The world’s most famous (and powerful) oracle resided at Delphi, high up the slopes of Mount Parnassus in the Temple of Apollo. In ancient times, supplicants would wind up the mountainside, patiently hoping for words of wisdom from the priestess (called the Pythia) in the temple’s adyton (inner chamber). Corbis

Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand what went on there and what people experienced. Sometimes, however, there’s an exception to the rule.

Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, “the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession” (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers—a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist—has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually understand what happened at Delphi.

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When ancient Greeks and Romans had to make decisions, they consulted the gods—by drawing lots, casting dice, interpreting dreams and analyzing such signs as sneezes, thunderbolts and flying birds. But for matters of the utmost importance, they sought to hear the words of the gods in the mouths of oracles.^a

Pythias were virgins who dedicated their lives to prophesying on behalf of the god Apollo. The first Pythia is said to have been the goddess Themis, who is depicted on a fifth-century B.C. cup (shown here) sitting on a tripod and holding a bowl and a sprig of laurel (Apollo’s sacred tree). According to Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.) and other sources, the Pythia was inspired by mysterious vapors, though these accounts have been largely ignored by modern researchers. Now, however, a team of archaeologists and geologists have proved that the Temple of Apollo sat directly above fault lines that likely released intoxicating carbon-based gases into the adyton. Was this the oracle’s secret?

Paradoxically, in male-dominated classical Greece the most influential voice, the Delphic oracle, belonged to a woman. The oracular temple was perched on the south slope of Mount Parnassus, surrounded by high cliffs, about 75 miles west of Athens. Getting to Delphi required either a long trek across the mountains or a sea voyage to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. However difficult the journey, thousands of visitors sought guidance from the holy woman, called the Pythia,^b who spoke on behalf of the gods.

The Pythia dealt less in visions of the future than in right choices: where to locate a new colony, when to attack an enemy, how to lift a curse, whom to choose as leader, what offering to make to which god. No kingdom, city or private person could afford to make critical decisions without consulting the Pythia. Thanks to her prestige, Delphi became the richest and most famous Hellenic sanctuary. The Greeks called it the omphalos, or “navel of the world.”

How could a mere mortal command such respect? The answer lies in the belief that Apollo—the god of revelation and inspiration—used the Pythia as his mouthpiece, taking possession of her during oracular sessions. The Pythia would fall into a trance, and the words she spoke were supposedly those of Apollo, delivered in a voice very unlike her normal tones.

Most scholars believe the Delphic oracle was established around the eighth century B.C., when founders of new colonies would consult the Pythia before setting out for the western Mediterranean, North Africa, Asia Minor or the Black Sea. The origins of the oracle are recounted in a story about a goatherd named Koretas, who pastured his flock on the slope of Mount Parnassus. Koretas noticed that when the goats grazed near a certain fissure in the mountainside, they began to bleat strangely. Approaching the fissure, he was filled with a prophetic spirit. Eventually, a woman—the first Pythia—was appointed to sit on a tripod over the cleft and give prophecies. Before she could mount the tripod, however, a goat had to be sacrificed to ensure that the day was propitious.

Image: Frank Ippolito.

During the classical period, supplicants would line up at dawn to walk along the Sacred Way, a steep path snaking up through the sanctuary toward the Temple of Apollo. The priests and temple attendants determined the order of the queue, giving priority to state embassies and then working their way down through military commanders, athletes, poets and, last of all, mere heads of families concerned about a child or an investment. The supplicants filed past bronze statues, war monuments and treasure houses dedicated in the past by grateful visitors. It would have been late in the day by the time the ordinary men at the rear reached the terrace of the temple and viewed the famous inscriptions, “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”

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From here the way led up a ramp to a great colonnade of Doric columns, and then through a double door into the temple itself. Inside burned a constant pinewood fire tended by women of Delphi. The final approach to the oracle led downward into a sunken space below the level of the temple floor, where the visitor would be confronted by a gold statue of Apollo and the omphalos stone that marked the sacred spot. The Pythia sat in a recessed inner sanctum called the adyton, a Greek word meaning “not to be entered.” Standing outside the adyton, visitors would ask their questions and await the response.

