and Kathleen mation (1953); Braidwood and Willey, Courses Toward PI. Kenyon, Palestine in the ,T!iiddle Bronze i lge ( ibid. , Urban L i f e (1962), etc. Yet for the latter part of the Fasc. 48, 1966 [Vol. 11, Chap. 1111. period one can get no satisfactory picture from the an-

277 WRIGHT:Archaeology of Palestine from Neolithic through Middle Bronze Age

I. For the Seolithic and Chalcolithic periods de Vaux divides his treatment into three sections. The first is "Hunters and Farmers" (Sections I-V of his chapter); the second is "Farmers and Potters" (Section VI) ; and third, "Farmers, Potters and Metal Workers" (Section VII). A final very brief section (VIII) provides a brief treatment of the "Megalithic Culture." This is a very logical division of the material, having to do with the first settlements in pre-Pottery Neo- lithic, Pottery Neolithic and the Chalcolithic Period when the first metal appeared.

A major difficulty with the Palestine bridge between Asia and Africa is to know when the term "Chalcolithic" should be applied to the country. I t is clear that in Anatolia and in Meso- potamia copper first appears to have been used as early as at least the second half of the 5th millennium (Tell Halaf). As for Israel and Jordan we have no actual knowledge of the use of copper before about the third quarter of the 4th millennium in the Ghassulian-Beersheba culture. De Vaux appears to be inclined not to introduce the term "metal working" (Chalcolithic) until we have actual evidence. As will be noted below, however, there is a 2500-year period between about 6000 and 3500 B.C. when little is known from any large samplings of material about the country. That metal probably appeared later in this part of the Fertile Crescent than in the northern areas seems certain. Therefore, the choice of when to introduce the term Chalcolithic either rests upon data taken from the north or is

thropologists alone. Here one needs to read W. F.Al-bright, From the Stone i lge to Christianity (1940; Anchor Books ed. 1957), Chap. 111; Henri Frankfort, The Bir th of Civilization i n the Near East (1951; Anchor Books, 1956); and such pioneering articles as Thorkild Jacob- sen's "Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia," J S E S , Vol. I1 (1943), pp. 159-172; and "Early Political Developments in ltesopotamia," Zeitschrift fur Assyrio- logie, X.F. 18 (1957), pp. 91-140. The two most important early Neolithic villages known from the 7th-6th millennia B.C. are, of course, Jericho, in occupied Jordan, and Catal Huyiik in the Cilician Plain of Turkey. The first is not adequately known as yet from publication, but see K . M. Kenyon, Digging up Jericho (1957), and Archaeol-ogy and the Holy Land (1960). For the second see James Rlellaart, catal H u y u k (New York, 1967).

a fairly arbitrary decision. Most scholars today simply refer to the 4th millennium in Palestine as Chalcolithic, whereas pre-Pottery Neolithic would be 8th-7th millennia, while Pottery Neo- lithic would be 6th-5th millennia. These appear to be approximations which de Vaux also uses, except for the fact that "Chalcolithic" in his view should not be used until the metal is actually known in the country-that is, ca. 3500 B.C.

We know from such sites as ~Eynan (cEin Mallaha) in the Upper Jordan Valley, and from the Nahal Oren (Wadi Fellah) in the Carmel range, that the first sickle blades and the first attempts at simple round huts on terraces with impermanent tops took place in the 10th and 9th millennia, a transition period between the Paleo- lithic and Neolithic Periods. The Neolithic began with the first real villages in which hunting and farming together were the main features of the economy. This would involve the introduction of simple agriculture and the domestication of cer-tain animals. De Vaux's review of the evidence need not be repeated here. However, he does point to something not commonly realized and that is the complexity of the evidence which we have. Up to this time the microlithic Natufian Culture was considered to belong to the transitional period while, as first established by Ren6 Neuville, the dominant flint industry of the Neo- lithic Period was Tahunian. De Vaux points out that pre-Pottery Seolithic A and B have a flint industry that seems more akin to the Natufian while the Tahunian is evident only in pre-Pottery Seolithic B; that is, in the second phase during the 7th millennium. He believes that this industry is largely confined to the southern part of the country and to the Transjordan Desert. The remarkable site of Beidha and others in southern Transjordan, as shown by the excavation of Diana Kirkbride, would appear to be more oriented toward the desert since arrowheads are present while sickle blades are rare. That is to say, as the evidence is accumulated in more detail for the period, a considerable regional variation may indeed be present, as also a variety of groups of people who are not all on the same

278 Jour?zal of the American Orie~ztal Society, 91.9 (1371)

technological level-something which has always been the case in the Near East to this day.

I t is important to stress with de Vaux that the introduction of pottery, while it is a convenient dividing line for archaeologists, actually involves no basic cultural change. There is simply the addition of pottery vessels to the former group of stone, reed basket and leather materials, used for the variety of purposes which a farming community needed. The basic problem of the Pottery Xeolithic Period is that we have no consecutive sequences of architecture or of arti- facts which cover the period between f6000-3500 B.C. All we have is a large number of deposits from various places and the problem is how to arrange them in any coherent order. Without stratigraphy it simply cannot be done with certainty. As a result, there is a large difference of opinion as to the range and dating of the various groupings. I think de Vaux is right in suggesting that the earliest range is a rarely found dark-faced burnished ware, with or without incisions. Sherds of this ware shown me by Dr. Prausnitz of Israel's Department of Antiquities, for example, from Sheikh Ali (Tell ~E l i ) in the Jordan Valley, remind one very strongly of the lowest ranges of the Braidwood Amuq pottery in Syria (Phases A and B) .2

In 1936 Ben-Dor distinguished two early pottery layers at Jericho, Levels I X and VIII. The exposure was perhaps too small to yield as clear a picture of each phase as is necessary for comparative work. In the Kenyon excavations at Jericho between 1952 and 1958, these phases are labeled Pottery Xeolithic h and B, but from what has been said in preliminary publications thus far one gains the impression that stratification between the two was not at all clear in the places where Kenyon found the material. Hence, the separation of Pottery Neolithic A and B at Jericho seems to have been largely typological. This leads de Vaux to the assumption that Pot- tery Neolithic A means coarse wares, while B

2 K. J. Braidwood and L. S. Braidwood, Excacations i n the Plain of Antioch, T'ol. I . The Earlier dssemhlages, Phases A-J (Chicago, 1960).

refers to finer wares. Hence, both may belong to the same period (p. 17), or they belong to a development in which the later phase may be introduced by a culture which scholars have generally assumed to be Chalcolithic; it was discovered at Shacar ha-Golan and has been called Yarmukian. Whether the Yarmukian is to be termed a Seolithic or Chalcolithic culture depends on the considerations outlined above.

Yet with regard to Jericho I X and VIII of Ben-Dor, this reviewer, knowing the latter's care in his archaeological work, does not believe that they can be easily dismissed. Renamed Pottery Neolithic A and B is quite satisfactory as long as the proper hesitations are introduced regarding the use of the term "Chalcolithic." In any case, this reviewer is inclined to agree with de Vaux that there may well be a gap at Jericho between pre-Pottery Xeolithic B and the introduction of pottery in Pottery Seolithic A. Yet I would go on from this point and insist that pre- Pottery Neolithic B, or Ben-Dor's Jericho VIII, is indeed a separate element or cultural phase, though its precise characteristics can only be determined by further discovery. I t is the opinion of this reviewer, not only from the literature, but also from frequent trips to both Jordan and Israel beginning in 1956, in which an attempt has been made to keep abreast of the developments in the pre-history of the area, that much more can be done to place the various more or less isolated groups of material from a variety of sites into some sort of approximate sequence, even though the state of our knowledge is such that each new discovery may revise a part of any such attempt at synthesis.

The one person whose work has been uniformly neglected by nearly all people concerned with the period is that of Jacob Kaplan of the Tel-Aviv- Yafo Museum. His work in the vicinity of Tel- Aviv, in the Sorek Valley area, and in a large number of places in Galilee, where he has worked in particular vi th discoveries of Kibbutzim, in each of which there is one or more amateur archaeologists, is not well knom-n because it has not been described in detail in any one place.

