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2022, Jerusalem and the Coastal Plain in the Iron Age and Persian Periods New Studies on Jerusalem’s Relations with the Southern Coastal Plain of Israel/Palestine (c. 1200–300 BCE) Research on Israel and Aram in Biblical Times IV
https://doi.org/10.1628/978-3-16-161254-1…
26 pages
1 file
AI
This paper examines the impact of destruction on trade networks at the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Southern Levant, focusing on two specific case studies involving LBA Cyprus and Mycenean Greece. The analysis explores how significant destruction events around 1200 BCE may have disrupted interregional trade connections, particularly in the context of notable trade hubs like Ugarit and the broader Eastern Mediterranean. By assessing archaeological evidence of pottery and trade routes, the study seeks to determine the role destruction played in influencing trade dynamics during this transformative historical period.
Nomads of the Mediterranean: Trade and Contact in the Bronze and Iron Ages, Studies in Honor of Michal Artzy, eds. A. Gilboa and A. Yassur Landau. Leiden: Brill., 2020
It is an honor to dedicate the following study to Michal Artzy, esteemed friend, colleague, and mentor. Michal was my first dig director on the Tel Nami project in 1987. I joined the project after a year affiliation with the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa, which Michal helped to shape over her distinguished career. I had gone to Israel to study and participate in underwater archaeology, but under Michal's guidance gained a deep appreciation for harbor sites and the interaction between the land and the sea, a maritime focus which has had a profound effect on my research interests and career. After graduate school, it was Michal who offered me access to her excavation materials from Moshe Dothan's 'Akko project to work on as a postdoctoral project. It has been a pleasure to spend additional seasons in the field with Michal, on her and Ann Killebrew's codirected Total Archaeology Project at Tel 'Akko.
Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient near East (10th ICAANE), Vienna, 25 April - 29 April 2016, 2018
The Carmel coast showed similar transformations to those noted at Ugarit and on the southern coast of Cyprus. The material culture of Tell Abu Hawam, Tel Nami and Tel Akko underwent detectable changes in the LB IIB phase, already during the 13th century BCE. Certain forms of ceramics, with changes, continued to be produced on Cyprus albeit, not necessarily in the same production centres. The ceramic variations in the coastal areas of the southern Levant (modern Israel), are traceable in inland sites, connected to the coast by terrestrial routes, such as Tel Megiddo, Tel Beth-Shean and Tell es-Sa’idiyeh (Trans-Jordan). This period ended with the final destruction of Ugarit, which coincides with that of Tel Nami and is traditionally ascribed to the beginning of the Iron Age at ca. 1180 BCE. We propose that the transitional period between ca. 1230 and 1180 BCE in the Carmel coast and its hinterland should be defined as Coastal LB IIC.
Chapter 44 of Steiner, Margreet L. and Ann E. Killebrew, The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant, c.8000 - 332 BCE. Oxford University Press, Oxford., 2014
The Iron II period may easily be the most extensively excavated and intensively researched era of the Levant, especially in the southern part of the region, but it is not the best understood period under investigation. Compared to the Late Bronze Age, we know precious little about the path to statehood that the various regions travelled, or about their economy or history. Both the beginning and the end of the Iron II period are disputed, and there is constant discussion over the dating of the excavated pottery and thus of the strata in which this pottery was found. I will not try to discuss or summarize the enormous amount of information provided in the following chapters. What I want to do here is focus on some aspects that have not received much attention in the literature. These concern first the impact of the Assyrians (and later the Babylonians and Persians) on the material culture of the regions they dominated, and secondly the organization of the economy of the various states in the Levant.
Jerusalem and the Coastal Plain in the Iron Age and Persian Periods, 2022
Table of Contents and Introduction of Jerusalem and the Coastal Plain. Published in English. This volume brings together archaeological, historical, and biblical studies on the cultural, economic, and social relations between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean coast of Israel/Palestine in the period from 1200 to 300 BCE.
The Mediterranean Sea and the Southern Levant, 2021
The Sea Peoples, destruction, and the end of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean ca. 1200 BC are almost synonymous in much of the scholarly literature. While there are a wide range of theories for where the Sea Peoples originated and what drove them to leave their homes, they are always a factor in what brought about the Late Bronze Age civilizations. The Sea Peoples are then also notorious as being the harbingers of destruction whether it being Enkomi on Cyprus, Ras Shamra, the capital of Ugarit in Syria, the sites of the Philistine Pentapolis in the Southern Levant and many others beyond these. However, when attempting to assess the effects that the Sea Peoples had on the Eastern Mediterranean it is necessary to step back and reexamine the textual and archeological evidence to see what if anything they destroyed. The purpose of this article is first to critically examine the textual evidence from Egypt and Ugarit to see if it truly does describe the Sea Peoples as causing destruction. Secondly, I will critically assess the archeological data from cities and towns which have been assumed to have been destroyed by the Sea Peoples to see if there is any archaeological evidence of the supposed path of destruction caused by the Sea Peoples.