Unlike itinerant prophets and omen-interpreters, the Pythia derived her power from the place—she could only prophesy while seated in the adyton within the Temple of Apollo. According to Strabo, the pneuma arose from a small opening (chasma ges) in the adyton: “Over the mouth [of the opening] a high tripod is set. Mounting this, the Pythia inhales the pneuma and then speaks prophecies in verse or in prose. The latter are versified by poets on duty in the temple” (Geography 9.3.5.).

Strabo was not the only ancient source to describe the adyton and the intoxicating gas. The second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias told of a spring in the temple’s adyton that made the Pythia prophetic. Also, in On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, the biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.), who served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, described an exhalation of vapor in the adyton that sent the Pythia into a trance.
Despite these testimonies, no serious scholar over the last 50 years has accepted the idea that the Pythia’s trance was caused by a gaseous emission.

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Modern investigations began in the 1890s, when French archaeologists began to excavate the sanctuary at Delphi. They first moved the modern village of Kastri, household by household, from above the ancient sanctuary to the town of Delphi, west of the sanctuary. The French archaeologists uncovered the boundary wall of the ancient sanctuary, an entry gate, and the lower stretches of the Sacred Way. By 1893 they had reached the terrace of the Temple of Apollo—where they found that scarcely a stone remained in place above the floor. The columns had toppled, and the statuary had been carried off or destroyed. In the lower chamber, where the oracle once spoke, no trace of the ancient structure remained. Even the archaeologists’ attempts to reach bedrock were frustrated as water filled the excavated areas.

While the French team was excavating the temple, a young English scholar named A.P. Oppé published a report based on his visit to the site. Oppé proposed that the ancient sources had confused the fissure with a nearby gorge, and that the vapor was simply a fiction that had been passed down from source to source.¹

In 1927, after a hiatus precipitated by World War I, a scholar named M.F. Courby published the French team’s final report of the temple excavations. He described the bedrock under the center of the temple as “fissured by the action of the waters”—suggesting that the ancient traditions of an opening in the rock may have been correct.² By then, however, Oppé’s theory that the ancients simply misconstrued the facts had taken too strong a hold among scholars for the issue to be reconsidered. The final blow came in 1950: Pierre Amandry of the École Française d’Athènes stated definitively—or so it was widely believed—that exhalations of intoxicating gas could never have existed at Delphi. Only volcanic activity could produce such gas, Amandry (incorrectly) noted, and Delphi does not lie in a volcanic area.³ For almost half a century, debates about the geological origins of the oracle virtually ceased.^c

The first step toward a modern reassessment of the evidence was made in the 1980s by geologist (and co-author) Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the senior member of our project in Delphi. De Boer was conducting surveys, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Greek government, to identify active fault lines. One area he studied was the south slope of Mount Parnassus, where he noted an exposed fault both east and west of the sanctuary of Apollo—though it could not be seen at the site of the temple, where it was covered by ancient construction and debris from rock slides. De Boer suspected that the fault did indeed run under the temple, but he gave the matter no more thought.

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It was not until the summer of 1995 that Zeilinga de Boer encountered an archaeologist, co-author John Hale of the University of Louisville, who assured him, first, that he could not possibly have seen any such feature at Delphi and, second (after Zeilinga de Boer described the fault in detail), that this might be a discovery of major importance. We decided to continue investigations at Delphi, eventually adding a chemist (Jeff Chanton of Florida State University and the U.S. Geological Survey Magnetic Laboratory) and a toxicologist (Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Poison Center) to the team.

In 1996, with the support of Rozina Kolonia, the director of the Delphi Museum, we conducted a survey of the site and found that the sections of exposed fault on either side of the sanctuary were indeed part of the same fault—an active fault extending about 13 miles east-west along the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. We named this fault the Delphi Fault.

This egg-shaped stone—the very stone described by the Greek writer Pausanias, who visited Delphi in the second century A.D.—represents the omphalos, or “navel of the world.” According to Greek legend, Delphi was fixed as the center of the world when Zeus released two eagles, one from the west and the other from the east, which met in the sky above Delphi. The original omphalos stone, now lost, was probably an archaic cult object that supplicants draped with wreaths, resembling the wreaths carved in relief on this stone. Erich Lessing

In subsequent seasons we identified a second fault, extending approximately southeast-northwest. This fault could be traced along a line of springs running through the center of the sanctuary. The highest spring, above the temple, is called the Kerna Spring; its water is currently channeled westward to modern Delphi. Further down the slope, though still above the temple, a mass of travertine (a kind of limestone) deposited by calcite-rich waters indicates another spring. There is also an elaborate channel for a spring built into the southern foundation wall of the temple itself. Although this spring is dry today, the early 20th-century French archaeologists found it difficult to reach bedrock within the sanctuary because their holes kept filling up with water. Down the slope below the temple, yet another spring emerges from a cleft in the bedrock near the Treasury of the Athenians.
We have named this southeast-northwest fault the Kerna Fault, after its highest spring. In de Boer’s opinion, the Kerna Fault intersects the Delphi Fault at or near the site of the temple.