The result of this work is a series of strati-

WRIGHT:Archaeology of Palestine from Neolithic through Middle Bronze Age 279

graphical sequences in a variety of places which can be dovetailed together, a t least in preliminary fashion. The first review of his conclusions is to be found in his article on the "Neolithic Pottery of Palestine," in BASOR 156 (1959), pp. 1.5 ff. As a result of his continued work on the problem in the 1960's, he would now introduce certain re-visons in detail of his projection. One major article, published with the aid of the Semitic hluseum of Harvard University, is "~Ein el-Jarba, Chalcolithic Remains in the Plain of Esdraelon," BASOR 194 (1969), pp. 2-39. In his dovetailed sequences, based upon work in a sizeable number of sites, the Ghassulian-Beersheba culture is always the latest. Preceding it is a phase which he called the Wadi Rabah culture, something new except for Kaplan's discovery of it in a number of places. The second of the two articles noted above describes it in some detail, but its beauty must be seen to be believed. At its best it is a pottery with a highly polished red surface, often shading into dark grays or blacks. This is a handmade pottery and in technique, though not in pottery shapes, reappears in the post-Ghassulian gray-burnished and red-slipped wares at the end of the 4th milennium, and again in the Khirbet Kerak pottery of the mid-3rd millennium. Ben- Dor's Jericho VIII (Kenyon's Pottery Neolithic B) appears to be its latest or debased phase. Preceding the Wadi Rabah pottery is the series of impressed wares, often burnished but also un-burnished, and then painted wares, preceded by the dark-faced burnished material. The sequence from late to early would thus appear somewhat as follows: Ghassul/Beersheba, Jericho VIII (Kenyon's Pottery Neolithic B), Wadi Rabah, Yarmukian, Jericho I X (Kenyon's Pottery Neo- lithic A), and earlier Neolithic assemblies a t Kfar Giladi and Sheikh cAli, among other sites.3 A

See further J. Kaplan, "Excavations at Wadi Rabah," IEJ, Val. 8 (1958), pp. 149-160-a site in the Sorek Valley; "Excavations a t Teluliyot Batashi in the Vale of Sorek," Eretz Israel, Vol. 5 (1958), pp. 9-24 (He-brew, with English summary); "Excavations at Benei Beraq, 1951," IEJ, Vol. 13 (1963), pp. 300-312. The important contributions of J . Perrot and H . de Contenson, among others, must remain untouched in this review for

carbon-14 determination on charcoal from the earliest of four strata at Wadi Rabah gave 3740 f 140 B.C. This falls nicely in the sequence of carbon 14 determinations from the Ghassulian/ Beersheba culture which range 3640 350 B.C.

to 3310 f.300 B.C.

De Vaux's summary of the type of culture of the period which can be observed in the country would seem to be quite accurateS4 The land of Israel and Jordan must have been thickly occupied by a variety of groups living in small villages, all unfortified. Added to de Vaux's description should be the observation of the nature of the Jordan Valley at the time by Nelson Glueck, following his surveys. Of particular importance and interest in the Jordan Valley are the large number of very small settlements, rising above the valley floor, scarcely more than a meter in height and which are rapidly disappearing as a result of increased agricultural use of the valley with more modern p l o ~ s . Marginal settlement areas like those of the Beersheba area and a variety of discoveries along the Wadi Ghazzeh indicate an extension of a considerable population into and beyond the 8-inch rainfall area. I t can only be stressed again, however, that in contrast to the situation in RiIesopotamia and in Syria, our knowledge is spotty with no stratigraphy covering the whole period. 11. I t appears that carbon-14 dates for the Ghas- sulian/Beersheba culture are sufficiently plentiful to cause all scholars to agree on the approximate dates. Hence, at the outside, the date for this culture would be 36th to the 33rd century, or approximately 3rd quarter of the 4th millennium, as previously stated. A fine temple discovered and excavated by a team headed by B. RIazar on a bluff above CEin Gedi, a spectacular group of over 400 copper objects, including more than 200

lack of space; they are cited by de Vaux, but note now Perrot's useful summary of the data and his interpreta- tions of i t in "Prkhistoire palestinienne," Supplement a u Dictionnaire de la Bible (1968). Note E . D. Stockton, "A Bibliography of Flint Industries of Transjordan," Levant, Vol. I (1969), pp. 100-103 with map.

For additional insights and generalizations see Kap- lan, "Ein el-Jarba . . .," o p . cit. , esp. pp. 27-31.

280 Journal of the American Oriental Society, 91.2 (1971)

maceheads, plus a number of peculiar objects that appear to be some kind of "crown" and orna-mented heads for rods or wands and maces, clearly suggest a religious significance for the objects. The remarkable star painting and other wall painting at Ghassul proper, north of the Dead Sea, not far from the eastern hills of Transjordan, and the ossuaries for secondary burial along the coastal plain, most numerous in the area of Tel- Aviv, are perhaps the most spectacular objects of this culture. Yet as de Vaux remarks, it is certainly a culture of a people unrelated to those who followed them. He suggests that they are a broad- headed people of Armenoid or hnatolian origin. This would account for the metalwork which is a dominant new feature of the culture. Then sud- denly the sites are abandoned, and there is simply no knowledge at this time of the reason for the abandonment, other than a surmise about dis- placement by a more vigorous people who lead us directly into urbanism.

At this point the information that we have is not sufficient to solve completely the problem of the transition from the Chalcolithic to what is called the "Early Bronze Age," the latter a conventional title because true Bronze seems not to be known until the 2nd millennium. In 1937 the reviewer was able to put together all the evidence at the time in a dissertation entitled The Pottery of Palestine From the Earliest Times to the End of the Early Bronze Age (1937).5 At that time it was very clear that in northern Palestine a new element had come down from the north, now known certainly to be from central Anatolia, and called "the gray-burnished ware." This is a handmade pottery, the characteristic shape of which in its earliest form is a shallow bowl with a sinuous ridge or with knobs around the middle of the exterior. However, we also know that it appears along with a new red-burnished tradition, uncharacteristic of the Ghassulian. In general, therefore, there appears especially in northern Palestine a highly lustrous pottery in the tradition of the earlier Wadi Rabah

Reprinted and available from University Microfilms, Ann -4rbor.

and of the later Khirbet Kerak wares in technique, though not in shapes. In 1936-37 I named this culture the "Esdraelon Ware" and placed i t in the "upper" or "late" Chalcolithic, and dated it from about 3400-3200/3100 B.C.

I assumed at that time that it was accidental that this culture was only found in the north and that in due course it would appear also in the south. The earliest elements at that time in the south, following Ghassul, were dominated by a band-painted tradition on a variety of new shapes rvhich had been found by FitzGerald in his Strata VII-VI at Jericho in 1936, well known from Ophel, Tomb 3, and from three sizeable tombs at Ai, as well as in tombs at Gezer. This band- painted southern tradition I correlated with certain northern strata for the introduction of Early Bronze I proper, dateable in the Gerzean or Late pre-Dynastic Period of Egypt. Chrono- logically, following the low date for the 1st Dynasty, I dated the period with Albright about the 32nd century to f2900 B.C. I n the fall of 1956 this reviewer began a fresh survey of the period in question on a grant from the American Philosophical Society, paying special attention to the tombs and "late Chalcolithic" layer at Tell el-Farcah, northeast of Shechem, and especially to the results of the AIellaart survey of the Jordan Valley in preparation for the 200-meter, East Ghor irrigation canal. As a result of this detailed survey of all the material available to me in 1956, I prepared an article, "The Problem of the Transition Between the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age in Palestine," Eretz Israel, Vol. 5 (1958), pp. 37* ff. I t had now become clear to me that the high-polished gray- and red-burnished tradition was set in the midst of a pottery context which in many particulars had received impulses from the Ghassulian, though i t was new and vigorous with its new elements. The pottery con- tinuations included a certain type of plain ledge handle that appeared in the Ghassulian, certain jar forms, including the hole-mouth, and a large variety of smalI lug-handles and decorated strengthening devices of ropes of clay around the various vessels. These characteristics all appear a t Ghassul, though they are not as apparent in the


Beersheba area as they are in Ghassul proper. This common pottery tradition simply cannot be divided and separated completely from the shapes known in the painted-pottery tradition of the Gezer- Jerusalem- Jericho axis.