Pp. 31-38, in G. Affanni, C. Baccarin, L. Cordera, A. Di Michele, K. Gavagnin (eds), Broadening Horizons 4. A Conference of young researchers working in the Near East, Egyot and Central Asia University of Torino, October 2011, BAR-International Series 2698, Oxford., 2015
Diacritica, 2023
The transition between the Late Bronze and Iron Age, often described as a collapse, is most often characterized by comparing the changes between these two periods. As trade and connectivity is one of the hallmarks of the Late Bronze Age, the lack of evidence for international trade during the early Iron Age is seen of evidence of the profound changes that occurred during this transition. In this paper, I will reassess the evidence for international trade during the early Iron Age in Philistia and neighboring regions, demonstrating that while there was a substantial degrading in the volume of international trade during this period, it did not cease completely. And based on this, what does this tell us about the processes and mechanisms occurring during the Late Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in the eastern Mediterranean.
Levant, 2019
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Ugarit-Forschungen, 2018
Destruction is an integral part of the end of the Late Bronze Age in the southern Levant. Once-powerful sites like Hazor and Lachish were burnt and abandoned. A multitude of other sites have been included in maps and tables describing the extent of the destruction, but just how much was destroyed? This article examines 62 destruction events to answer this very question. While some sites did suffer destruction, other destruction events exist only as scholarly citations, and many others are minor in their extent. This has strong implications on many of the theories for the end of the Late Bronze Age which utilize these destruction events to explain the transitions from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron I.
2020
The goal of this volume is to examine one key aspect of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron I in the Southern Levant, the development and changes in interregional exchange both over time and in the region as a whole. Interregional exchange is most easily seen in the appearance and disappearance of non-local material culture and materials. Twelve non-local types of material culture were collected into a database in order to track the development of interregional exchange over the course of the LBA to the Iron I. With this data, we can ask what effect if any did changes in interregional exchange have on the ‚collapse‘ of the LBA societies in the Southern Levant. To help answer this question, I also explore briefly the theory of collapse, and the various proposed causes for the ‚collapse‘ at the end of the LBA in the Eastern Mediterranean along with the theories for trade and exchange in anthropology and archaeology. Another key aspect of this work is the examination of the supposed wave of destruction which took the Southern Levant by storm asking to see if these events might have affected trade and contributed to the transitions during the end of the LBA into the Iron I. In all this work seeks to see what changes took place in interregional exchange, how might destruction have affected this, and was this the cause for the transition to the Iron I.
Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament, 2018
The Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant c 8000-332 BCE edited by M. Steiner and A.E. Killebrew, 2014
The end of the Bronze Age ( c. 1200–1130 BCE) witnessed the demise of the Mycenaean palace system and the decline of the Late Bronze Age Hittite and Egyptian Empires, culminating in the collapse of the first ‘Age of Internationalism’ in the eastern Mediterranean. This Late Bronze ‘golden age of heroes’, romantically immortalized in the Iliad , is defined by economic, political, and cultural interconnectivity that was under the control of imperial networks and local royal palaces. Early scholarly treatments attributed the end of this era to a catastrophe or series of disasters—natural or man-made—that destroyed major Late Bronze Age centres. In this scenario, these destructions triggered migrations of displaced peoples, especially populations in the western Aegean. These groups, often referred to by the modern term ‘Sea Peoples’, were held responsible for the devastation of Late Bronze Age settlements further to the east that resulted in a ‘dark age’ lasting centuries— a view that still prevails among some Aegeanists, particularly when dealing with the Levant. Recent studies reveal a far more complex network characterized by multidirectional cultural and socioeconomic interconnections that preceded and coincided with a more protracted demise of the Bronze Age that continued into the 12th century BCE. Continuity, discontinuity, change, appropriation, diffusion, creolization, hybridity, transculturalism, interculturality, catastrophe, collapse, crisis, dislocation, migration, colonization, ethnogenesis, nucleation, reoccupation, abandonment, and a new term I have proposed, Levantinism are all descriptive terms that have been employed to characterize the instability and fluidity of the late 13th–11th centuries as evidenced in the archaeological record and reflected in the economic, political, and social structures of this period of time.