What the ancient authors described as a fissure (chasma ges) in the rock over which the Pythia sat was probably a small fracture extending up from the intersection of these two faults. Very likely, this is also what M.F. Courby, in his 1927 publication of the French team’s excavations, was describing when he wrote that the bedrock was “fissured by the action of the waters.”

Greek geologists had already identified the limestone under the temple as bituminous (oil-bearing), with a petrochemical content as high as 20 percent. These petrochemicals appeared to be a possible source of gases. But how exactly could they be released from the rock into the atmosphere?

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The Delphi Fault is linked to one of Greece’s most geologically active features: the great rift, or graben, that today is filled by the waters of the Gulf of Corinth. This is a recent feature, geologically speaking, having formed roughly two million years ago. The rift continues to widen; as it does, motion occurs along faults and earthquakes are triggered. In 373 B.C., for example, earthquakes almost completely destroyed the Delphic temple on the north side of the gulf, as well as coastal towns on the south side.

As slippage occurs along the fault lines, adjacent rock masses are heated, vaporizing the lighter petrochemicals in the limestone and expelling gases upward along the face of the faults. Once faulting has opened such a pathway, gases continue to rise, although the volume would slowly decrease over time. We believe that this is exactly what happened at Delphi: The rock masses deep in the earth were heated, and they intermittently produced gases that rose up along the intersection of the two fault lines, eventually entering the adyton of the temple through one or more fissures over which the Pythia sat.

Read about the discovery in ancient Hierapolis of Pluto’s Gate, a site shrouded in misty poisonous vapors and considered sacred to the underworld deity Pluto.

Exhalations of gases from bituminous limestone have been observed by geologists studying underwater faults in the Gulf of Mexico. There light hydrocarbon gases—methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants—have been found bubbling up from the rock below. Closer to Delphi, similar exhalations were detected near the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as on the island of Zakynthos.

We decided to test the spring water at Delphi, along with samples of the travertine rock that the ancient springs had deposited on the retaining walls and slopes around the temple. If significant quantities of gases had been emitted with the spring water, traces of these gases might be found in the travertine deposits. The very presence of travertine rock, formed from dissolved calcites in warm spring water, is evidence that the springs along the Kerna Fault had their origin at deep levels.

The water and travertine from the sanctuary of Apollo, which were analyzed by Jeff Chanton, revealed traces of the light hydrocarbon gases found in the Isthmus of Corinth and on Zakynthos. Could this explain the Pythia’s state of intoxication in ancient times?

Apollo sits on a carved ompholos stone—perhaps even a representation of the stone shown in the previous photo—on a coin (shown here) minted in Antioch in 225–223 B.C. Clearly, the Delphic oracle and its association with Apollo were well known throughout the ancient world in Hellenistic times. By the first century A.D., however, the Pythia’s powers were failing, perhaps because the volume of gases flowing into the adyton had decreased—and by the fourth century, the demise of the oracle was complete. Photo: American Numismatic Society.

The ancient sources describe two distinct types of prophetic trance experienced by the Pythia. First, and more normally, she would lapse into benign semi-consciousness, during which she remained seated on the tripod, responding to questions—though in a strangely altered voice. According to Plutarch, once the Pythia recovered from this trance, she was in a composed and relaxed state, like a runner after a race. A second kind of trance involved a frenzied delirium characterized by wild movements of the limbs, harsh groaning and inarticulate cries. When the Pythia experienced this delirium, Plutarch reports, she died after only a few days—and a new Pythia took her place.

According to toxicologist Henry Spiller, both of these symptoms are associated with the inhalation of hydrocarbon gases. Spiller studies the effects of such inhalants on young people, known as “huffers,” who breathe in fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other substances because of their intoxicating properties. Perhaps the Pythia too was high on one of these hydrocarbon gases.