A second point after the 1956 study, very apparent, and for that matter apparent ever since 1937, was that the red and gray high-polished wares were not a single phenomenon of one very short period. They had a history and a development which was traceable. This was what I attempted to point out in my Eretz Israel 5 article, with more or less success. Yet one thing remains true and incontrovertible: the earliest gray-burnished shallow bowls with the sinuous band of Beth-shan XVII-XVI have to be con-sidered not only typologically but stratigraphically earlier than the final type of a deep carinated bowl which is a dominant characteristic of Megiddo Stratum XIX (Stages VII-V). This fact is almost certainly demonstrable in the literature with more evidence available now than even in 1956. Consequently, one cannot simply lump the red- and gray-lustrous wares all together as though they were one thing of one particular phase without any stratigraphical and typological development present in the evidence.

A third fact, and this a crucial one for chronology, is that in the tombs of de Vaux's Tell e l -Fa~ah there is one early tomb with a gray-burnished bowl of the earliest type. All other gray-burnished bo~vls in the other tombs are typologically intermediate between the earliest types in Beth-shan XVII-XVI and Megiddo XIX. With them in the same tombs appear the pottery forms which in the Jerusalem region are band-painted. I t just happens that for the most part they are not painted at Farcah. Yet after a number of years of experience in the field, and following the lead of W. F . Albright, it appears clear to me that form in ceramics is something that is primary and cannot be disregarded. Decoration of the form, which is the most obvious and immediate characteristic for the casual ob- server, is a secondary feature and found only on a small portion of the finer pieces. In any event, form can never be disregarded. Thus, a chron-

ological division between the materials in Tell en-Nasbeh, for example, and Jerusalem-Jericho is simply not permissible on a chronological scale just because the en-Nasbeh wares for the most part are not painted while those on the other sites are painted. I t is now perfectly clear that when many excavators publish they simply leave the uninteresting wares aside and publish only those which are most interesting-that is, the best exemplars of finely-decorated pottery-while the common wares are left aside. If this fact is taken seriously, as I for one believe that it must be, then the Tell e l - F a ~ a h tombs, except for the one early one, must be considered contemporary with the deposits of the Jerusalem area which have precisely the same pots but as published happen to be distinguished by band-painting. Whether painted or unpainted, however, the forms are identical. Therefore, there can be no separation between Jerusalem, Ai, Jericho, Gezer and Nasbeh on the one hand and a great majority of the tombs of Tell e l - F a ~ a h on the other. Such were the main conclusions of the research of 1956 which was presented in the Eretz Israel 5 article.

On my return home in the late fall of 1956, Miss Kenyon was kind enough to invite me to lunch in her home near London. Here we talked over the problems of this era in the light of my own research just concluded and her work at Jericho. I presented in brief my arguments for calling the whole post-Ghassulian period Early Bronze I, dating it before the pitchers and other items which correlate with the 1st Dynasty in Egypt and mark Early Bronze I1 in Palestine. When I objected to the use of the term "Late Chalcolithic" as meaningful, she suggested immediately something that was in her mind, namely the term "Proto-Urban." I agreed to this in the sense that this culture is indeed proto-urban and leads at the end of its first development in Early Bronze I to the beginning of the major tells and cities, with city walls and the like-the period for which anthropologists now reserve the term "civilization."

Subsequently, in articles, books and particularly in the volumes of tombs, Jericho I and Jericho 11, Miss Kenyon explained her position in


more detail. Between the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age in the transitional period in question she introduces a "Proto-Urban" period. This is characterized by three ceramic elements she believes are very largely coterminous in date, though not in geography. These are the red-burnished pottery (ceramic horizon A), the band- painted wares of the Jerusalem area (ceramic B) and the gray-burnished pottery (C). The objec- tion which I have had to this general treatment is that it is indeed too quick and too general and disregards for the most part all stratigraphy before the new ~ o r k under Kenyon's direction at Jericho. The possibility of demonstrating in the pre-Early Bronze I1 period a development in the red-burnished pottery (A) and of the gray-burnished pottery (C), and even of perhaps two phases of the band-painted pottery of the Jeru- salem area (B) is simply not discussed. Con-sequently, I have been unable to follow her classification as a really meaningful one. She bases a great deal upon the difference between such tombs as A 94 and A 13 along with other tombs of their type at Jericho. A 94 represents to her the earliest horizon of the red-burnished period. Yet when the tomb xas finally published in detail in Jericho 11,one had to pull back immediately from the conclusions which Miss Kenyon d ram from this material. I n the first place, it is a very highly- selected and specialized group of funeral pottery in a tomb, with a very narrow range of shapes. I t is, therefore, not to be compared with what one would expect to find in a normal house deposit of the period and there is a great possibility that, while forms are present which might be expected to be band-painted, it just happens that in this tomb they are not. Consequently, the assumption of a huge separation between tombs A 94 and A 13, for example, cannot be taken for granted as a major chronological indicator.

De Vaux rejects both my own and the Kenyon classification, but from a very different perspective. According to de Vaux the red-slipped and gray-burnished traditions come into Palestine from the north and press down upon but co-exist ~ ~ 4 t hthe Ghassulian/Beersheba culture, which he interprets to be characteristic only of the south.

He agrees that this northern impulse will soon engulf the Ghassulian and yet at the same time he would classify it as "Late Chalcolithic" be-cause, in his view, it still belongs to his third prehistoric phase, "Farmers, Potters and Metal Workers.'' The result is that his treatment of the period in question is, in fact, though un-mentioned, an up-dating of my 1937 chronology of the "Esdraelon Culture" and the consideration of it as Late Chalcolithic, indeed the end of the Chalcolithic period.

The new factor is the assumption that the Ghassulian/Beersheba culture is to be considered contemporary with For him the true Early Bronze I begins with the Jerusalem-painted wares and the continuation of the red tradition in the north and ends with the establishment of the great urban centers with city walls and the beginning of the great tells of historical times.

About the same time as de Vaux was writing his chapters for CAH, Ruth Amiran in Israel was writing her basic work, Ancient Pottery of the H o l y L a n d . The Hebrew edition of this work was first published in 1963. The English edition, revised and updated, has finally been published by Rutgers Tniversity Press, 1970, Appropriately enough the work is dedicated to William Foxrvell ,4lbright. Her treatment of the period under discussion appears on pp. 22-57 of the English edition xith elaborate illustrations of the pottery forms in question. She, along with most Israelis who are dealing with the problem, follox~-s this reviewer's perspective of the period in question and it should be read as a counterbalance to the very clear presentation of de Vaux. I t is Mrs. Amiran's position, and that also of myself, that the view of a very lengthy overlap between the red- and gray-burnished ceramic horizons with the Beersheba culture is out of the question. The Ghassulian horizon stratigraphically appears be- lox~r the "Upper Chalcolithic" of de Vaux at Tell el-Farcah, for example; a similar situation seems to pertain at ~Affuleh and, among other pieces of important evidence, in Mellaart's soundings at

See also Perrot, op. cit. (note 3) , who has lorip held this view.

283 WRIGHT:Archaeology of Palestine f rom Neolithic through Middle Bronze Age

Tell esh-Shuneh, east of the Jordan opposite Beth-shan? Both Beth-shan and Shuneh, like Khirbet Kerak, are tremendous sites for Early Bronze I11 and Khirbet Kerak ware proper. But a t Shuneh we have a good stratification right down through the earlier period into the Ghassulian horizon. The same appears to be true in Ruth Amiran's excavations a t Tell Arad in the northern Kegev. In other words, there is quite a sufficiency of evidence to make it highly improbable that there is any lengthy coexistence between these two radically distinct cultures. On the contrary, as Ruth Amiran summarizes the evidence, the red-burnished and gray-burnished wares have to be seen as contemporary in a large measure with the band-painted ware of the Jerusalem area. It is thus impossible to separate the period, and the whole post-Ghassulian horizon must be called Early Bronze I.8

This is not the place to present all the arguments in detail. Indeed, the evidence is not such that absolute proof for one side of the position or the other can be produced.