The Iron Age I in the Levant: A View from the North (Part 1), H. Charaf and L. Welton, eds. Archaeology and History in the Lebanon 50-51, p. 2-7, 2019
In the last two decades, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age I in the Northern Levant, with a variety of articles, edited volumes, and workshops emphasizing aspects of both continuity and change in the political situation, social structure, and archaeological materials6. As in other regions, reconstructions of society in the Iron Age I in the Northern Levant have until recently, whether implicitly or explicitly, assumed that the influence and lasting effects of the “Sea Peoples” were similar in the north to their manifestations to the south. This can be at least partially attributed to fragmentary publication of many sites in the Northern Levant, but the underlying assumption has rarely been critically evaluated. This question, however, has significant implications for reconstructions of social processes affecting the whole Eastern Mediterranean during this pivotal period. In a series of four sessions organized at the American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meetings between 2015 and 2017, we therefore aimed to bring together the researchers working at sites throughout the Northern Levant (Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey). This varied group of scholars combined to provide a perspective on the Late Bronze Age-Iron Age I transition from a more holistic northern viewpoint, and to examine more comprehensively sites from both the inland and coastal regions to discuss their relationships to each other and to other regions during the Iron Age I. We intended to focus on evidence from material culture and subsistence patterns as a means of addressing themes such as the continuity of Late Bronze Age traditions into the Iron Age I, the introduction of new influences (with or without possible newcomers) and settlement changes in the Iron Age I, and evidence for (or against) cultural regionalism during this transition.
Tel Aviv, 2013
A core drilled from the Sea of Galilee was subjected to high resolution pollen analysis for the Bronze and Iron Ages. The detailed pollen diagram (sample/~40 yrs) was used to reconstruct past climate changes and human impact on the vegetation of the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant. The chronological framework is based on radiocarbon dating of short-lived terrestrial organic material. The results indicate that the driest event throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages occurred ~1250–1100 BC—at the end of the Late Bronze Age. This arid phase was identified based on a significant decrease in Mediterranean tree values, denoting a reduction in precipitation and the shrinkage of the Mediterranean forest/maquis. The Late Bronze dry event was followed by dramatic recovery in the Iron I, evident in the increased percentages of both Mediterranean trees and cultivated olive trees. Archaeology indicates that the crisis in the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age took place during the same period—from the mid-13th century to ca. 1100 BCE. In the Levant the crisis years are represented by destruction of a large number of urban centres, shrinkage of other major sites, hoarding activities and changes in settlement patterns. Textual evidence from several places in the Ancient Near East attests to drought and famine starting in the mid-13th and continuing until the second half of the 12th century. All this helps to better understand the ‘Crisis Years’ in the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the quick settlement recovery in the Iron I, especially in the highlands of the Levant.
During the second half of the 3rd millennium BC the whole Levant was involved in deep historical and cultural transformations. Yet, Syria and Palestine underwent different historical trajectories, and gave different responses to changes, achieving different socio-economic and political systems during this time-span. In north-western Syria, in fact, the floruit of the EB IVA period was followed by a crisis of the local political system, after the Akkadian military campaigns, then succeeded by a period of reorganisation rather than proper collapse, and by cultural continuity rather than break, despite some changes and innovations. On the other hand, during the Early Bronze IV period the Southern Levant witnessed deeper changes in the socio-political and socio-economic organisation, the settlement pattern, and the material culture. In fact, the region reverted to village life, and developed a markedly regionalised cultural horizon. A general “Syrian connection” has always been recognised in the Southern Levant within those centuries, when material culture shows both cultural autonomy and as complex as important phenomena of interaction with and emulation of the northern neighbours. The article seeks to investigate connections and interactions between the two areas at the end of the Early Bronze Age, analysing specific markers within the material culture, aiming at a possible definition of the nature of these relations in a socio-economic and cultural perspective.
c. 8000-332 BCE, 2013
is has not always been the case. Once upon a time, before attempts to date the volcanic eruption of Th era by various scientifi c means, the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in both the Aegean and Cyprus was aligned with the start of the Egyptian New Kingdom at c. 1550 bce (Sjöqvist 1940 : 197; cf. Manning 1995 : 198-9); and C. F.-A. Schaeff er (1948 : 392) made a brief but short-lived attempt to align the end of the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus with that at Ugarit (c. 1200 bce), before the scheme originally devised by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, which brought it into line with the end of the Submycenaean ceramic phase in Greece (c. 1050 bce), reasserted itself. From current viewpoints at least, neither of these latter dates has very much to do directly with the switch to iron as a base metal.
Jesse Millek