It may even be possible to identify the kind of gas. Plutarch—who, we recall, was a priest of Apollo at the Delphic sanctuary—noted that the intoxicating pneuma had a sweet smell, like expensive perfume. Of the hydrocarbon gases, only ethylene has a sweet smell—so ethylene was probably a component in the gaseous emission inhaled by the Pythia.

Now, there is a good deal of evidence concerning ethylene intoxication, particularly from the early 20th century. In laboratory tests involving human subjects, the pioneering anesthesiologist Isabella Herb and other scientists studied the effects of light doses of ethylene. Ethylene worked twice as fast as nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and achieved similar effects with only half the quantity. In high concentrations, ethylene produced complete unconsciousness; in low concentrations, it induced a trance state. Ultimately, ethylene’s use as a medical anesthetic was discontinued because of its combustibility: A spark from electrical equipment in the operating room could ignite the ethylene canister, causing it to explode.⁴

From the evidence of “huffers” and the experiments with ethylene, we know that subjects normally react to inhaling small quantities of these gases by entering a benign “out-of-body” trance. They can remain seated and answer questions, but their tone of voice and typical speech patterns are altered. Recovery takes place as soon as the subject is removed from exposure to the gas, and complete amnesia about the trance follows. In a minority of cases (about one in six) in the ethylene experiments, subjects experienced delirium, or a “bad trip.” Experimenters had to use restraints to hold down those undergoing this delirium, which was accompanied by groaning, shrieking and a thrashing of the arms and legs.

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Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the Pythia’s behavior survive from the golden age (seventh to fifth century B.C.) of the Delphic oracle. By the time Plutarch took office as priest of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle’s powers had significantly diminished. According to Plutarch, emissions of pneuma in the adyton were slight and unpredictable, leading to the decline of the oracle itself. He suggested that whatever produced the pneuma in the rock below the temple had become exhausted, or that the fissures in the rock had been blocked up in the 373 B.C. earthquake. The Delphic oracle never recovered its former prestige after this earthquake, even though the temple was rebuilt.

The diminished flow of gas may not have been the only reason for the decline of the institution. Plutarch opined that the pneuma was merely a trigger for the prophetic trance, and that the Pythia’s lifelong training and psychological preparation played the most important role in her spiritual possession. In a memorable simile, Plutarch compared Apollo to a musician, the Pythia to a lyre, and the pneuma to the musician’s uncanny ability to produce music by touching the instrument. Perhaps there were socio-cultural reasons for the decline of the institution, or perhaps, as the gaseous emissions became less powerful, devoting one’s life to the oracle became less attractive.

Whatever the reasons for the oracle’s demise, we can no longer dismiss ancient traditions concerning its origins and power. Strabo, Plutarch and the others have been rescued by science from a century of calumny.

Read the Bible History Daily feature Medicine in the Ancient World.

The House of Apollo: A History

The Delphic oracle appears often in Greek myth, even in the account of the repopulating of the earth after a great flood. The high god Zeus, distressed over mankind’s wickedness, sends a flood to cover the earth, but two pious human beings, Deucalion (Prometheus’s son) and Pyrrha (Prometheus’s niece), survive by climbing Mount Parnassus. With the ebbing of the flood, the two descend the mountain and come upon the Delphic temple site, where they hear a voice: “Veil your heads and cast behind you the bones of your mother!” Like many of the Delphic oracles, this one is initially enigmatic, but Deucalion and Pyrrha soon realize that the earth is their mother; so they throw rocks over their shoulders, and the rocks are transformed into men and women, saving humanity from perdition.

Photo: Erich Lessing.

Another famous, or infamous, visit to the oracle was made by the young Oedipus—who, having been adopted as a baby, wanted to know the identity of his parents. (The third-century A.D. marble relief above shows Oedipus [center] sacrificing to the Delphic oracle in front of a statue of Apollo [left].) However, the Delphic oracle informed the young man that he would murder his father and commit incest with his mother. To foil the prophecy, Oedipus left Corinth, which he (erroneously) believed to be his native land. On his journey he killed another chariot-driver in a fit of ancient road rage—but unknown to him, the other driver was his father Laius, King of Thebes.