Recently two important new treatments of the problem have appeared. One is the volume of J. B. Hennessy, T h e Foreign Relations of Palestine Dur- ing the Early Bronze Age (London, 1967), who in general supports the position of Kenyon but with much new material, and particularly new information concerning the stratification of the Jericho tell. The second is the clearest review of the whole problem, and the three positions taken to solve it, by Paul W. Lapp, "Palestine in the Early Bronze Age," Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century (Glueck Festschrift ed. by J. A. Sanders; Doubleday, 1970), pp. 101-131. Neither Lapp nor Hennessy are impressed by my attempt to bolster the terminology "EB I A, B, C" by stratigraphical arguments. Lapp, however, in describing the vari-

See H. de Contenson, "Three Soundings in the Jor- dan Valley," A D A J , Vol. 4-5 (1960), pp. 57 f f . ; '(La chronologie du niveau la plus ancient de Tell esh-Shuna (Jordanie)," M U S J , Vol. 37 (1960), pp. 57 ff.

See most recently Ruth Amiran, "The Beginnings of Urbanism in Canaan," iyear Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century (Glueck Festschrift; ed. by J. A. Sanders ;Doubleday, 1970), pp. 83-100.

ous positions on the period in question ("Early Bronze I [Wright, Amiran], Proto-Urban [Kenyon, Hennessy] and Late Chalcolithic [Albright, de Vaux]"), makes a fresh attempt to argue for the EB I A (= Proto-Urban A), EB I B (Proto-Urban B), and EB I C (EB I) in the other clas- sifications. His discussion is generally convincing to this reviewer, of course, though I reserve judgment on his interpretation of the Bab edh-Dhrac town and cemetery material until further evidence is published (see below). 111. Defining the beginning of the Early Bronze Age as the band-painted \Tare of the Jerusalem or central area of the country, de Vaux has trouble in getting his Early Bronze Age started and correlated with other sites in the country. In attempting a correlation with northern sites, he is forced to conclude that the red-slipped (and gray-burnished?) wares of the "Late Chalcolithic" in his terminology are contemporary with the beginning of Early Bronze I in the central section of the country. Thus, not only does the Ghassulian overlap with the northern tradition of Late Chal- colithic, but also the southern Early Bronze I over-laps with the northern "Late Chalcolithic." He considers it, nevertheless, proper to use the term Early Bronze I for this central area material because it is the southern culture which in due course overcomes the northern or "Late Chalco- lithic" and leads into full urbanization. This pre- sents a peculiar picture. One would presume that the real drive t o ~ ~ a r d urbanization should be coming into the country from the north. Indeed, Frankfort, Kantor and others long ago emphasized this age as one of the first periods of truly inter- national trade, but the influence seems to be coming from the north and from Mesopotamia around the Fertile Crescent into Egypt, and not the other \Tay around. The earliest stone architecture in Egypt, for example, according to Frank- fort, shows the strong impulse of the peculiar use of brick decorative styles on Mesopotamian temples. For spouts and seals and other evidence of this relationship, see now for summary the treatment of Ruth Amiran (op. cit.).

Here indeed would appear to be a serious ob- jection on a theoretical level to the presentation

284 Jour.~ialof the Amelkan O~ientalSociety, 91.2 (1971)

by de Vaux. From what source comes the impulse toward urbanization which is represented in central and southern Palestine while the north is considered to have been still occupied by "Late Chalcolithic"? To this reviewer such a criticism plus the state of our present evidence, mounting in volume since 1965, renders de Vaux's perspective and correlations most dificult. On the other hand, if the treatment of this reviewer and more recently that of Ruth Amiran were followed, the continuities amidst the discontinuities can be seen to be such that the impulse toward urbanization is that which began immediately after the Ghas- sulian precisely in the red- and gray-burnished tradition in the north. This tradition in its earliest phase is found as far south as 'Alayiq at Jericho but not apparently on the mound itself, whereas the painted wares of the central area can now be seen in far greater numbers appearing in northern Palestine. Such a view, while allowing for the regional differences, also allows for the strong urban impulse to be moving down from the north all over the country in the post-Ghassulian or EB I (in this reviewer's nomenclature).

A major difficulty in dealing with the Early Bronze Age is the fact that so much new and very important material is as yet unpublished. For- tunately, the excavation of Tel Arad was ready for the press in late summer of 1970. Here a small Beersheba type of Chalcolithic deposit was suc- ceeded by a succession of houses, enclosed inside a city wall erected at the end of EB I and in 11.The last phase of the houses and the wall are immediately under the surface of the ground so that their tops could be swept off with a broom once one knew where they were. In other words, the area had not been cultivated since the abandonment of the Early Bronze city of some twenty-five acres. From this site important new dimensions of knowledge for the development of pottery chronology should be available. I t also reveals for the first time the true nature of the typical Early Bronze Age house as a rectangular main room with entrance on the center of the long side of the rectangle and with a bench running around the inside. The Early Bronze temples at Arad and elsewhere of the period would appear to be simply an enlargement

and beautifying of this simple type of house. Here the imported Egyptian material, though small in quantity, was suffcient to suggest that the beginning of the 1st Dynasty must have begun slightly before the beginning of Early Bronze IT during the last phase of Early Bronze I.

Of great importance also is the excavation at Ai, which has been carried on since 1964 by Joseph A. Callaway and his staff. These sites and others when published ought greatly to improve our definition of the phases of the Early Bronze Age.

In any event, the evidence is clear that city walls appeared at the end of EB I and before the beginning of EB I1 at such sites as Tell el-Farcah (K),Arad, Ai, Tel ~Areini (formerly Tel Gat) and perhaps at Khirbet Kerak. I t was de Vaux at Farcah who discovered the first city gate known for certain in the Early Bronze Age. I t consisted of a passage four meters wide contracting to two meters on the inside, surmounted by brick tom-ers. The original wall in phase l b is said to have been 2.60-2.80 m. wide. In phase I1 an additional three meters was added to it with glacis while on the south side of the mound a new rampart, 8.50 m. in width, was erected. In other words, by about the 30th century B.C. people in Palestine were capable of protecting their cities with huge fortificatiorls using mass for strength and even protecting the outside of the slopes below the city walls at such places as Farcah, Ai and Taanach with a kind of glacis. This is indeed the revolution to urbanism, and such a term as "primitive" can no longer be applied to the people's technological ability.

By the summer of 1970 Callaway was able to assert that at least two city gates are kno~vn in the huge stone fortification at Ai. A great citadel was erected over the first city wall in EB I1 011

the west and most vulnerable side of the city. On the southwest a double line of ~vaIls, repeatedly buttressed do\\-n the slope, was discovered. The fortifications continue around the south and create a city nearly thirty acres in extent. The most surprising new discovery at Ai in the last full season of excavation (1968-1969) was a huge pool which collected the winter rain and obviously served as one of the main, if not the main, source of water for the city. I t was most ingeniously con-

WRIGHT: 285Archaeology of Palestine f r o m hTeolithic through Middle Bronze Age

structed, using a special type of red clay, which when soaked with water becomes completely im- permeable to leakage. The sides of this earthen dam were held in place by inner and outer stone malls while the clay sealed the virgin rock beneath a flagstone floor.

De Vaux continues to believe that the main building at the highest point of the tell of Ai is a palace, while a series of nondescript rooms against the city wall behind it are considered "the sanc- tuary." The writer has attempted to show the impossibility of this interpretation in a recent article, "The Significance of Ai in the Third Mil- lennium B.c.," Archaologie u n d Altes Testament; Festschrift Galling; ed. by Arnulf Kuschke and Ernst Kutsch; Tiibingen, 1970), pp. 299-319. In this article the origin of the view, followed by de Vaux, is credited to the extraordinary imagination of the late Pkre Vincent. By attempting to put together a preliminary survey of the various temple types in Syria and Palestine during the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.c., the reviewer believes that there can no longer by any question but that the Ai main building is a typical Canaanite temple. The type continues in the 2nd millennium at Alalakh in Syria in the 18th through the 13th century.

In the same article it is also shown that the Babylonian cubit of 500 mm. width seems to have been the basic measuring unit of Syria and Pales- tine in the 3rd millennium, whereas during the Middle Bronze Age Palestine shifts to the Egyp- tian cubits of approximately 525 mm. and 445 mm. The Alalakh temples on the other hand continue the Babylonian cubit down into the 13th cent. I t is surprising how many of the dimensions given by de Vaux for various ramparts, the F a ~ a h gate and other building units, fall into the picture of the Babylonian cubit in the Early Bronze Age. On the other hand, until excavators begin to measure precisely with the problem of the cubit measurement in mind and also the problem of plaster on inside and external faces of the wall, it is dangerous to generalize too sharply about or- dinary excavators' dimensions.

I t would appear that the major cities of Pales- tine were all destroyed at the end of either Early

Bronze I1 or during the course of Early Bronze 111, so that by about the 24th century B.C. there is not a city existing in the country. A dark age then descended about which little can be said, though in 1937 I suggested the term Early Bronze IV as a designation for it. However, we still do not have very much material to place with certainty within it. I t is highly likely that, as more information is accumulated, burials of a variety of nomadic groups will gradually come to light. At least at the moment the discovery of cemeteries would seem to be our best hope of penetrating the period.

In the opinion of this reviewer, one of the most important discoveries of a cemetery in modern times, which may do a great deal to fill out a part of the Early Bronze IV picture, is the work of Paul W. Lapp a t Bab edh-Dhrac on the Lisan or "Tongue" extending into the Dead Sea in Trans- jordan. From his soundings it would appear that there was an Early Bronze Age city surrounded by a wall existing at the site at least in EB I and 11, but since only soundings were made in the city and the material remains unpublished, little more can be said about it. Outside the city was a vast cemetery, Dr. Lapp calculating at least 50,000 burials. Yet all of the burials consisted of bones secondarily collected in tombs and in rectangular "charnel" houses. The plans of such houses as have been published seem to be generally rectangular with entrance on the long side as we would expect in the Early Bronze Age. All burials thus are secondary burials. The only primary burials where skeletons were in some articulation, as far as I have been informed, were in stone cairns, most of which, however, were empty of bone contents. There may be some exceptions to this general rule, but those who have worked at the site have told me that this distinction between cairn and tomb appeared to be the general situation. Most of the pottery in the tombs and charnel houses is of a new type never before recognized. The vessels are thin in sections and all handmade, including the rims. The handles of this hard-fired, handmade ware appear mostly on jugs and those that I have seen tend more toward a flattish, strap-like handle than round in section. Sometimes the ves-


sels are covered with a burnished red or orange slip, but most often they are unslipped and un- burnished. The firing of the pottery is so hard that it would appear to make the vessel "water-tight," though this is an observation which needs to be technically checked.

The problem of dating this unknown horizon of pottery is very difficult. I n a number of the tombs and in the charnel houses the bowls were put together not infrequently in a stacking effect. On the top of the stack would occasionally appear a little band-painted EB I or EB I1 juglet or other vessel of known EB 1-11 horizon. Methodologi- cally, the problem would seem to solve itself by dating the unknown by the known. This was the solution of Dr. Lapp, who divided the pottery over a long period from the end of the 4th millennium to the end of the 3rd.9 On the other hand, one must remark on the fact that the tombs are all shaft tombs of the type otherwise known in the country only from the Middle Bronze I period around the turn of the 2nd millennium (see below). The main difference is that around one shaft two or more tombs were dug, precisely as happened in Tombs 1101-1102 at >legiddo. The latter clearly belonged to the earliest phase of the transitional MB I period, as William G. Dever will show in his forthcoming dissertation on the latter period.

On the other hand, the way the pottery is made by hand in thin hard-fired sections, the lug handles and the nature of the jug rim remind one most strongly of hlB I pottery, though the shapes suggest that they are probably not in a direct line of chronological development, but the technique is that of another group of nomadic people. Fi- nally, the cairns at Bab edh-Dhra', as in thevarious sites in the Xegev in J I B I, were probably used for the primary inhumation, the bones and skulls

9 See Paul W. Lapp, "The Cemetery at Bab edh-Dhra, Jordan," Archaeology, Vol. 19 (1966), pp. 110 ff . ; "Bhb edh-DhrLC Tomb A76 and Early Bronze I in Palestine," BASOR, KO.189 (1968), pp. 12-41; and "Palestine in the Early Bronze Age," o p . c i t . The largest collection of the Bab edh-Dhra pottery thus far published is that of S. Saller, "Bab edh-Dhra," Studii Biblici Franciscani Liber Annuus, Vol. XV (1966), pp. 137 f f .

being removed to tombs and charnel houses only after the flesh had decomposed. Thus, the argument from the nature of the tombs as shaft tombs and the argument from the pottery itself lead this reviewer to suggest that it is perhaps the most important discovery to be fitted into the period between the 24th and 22nd centuries so far made. The only explanation for the occasional EB I and EB I1 vessels on the top of pottery stacks or elsewhere scattered on the floor of charnel houses would be that the diggers of the tombs ran into earlier material in the vast amount of tomb digging done and the earlier pottery was simply saved in the fashion mentioned, as other examples in archaeological history suggest. In any event, the vast bulk of the pottery is otherwise completely unknown, while the burial customs are closest to those of MB I. On the other hand, it must be said that the views of Lapp and myself could possibly be adjusted quickly to one another, when all his material is published, if there is evidence of which I am unaware. IV. Finally, we turn to Kathleen Kenyon's chapter on the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine. As a preface to it we need to have read her sections V-VII of Chapter 21 of the revised edition of CAE. This is on the "Nomadic Way of Life of the Inhabitants of Palestine During the Period Roughly Equivalent to the First Intermediate Period of Egypt" and which she labels "Inter- mediate Early Bronze-Middle Bronze." She thus rejects Albright's term, "Middle Bronze I," for the age, a term which is still used by most Israeli scholars and by this reviewer, following Albright.

To read these chapters it is important to understand that they are written by a completely different type of scholar than Father de Vaux. Miss Kenyon is one of the great field archaeologists of our time, a pioneer in her work at Samaria, Jericho and Jerusalem. We are all indebted to her and field work will not be the same again as a result of her efforts at applying what she learned from Sir Mortimer Wheeler to the complex problem of Palestinian stratigraphy (see the reviewer's article, for example, "Archaeological Method in Palestine-An American Interpretation," Eretz Israel, Vol. 9 [The Albright Festschrift, 19691, pp.

WRIGHT: 287Archaeology of Palestine from Neolithic through Middle Bronze Age

120-133. Thus, we expect a review of the material by a field archaeologist. I t is not the type of work that we have been reviewing by de Vaux. It thus has its own peculiar strengths, but because of a radically narrowed span of coverage the chapter will not be as comprehensive or as detailed as what we have been reviewing.

First, regarding the chronological and terminological problems, Kenyon's unilateral abandonment of the traditional terminology means that the first period of what everyone else calls Middle Bronze I1 will be, to her, Middle Bronze I. While she affirms the continuity of the culture in the age in question, she thus has to divide artificially the period into two phases, Middle Bronze I and Middle Bronze 11, the latter undifferentiated in phases, except for certain tomb criteria which she derives from Jericho. The rest of us, in order to affirm this continuity of culture, have divided i t into three phases, Middle Bronze I1 A, I1 B, and I1 C. All agree that the end of the Middle Bronze Age occurred about 1550 B.c., or at the latest in the third quarter of the 16th century, when the first kings of the 18th Egyptian Dynasty were recovering their Asiatic empire from the Hyksos dominion. Inasmuch as this dominion seems to have consisted of a firm league of the Syro- Palestinian city-states, each one of them is sys- tematically destroyed, as far as present evidence shows.

The key to the terminological problem lies with one's evaluation of the preceding culture, Ken- yon's "EB-MB" or Albright's "MB I." Kenyon emphasizes the complete separation of this culture from what preceded and from what followed it. I t is so isolated that i t must indeed be considered an intermediate phase, which cannot be placed in the normal sequence of numbers in Early Bronze or Middle Bronze. From an analysis of the Jericho tombs of the age, she sees many groups of people involved and considers them largely nomadic. The opposite point of view, held by this reviewer and Israeli scholars who have dealt with the issue, is to see that the various groups involved have lived on the fringes of EB I and EB I1 culture as semi-nomads, so that their pottery, while completely new and original in technique and decora-

tion, nevertheless preserves certain shapes which must derive from 600-900 years previously.