The oracle at Delphi was also consulted by non-mythical figures. In the sixth century B.C., King Croesus of Lydia, in western Anatolia, inquired whether he should attack King Cyrus of Persia. “If you attack,” replied the Pythia, “you will destroy a great kingdom.” Croesus attacked the Persians, suffered total defeat, and saw his kingdom absorbed into the Persian Empire. Croesus had destroyed a great kingdom—his own.

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

More than a century later, the philosopher Socrates—shown above in a Hellenistic bust—reminded the Athenians at his trial in 399 B.C. that the oracle had declared him the wisest of men, a fact that did not save him from execution.

Photo: David Harris/Collection Israel Museum

After Greece was conquered by Rome, a number of Roman emperors posed questions to the oracle. Nero (54–68 A.D.) was warned to beware the 73rd year, and he was later assassinated by troops who made the 73-year-old Galba emperor in his place. Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), shown in the bronze statue above, ever the intellectual, wanted to know the birthplace of the poet Homer. (The Pythia’s answer: Homer was the grandson of Odysseus and born at Ithaca.) The oracle advised Diocletian (284–305 A.D.) to persecute Christians—which Christians avenged by destroying a number of oracle sites in the fourth century A.D. Finally, the envoys of the pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 A.D.) received word of the oracle’s demise from the Pythia: “Tell the king the fair-built hall has fallen; Apollo now has no house or oracular laurel or prophetic spring; the water is silent.”

Notes

a. The oracle at Delphi was not the only ancient oracle, though it was the most powerful. Other Greek oracles were located at Epidaurus and in Asia Minor at Colophon and Didyma. Italy’s most famous oracle was at Cumae (near Naples), where a sibyl, or priestess, prophesied in a cavern; originally, the sibyl’s utterances were inscribed on palm leaves.

b. “Pythia” derives from the original name of the site, Pytho. Homer, for instance, refers to Apollo’s “shrine in Pytho” (Odyssey 8.94). The name “Delphi” came later.

c. However, this was not so among such Greek scholars as Spyridon Marinatos (1901–1974), the excavator of ancient Thera (modern Santorini), which was buried in a volcanic eruption around 1638 B.C. Marinatos argued that Delphi’s active geological history made it difficult to know what changes might have occurred over the past two millennia. He also made a report on an anemotrypa (wind hole) in the modern town of Delphi—a small cleft in the rock that emitted gas with a sulfurous smell. Scholars outside Greece ignored these ideas.

1. A.P. Oppé, “The Chasm at Delphi,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 24 (1904), pp. 214–240.

2. M.F. Courby, Topographie et architecture: la terasse du Temple: Fouilles de Delphes (1927), vol. 11, pp. 65–66.

3. Pierre Amandry, La mantique apollinienne a Delphes: Boccard (Paris, 1950), pp. 215–230.

4. See Isabella Herb, “Ethylene: Notes Taken from the Clinical Records,” in Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1923), pp. 210, 231–232; Herb, “Further Clinical Experiments with Ethylene-Oxygen Anesthesia,” Anesthesia and Analgesia (December, 1927), pp. 258–262; A.B. Luckhardt and J.B. Carter, “Physiologic Effects of Ethylene: A New Gas Anesthetic,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 80 (January–June 1923), pp. 765–770.

“Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale appeared in the November/December 2002 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in May 2013.

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A helmeted god stands guard over one of the principal entrances to ancient Hattusa. From the 17th to the early 12th century B.C., Hattusa served as the capital of the Hittite empire. Credit: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis.

From his capital, Hattusa, in central Anatolia, the last-known Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II (1207 B.C.-?), ruled over a people who had once built a great empire—one of the superpowers (along with Egypt, Mittani, Babylon and Assyria) of the Late Bronze Age. The Kingdom of the Hittites, called Hatti, had stretched across the face of Anatolia and northern Syria, from the Aegean in the west to the Euphrates in the east. But now those days were gone, and the royal capital was about to be destroyed forever by invasion and fire.

Did Suppiluliuma die defending his city, like the last king of Constantinople 2,600 years later? Or did he spend his final moments in his palace, impassively contemplating mankind’s flickering mortality?