On the other side, the break between this intermediate age and the following periods in Middle Bronze Age is not as complete as Kenyon suggests: the Middle Bronze pinched lamp does indeed begin in the intermediate period; incised bands on the top shoulder of large jars continue even into the early 17th century; heavy platter cooking pots continue into the succeeding ages even though they are not as common as the regular cooking pots, which show a gradual and steady evolution throughout the Middle and Late Bronze stages into the Iron Age. For more details on the connections between the intermediate period and the Middle Bronze Age proper, see Ruth Amiran, op. cit., pp. 79-89 and her article, "The Pottery of the Middle Bronze Age I in Palestine," IEJ, Vol. 10 (1960), pp. 204-225.'' Furthermore, the fact that we know so much about these intermediate people is owing to their unusual burial customs. Usually they deposited single secondary burials in large shaft tombs like those a t Bab edh-Dhrac, except that one tomb per shaft was the regular custom. There is also the fact that they are beginning to settle down on most of the major tells in the country. Furthermore, in at least two sites, excavation recently has produced stratigraphy of more than one level, as did Tell Beit Mirsim where Albright first isolated the culture. This is a considerable addition to a large amount of evidence which tombs by nature of their limitation cannot produce.ll Consequently, it is clear that we have

10 On the other hand, the emphasis of Kenyon is in general correct, and the connections while few in number do in fact exist. See the article by William G. Dever, "The 'Middle Bronze I' Period in Syria and Palestine," Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century (Glueck Festschrift; J . A . Sanders, ed.), pp. 132-163, which to this writer is the most authoriative review to date. On the point a t issue, see his remarks, p. 159 note 65.

l1 See N. Kochavi "The Excavation at Har Yeroham, Preliminary Communications," BIES, Vol. 27 (1964), pp. 286292 (Hebrew); and the excavation of William G. Dever, since 1967, a t Tell el-Ful, a few miles west of Hebron: "The 'Middle Bronze I' Period in Syria and Palestine," Near Eastern Archaeology i n the Twentieth Century, pp. 132-163.


here in the intermediate age a nomadic people in the process of becoming sedentary, settling in towns. In other words, they are precisely analogous to Kenyon's "Proto-Urban" period over a thousand years earlier, preceding the full urbanization, the renewal of city fortifications and the like at the end of Early Bronze I. From this perspective, therefore, Middle Bronze I makes much more sense as a title than the term "Intermediate Period." I n MB I and MB I1 A (the latter Kenyon's "MB I") we have two waves of Amorite invasion which end with the full re-urbanization of the country, in a situation quite analogous to the period termed by this reviewer and Ruth Amiran "Early Bronze I" discussed above. This defense of the use of the term Middle Bronze I for Kenyon's "EB-MB" is a fresh one, but it has grown from her own presuppositions used in the earlier period but unused at this time because her eyes are focused almost solely on the Jericho tombs for the analysis of the people in question. Yet MB I is surely closely analogous to Kenyon's "Proto-Urban" at the end of the fourth millennium, and deserves to to be so considered. Hence, its connection with MB I1 is better defended than its complete isolation, especially when the peoples involved must all have been "Amorites."

As for chronology, Kenyon dates her "Middle Bronze I" (our Middle Bronze I1 A) to a half- century, approximately 1850-1800 B.C. (p. 43). This is not far removed from W. F. Albright's recent attempts to confine the period also to a half-century, but to date it ca. 1800-1750 B . C . ' ~

(see his discussion in Chronologies in Old World Archaeology [ed. by R. W. Ehrich; Chicago, 19651, pp. 53-54). Kenyon draws her chronology chiefly from the relation of this culture to that of Byblos,

12 See Albright's articles, "Abram the Hebrew: A New Archaeological Interpretation," BASOR, No. 163 (1961), pp. 36-54; "The Chronology of Middle Bronze I (Early Bronze-Middle Bronze)," ibid., No. 168 (19621, pp. 37-41; 'The Eighteenth Century Princes of Byblos and the 'Chronology of Middle Bronze," ibid., No. 176 (1964), pp. 38-46; "Further Light. . .," ibid., No. 179 (1965), pp. 38-43; "Remarks on the Chronology of Early Bronze IV-Middle Bronze I1 A in Phoenicia and Syria-Palestine," ibid., No. 184 (1966), pp. 26-35.

and particularly from that of the Byblian royal tombs, precisely as Albright had originally done in his fixing of the period and its approximate time in his work a t Tell Beit Mirsim. Albright is able to argue for an even lower dating of the period because he has lowered his dates for the royal tombs.

As in all cases where a new culture begins, it is difficult to assess the length of time that it took to become well-established in the country, especially as the initial stages are very difficult to discover. In addition, insufficient excavation has been done to find real stratigraphy anywhere in the country other than Strata G and F at Tell Beit llirsim, where a town wall and well-built brick "palace'' were discovered, and some part of Strata XV-XI11 at >legiddo with another city wall and a gateway belonging to the period. Yet in Principal Kenyon's very fine critique of the Rlegiddo excavation reports she correctly observes that the stratification is such that it is dangerous to rely on the supposedly stratified material without a study of each particular locus. Consequently, the main reliable material that we have is derived from tombs which are usually to be ascribed to the stratum subsequent to the one in which they are found and to which they are ascribed, because they were dug down into the lower stratum from above.

At least two phases of MB I1A were discovered at Shechem, but their locations so deep beneath the thick deposits of MB I1 B-C were such that clear stratigraphy and pottery separation was difficult because we were forced for the most part to dig small probing areas between walls of later buildings, vi th the result that too little overall exposure was secured. Major excavated tells like Hazor, Beth-shan and Jericho all appear to have a gap in occupation during this first phase of the Middle Bronze Age and thus are of no help. In the new excavations at Gezer, beginning in 1964-1965 under the auspices of the Hebrew Union College Biblical and Archaeological School in Jerusalem, great quantities of MB I1 A and Early hlB I1 B sherds have been found in later fills, but thus far no stratification for the period has been discovered and probably will not be until large enough areas


in the center of the mound can be excavated-if the strata actually exist in the remaining parts of the tell unexcavated by Macalister. Currently, Field VI on the highest point of the tell by the Muslim weli provides the best possibility. In Macalister's The Excavations of Gezer, sherds of the period are to be noted on the plates and certain tombs in I11 30 are additional indicators of the presence of this horizon. In short, in the opinion of this reviewer, there is simply too little archaeological exposure of the period in question to assert with confidence that it must be or can be confined simply to a half-century.

As for the date of MB I1 A, it is the strong opinion of this reviewer and of his students, particularly William G. Dever, who has concentrated a great deal of study on MB I and I1 A and has personally inspected virtually every deposit having anything faintly to do with the period, that simply lowering the date of the royal tombs of Byblos is not a sufficient indicator that the date of the period in question must be 10wered.'~ I t is our opinion that Albright's original dating of ca. 1900-1750 B.C. is still approximately correct and that if any movement in the dating is to take place it must be backward or earlier, not lower or later.

IS See Dever, h he 'Middle Bronze I' Period in Syria and Palestine ," Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twen- tieth Century, pp. 131-163. This is the most detailed comprehensive treatment of the period in question to appear since this writer's own survey in 1938 ( B A S O R , No. 71, pp. 27-34). For the chronology of the period Dever draws on Hama and 'Amuq, "ignored by Kenyon," which Dever considers strange since it is the only stratified ma-terial available from Syria in the period and provides the only Carbon 14 dates (pp. 137-155, n. 34) . With this and other evidence available Dever shows that the beginning of MB I cannot be dated later than Albright's original 2100 B.c., though i t began earlier in Syria. His interpretation and dating of the Bab edh-DhraC tomb and charnel house material, while cautious, awaiting full publication, is similar to that presented here. On the other hand, Syrian and Egyptian evidence prevent one from going below 1900/1850 B.C. a t the latest for the beginning of MB I1A (see below). Lapp dates EB IV ca. 2275-2050 and MB I ca. 2050-1900 B.C. for reasons similar to those of Dever, though the precise figures are taken from Egyp- tian Dynasties: E B IV, "Sixth Dynasty thru the First Intermediate"; MB I, "Ninth Dynasty thru Arnme-nemes 11" (op. cit. , p. 124).

Ruth Amiran increases the range of dating to 1950-1730 B.C. I n the opinion of this reviewer the main reason for maintaining an earlier dating for the period than either that of Kenyon or of Albright is the discovery of a number of Egyptian statues and inscriptions in such sites as Gezer, Megiddo, Byblos, Ugarit and Qatna, which belong to the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty.

As I understand it, the earliest Egyptian object found at Ugarit from the 2nd millennium is a scarab of Sesostris I (1971-1928 B.c.). If we dis- regard that one object, the others make it quite clear that we cannot go later than the period of Sesostris I1 (1897-1878 B.c.) for at least the beginning of the age. The argument would run somewhat as follows: MB I1 A is the period when the great city-states of Canaan and northern Syria were re-established, though in Syria there did not occur a break in culture quite as radical between the Early Bronze and the Middle Bronze stratigraphically as that which occurred in Palestine." The type of settlements thus far known in MB I in Palestine are not such as to make necessary the establishment of embassies with important Egyp- tian officials leaving memorials to themselves in the very fragile towns that were just beginning to be established before they were quickly snuffed out by the second major Amorite wave beginning in MB I1A. The urbanization which surely would interest the Egyptians in at least Palestine began in MB I1 A with the consequence that one must assume a connection between the Egyptian materials and the full stage of urbanization in the Middle Bronze, rather than the "Proto-Urban" of MB I . Shechem is first mentioned in an inscrip- tion of Sesostris I11(1878-1843 B.c.). While sherds of MB I have been found in fills at Shechem and in a few tombs, they are not in sufficient quantity to assume any major settlement and no stratum for this pottery was discovered anywhere on the tell. The result is that we must assume that Shechem as a city-state began as a creation of the second Amorite wave in MB I1 A.15

l4 Yet note the survey by G. Posener, J. Bottero and K . Kenyon, "Syria and Palestine, c. 2160-1780 B.c.," C A H a ,fasc. 29 (1965).

For detail, see Dever, o p . cit., 140-144. '6


The Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe, dating to the time of Sesostris I (1971-1928 B.c.), cannot be dated with certainty within the Palestinian chronological framework of MB I or MB I1 A. While i t throws a vivid light upon the conditions of life in the 20th century in eastern Syria, we are told within the tale that Sinuhe found that many Egyptians from previous times had been visiting the area so that his presence was not a new phenomenon. Yet i t must be remembered what was stated above, that the city-states of Palestine and to a different degree in Syria, beginning after the time the Khirbet Kerak ware show interruption in stratigraphy, and a new type of ceramic horizon to which the earliest "teapot" phase of MB I is clearly related, as Dever has most recently shown in detail, the relation being originally posited by Albright. While we have insufficient knowledge of the detailed stratigraphical transition which takes place in the 20th and 19th centuries in Syria, i t is probable that the gray ware ('teapot" or "calici- form" (Albright) phase in Syria gave way to a new painted pottery horizon which is closely related to the north Mesopotamian Khabur ware, probably during the 20th century. I n such a stratigraphical situation, it is impossible to assign the Tale of Sinuhe to a definite archaeological period until more exact evidence is available. The same is true with regard to the Execration Texts, though there is no reason why the earlier projec- tions of Albright, which regarded the Berlin Texts as MB I and the Brussels Texts as representing a later phase, namely MB I1A, are not still valid.16

With regard to the early painted wares in the Palestinian MB I1 A, Kenyon's comparisons with Byblos are still as cogent as they were when Albright first pointed them out in 1932-1934. Nevertheless, there is a much more direct and important horizon now to be considered, which is presently designated, for want of a better term, the "Khabur Painted-Ware Period." The correlation between these wares and the Palestinian is

16 See, for example, the survey by Albright in T h e Bible and the Ancient Xear East (G.E . Wright, ed., 1961; Anchor Books ed. 1965), pp. 444-448 (Anchor ed.); Dever, loc. cit.; and esp. the work cited in note 14.

much more clearly pointed out by Ruth Amiran, Ancient Pottery . . . ,pp. 90-123.

In the treatment of Middle Bronze Age I1B and I1 C (dated by this reviewer ca. 1750-1650 B.C.

and 1650-1550 B.C. respectively), Miss Kenyon uses Jericho as a type site on the basis of which she examines other sites of the age. This plunges her into difficulties, because all that is known of Jericho in this period, which she employs for her basic chronological criteria, is a series of tombs which she divides into five phases. The first is considered late Middle Bronze I1 A (her MB I), while her latest phase, Group V, is placed a t the end of the Middle Bronze Age, about 1550 B.C.

This reviewer has pointed out, however, that Diana ICirkbride, in her review of the Egyptian evidence in Jericho 11, shortens Miss Kenyon's dating of the material from Zk1850-1550 B.C. to the late 18th and 17th centuries. On the basis of the close phasings of Shechem pottery this writer would fully agree. If the first group were to be dated to the 2nd quarter of the 18th century and the other groups distributed between Zk1725 and 1600 B.c., the Kenyon tomb material would be much more in accord with the present state of our ceramic chronology."

Yet there is the problem even in this use of the Jericho material as pivotal for judging all other Palestinian deposits of the age. The reason is that Kenyon had not yet a t the time of publication been able to correlate her tombs with the stratigraphical phases on the mound proper. The result is that the very specialized type of material that is preserved in a group of important tombs is used to assess, chronologically, town strata where a much larger and more normal range of material exists. Furthermore, a large part of her treatment of Mid- dle Bronze I1 B-C is taken up with a description of Jericho, which is merely a prdcis of what has been given us in more detail in Digging up Jericho, Archaeology in the Holy Land, and especially in Jericho II. It is a t least to the first two of these works that the general reader would be better advised to turn for a detailed description of

l7 See my review of Kenyon's Jericho I I in Ant iqu i ty , Vol. 40 (1966), pp. 149-150.


Kenyon's knowledge of Jericho at this stage of her study than to the few pages given to the subject in this fascicule of the C A H .

Yet in saying this we should recall the remarks with which this section began. To the field excavator, it is natural that that which he or she has excavated should assume central importance in his or her mind, simply by reason of the fact that so many years of one's life have been spent in concentration on one site. In addition, it is natural for the excavator to be-& at the point which he or she best controls. This reviewer, therefore, must con- fess his own prejudice as a result of fifteen years of concentration on one site of the same period- namely, Tell Balatah, ancient Shechem. I t should be no surprise to the reader, consequently, to read that to the reviewer the site of ancient Shechem will in the future be the type site for the J I B I1 B and MB I1 C periods! There instead of four pottery separations by tomb groups within the periods in question, eight stratified tell deposits were distinguished in such a way that at Shechem at least we could separate MB I1 C from MB I1B and produce stratified deposits that average out at twenty-five year intervals, though in actual historical fact they were surely much more irregular than that. Yet I cannot expect this fact to be publicly accepted until the ceramic dissertations on MB I1 B and MB I1 C, respectively, are published by Professors D. C. Cole and J. D. Seger.

For this period, as for all others, so much new information has accumulated in the last fifteen years that remains unpublished. A great deal of work, however, has begun on a critical examina- tion of what has been published, though most of this work remains hidden in dissertations and seminar papers of graduate students working with instructors. Of great importance has been the vast amount of work which Miss Kenyon herself has done upon the isolation of tomb groups and architectural phasing of the work of Loud and Shipton between 1936 and 1939, published in Megiddo II.Alost important is her article on "The Middle and Late Bronze Strata at Megiddo," Levant, Vol. I (1969), pp. 25-60. As indicated above, no tomb group or locus at Megiddo can be

taken for granted as belonging to any stratum designated by the excavator without complete restudy. This involves a vast amount of labor, literally pulling this material apart in order to put it back together again according to the present state of our knowledge. In this article Miss Kenyon has managed to '(prove" as fully as can be proved, for example, that the fortress temple (Building 2048) does indeed go back into the 17th century, since its walls and foundations are clearly cut through Stratum X complexes in the north- west and southeast sectors (p. 50). Stratum X (Kenyon's Phase P) is dated to the end of the Middle Bronze Age. This is a very happy conclusion for the reviewer, inasmuch as he had main- tained on the basis of the Megiddo plans that the date of the building must also be brought back into the period of at least Stratum X I of the 17th century. Thus, i t would have been erected a t approximately the same time as the even more massive structure of the same type found a6 Shechem and erected along with the great Wall A fortification at the beginning of the NB I1 C p e r i ~ d ? ~

Another very important feature of this article is the detailed analysis of the phasing in the deep cut on the eastern side of Megiddo, Area AA. Here finally is clearly shown how to the early period of Stratum XI1 (Kenyon's Phase A-D) a new town wall was erected with the system of internal buttresses not otherwise known elsewhere, erected on top of a considerable bank with a fac- ing, presumably of marl. Megiddo is thus shown to have the new defensive system erected at all other known towns where the slopes of the bank itself are used as a primary defensive work. The slope is held in place by prepared material, usually termed a glacis. Frequently, a stone wall builB against the bank a t the foot of the tell protects the slope at the bottom and a major defensive wall is expected to appear at the top. This is precisely what Kenyon shows is the case at Megiddo, except for the fact that insufficient

l8 See my Shechem: Biography of a Biblical Ci ty (1965), p. 94; Kenyon CAH2, fasc. 48, p. 23; Levant, Vol. I (1969), pp. 49-50.

292 Jour7zal of the American Orie7ztal Society, 91.8 (1971)

excavation was carried out on the slope to indicate what the bank was like a t that point.

The dating of this new type of fortification of all tells thus far investigated in the country is agreed to by most everyone on archaeological grounds. Kenyon, for example, points to the sealed J I B I1 B tomb within the glacis at Lachish. The evidence of Tell Beit Jlirsim is ~vell known. The very clear evidence that can be convincingly proved ceramically, when published, a t Shechem is most important. And within the last two years tombs sealed by the rampart at Tel Dan are equally important. That is, the radically new type of fortification belongs to the second phase of MB I1 B and, therefore, to approximately the end of the 18th century.

Yet on sites where we have evidence, the earthen fortification is increasingly faced or sub- stituted, as in the west wall at Shechem, by great stone masonry. The idea behind the earthen-work fortification does not survive the Middle Bronze period (except for isolated and very special cases where the embankment is scarped and used as fortification as in Iron Age Beersheba, discovered by Professor Aharoni in 1970). The fortification in question is such a commonsense and powerful type of defense that one cannot help but wonder why it lasts for so short a period and why it is given up in the time of the Egyptian 18th Dynasty, which brings the Middle Bronze I1 period to an end. Kenyon follows Professor Yadin in his suggestion that the new use of the glacis was the city-state's response to the introduction of the battering ram in AIesopotamia f1800 B.C. On the other hand, a former officer of the U.S. Army, writing a paper about the phenomenon in one of my Harvard courses, could not understand why the reason for the glacis need be any more important than simply the preparation in front of the defenders on the wall a t the top of a clear field of defense, over which any attackers had to come. The evidence of the Egyptian reconquest of Shechem is very clear on this point. They forced the east gate and then destroyed all fortifications, pre-sumably by setting the wood on fire with oil and then pulling sufficient brick out of the bottom of the brick part of the wall above the stone base, in order that the whole brick superstructure of

the wall and all its woodwork supports and top battlements would fall burning into the city, leaving brick debris to be found by the archaeologists extending some 7-10 m, from the wall inside the city.

A major problem for those working in Asia is the interpretation of great earthen-work enclosures built at the same time as the new type of fortification around the sides of the tells. The interpretation that comes most easily to us is that of W. I?. Albright in the early 1930's) on the basis of such enclosures as Tell el-Yahudiyeh in Egypt, Qatna and Carchemish in Syria. He inter- preted these earthen enclosures as camps for the "Hyksos" army and their new weapon, the horse and the chariot. Then between 1955 and 1958 came details of the knowledge of the largest second millennium city in the country. This is Hazor, excavated by a large team of Israeli scholars headed by Professor Padin. The tell proper is on the south and a vast plateau of some 150 acres was created to the north, with sides scarped, and with one gate of the typical three- entry type of the Middle Bronze Age 1;nown along the north slope at Site K, and another un- covered further to the south during the past year or so. Here again the dating seems very clear. The enclosure was created in the second half of the 18th century and from ca. 1700 to 1200 B.C. the whole of it seems to have been filled with houses and public structures. I t now is the largest known city in the country. Second to it in size is Tel Dan near Banias, before 1967 directly on the Israeli-Syrian border. Here the embankment like those at Tell el-Yahudiyeh, Qatna and Car- chemish consists of piling up earth in what was evidently a more or less flat plain in order to create a defense. Unlike the others that we know, a huge stone wall was first created as the core of the earthen embankment before the earth was poured from it down the slopes on each side, and the sides then plastered in place.

Jacob Kaplan has excavated still another such enclosure, which he has identified at Yabneh-Yam, south of Tel Aviv. Approximately half of this enclosure is now beneath the sea, for Israeli scientists have been able to show that since the


Middle Bronze time the shore of the Mediter- ranean has slowly been sinking, covering ruins that were once on dry land. Not only has Kaplan found the typical Middle Bronze three-entry gate and thus proved the date of the structure, but he has cut a north-south cross-section through it to show precisely how it was erected. Beginning with a hump of sand, the builders piled layers of special kinds of soil, the most important which holds the whole structure in place being ground up conglomerate of a stone appearing only on the coastal plain, called "Kurkar." The external face was then lined with Kurkar stone so that it could not erode. I t has thus remained intact through all the many centuries with very little subsequent building on or in it. We discovered at Shechem that the marl or chalk embankment, though repaired, had withstood the wear and tear of the centuries and was to be found at every spot we probed, once m-e knew where it was.

The interpretive problem has become acute. For most of us in Asian archaeology the theory that these were originally built as army camps, some, as at Hazor, Dan and Qatna, reused in subsequent cities and some abandoned as far as any urban purposes were concerned, as at Yabneh- Yam. If these vast enclosures were not originally built as army camps with horses and chariots involved, for what possible purpose could such vast amounts of labor have served? This question has to be asked of those Egyptologists who today are inclined to deny that there was any such thing as the "Hyksos" conquest of Egypt. They instead interpret it as various groups in the Delta slowly getting together and conquering this piece of territory and that, and then finally all uniting and conquering Upper Egypt. This is precisely the same view as Noth, and the literary critical scholars before him, suggested for the Israelite conquest of Canaan. In neither case is the archaeological evidence satisfied by such a theory.

Kenyon's conclusion regarding the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine is stated as follows: "Palestine formed part of a larger Syro-Palestine group, but within it was a comparative back- water, receiving little except the overlordship of the Hyksos aristocracy, and itself offering no contributions to progress'' (p. 40). Yet the impor-

tance of our increasingly detailed knowledge of Middle Bronze Palestine far exceeds what these remarks would suggest, probably true as they may be. The importance is that here we have the clearest evidence and the fullest knowledge, chronologically and typologically well-advanced, of something that should be known in greater detail in the regions to the north. Yet what precisely do we know about the RIiddle Bronze Age in Lebanon, Syria, Rlesopotamia or Anatolia? Our evidence consists of fragments of information only, and these not satisfactorily controlled by archaeological means. Thus, such observations as the following are surely important for the whole knowledge of ancient history in the 2nd millennium: that is, that this period represents the greatest technological advance mankind had made up to this time. I t represents the greatest density of population achieved and, while there was frequent war and destruction, nevertheless, cities expanded, some to great size, and undoubtedly unfortified villages existed all through the coun- tryside. The quality of life in this time, as suggested both by technology and by population density, is in very marked contrast to the situation in the Late Bronze Age, when the Egyptian bureaucracy, while evidently taking over the essentials of the "Hyksos" system of government and defense, nevertheless rapaciously "milked" the country of its economic resources and its dig- nity. The Late Bronze Age is marked by a vastly greater distinction between the rich and the poor, when Egypt was clearly using the city-states of the Syro-Palestinian coastline to her own eco-nomic advantage, and not to the advantage of the local population. The Middle Bronze Ages I1B and I1 C are a period, therefore, of the greatest prosperity that the country had seen to that time, or would see again before the Roman peace enabled all countries of the Near East to achieve their highest cultural development and population density. Most of the Near Eastern countries, Israel excepted, have yet to attain the political and economic prosperity of the Roman period, and some are not even yet approaching the sophistication of culture of MB I1 B and MB I1 C.

archeology - the archaeology of palestine from the neolithic through the middle bronze age

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