Neither, according to recent archaeological evidence, which paints a somewhat less dramatic, though still mysterious, picture of Hattusa’s last days. Excavations at the site, directed by the German archaeologist Jürgen Seeher, have indeed determined that the city was invaded and burned early in the 12th century B.C. But this destruction appears to have taken place after many of Hattusa’s residents had abandoned the city, carrying off the valuable (and portable) objects as well as the city’s important official records. The site being uncovered by archaeologists was probably little more than a ghost town during its final days.¹

Excavations at Hattusa have turned up beautifully crafted ritual objects, such as the 1½-inch-high, 15th-century B.C. gold pendant, which represents a Hittite god. Credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

From Assyrian records, we know that in the early second millennium B.C. Hattusa was the seat of a central Anatolian kingdom. In the 18th century B.C., this settlement was razed to the ground by a king named Anitta, who declared the site accursed and then left a record of his destruction of the city. One of the first Hittite kings, Hattusili I (c. 1650–1620 B.C.), rebuilt the city, taking advantage of the region’s abundant sources of water, thick forests and fertile land. An outcrop of rock rising precipitously above the site (now known as Büyükkale, or “Big Castle”) provided a readily defensible location for Hattusili’s royal citadel.

Although Hattusa became the capital of one of the greatest Near Eastern empires, the city was almost completely destroyed several times. One critical episode came early in the 14th century, when enemy forces launched a series of massive attacks upon the Hittite homeland, crossing its borders from all directions. The attackers included Arzawan forces from the west and south, Kaskan mountain tribes from the north, and Isuwan forces from across the Euphrates in the east. The Hittite king Tudhaliya III (c. 1360?-1350 B.C.) had no choice but to abandon his capital to the enemy. Tudhaliya probably went into exile in the eastern city of Samuha (according to his grandson and biographer, Mursili II, Tudhalia used Samuha as his base of operations for reconquering lost territories). Hattusa was destroyed, and the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390–1352 B.C.) declared, in a letter tablet found at Tell el-Amarna, in Egypt, that “The Land of Hatti is finished!”

In a series of brilliant campaigns, however, largely masterminded by Tudhaliya’s son Suppiluliuma I (1344–1322 B.C.), the Hittites regained their territories, and Hattusa rose once more, phoenix-like, from its ashes. During the late 14th century and for much of the 13th century B.C., Hatti was the most powerful kingdom in the Near East. Envoys from the Hittite king’s “royal brothers”—the kings of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria—were regularly received in the great reception hall on Hattusa’s acropolis. Vassal rulers bound by treaty came annually to Hattusa to reaffirm their loyalty and pay tribute to the Hittite king.²

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The most illustrious phase in the existence of Hattusa itself, however, did not come during the floruit of the Hittite empire under Suppiluliuma, his son Mursili II (c. 1321–1295 B.C.) or grandson Muwatalli II (c. 1295–1272 B.C.). At this time Hattusa was no match, in size or splendor, for the great Egyptian cities along the Nile—Thebes, Memphis and the short-lived Akhetaten, capital of the so-called heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (1352–1336 B.C.). Indeed, during Muwatalli’s reign Hattusa actually went into decline when the royal seat was transferred to a new site, Tarhuntassa, near Anatolia’s southern coast. Only later, when the kingdom was in the early stages of its final decline, did Hattusa become one of the great showplaces of the ancient Near East.

A 7-inch-high, 13th-century B.C. silver rhyton, cast in the shape of a stag, discovered at Hattusa. Credit: Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.

This renovation of the city was the inspiration of King Hattusili III (c. 1267–1237 B.C.), though his son and successor, Tudhaliya IV (c. 1237–1209 B.C.), did most of the work. Not only did Tudhaliya substantially renovate the acropolis; he more than doubled the city’s size, developing a new area lying south of and rising above the old city. In the new “Upper City,” a great temple complex arose. Hattusa could now boast at least 31 temples within its walls, many built during Tudhaliya’s reign. Though individually dwarfed by the enormous Temple of the Storm God in the “Lower City,” the new temples left no doubt about Hattusa’s grandeur, impressing upon all who visited the capital that it was the religious as well as the political and administrative heart of the Hittite empire.

Hattusili’s son Tudhaliya IV (1237–1209 B.C.) greatly expanded Hattusa to include a new Upper City, doubling the size of the Hittite capital. Tudhaliya also built dozens of new temples and massive fortification walls encircling the entire city. Credit: Life And Society in the Hittite World.

Tudhaliya also constructed massive new fortifications. The main casemate wall was built upon an earthen rampart to a height of 35 feet, punctuated by towers at 70-foot intervals along its entire length. The wall twice crossed a deep gorge to enclose the Lower City, the Upper City and an area to the northeast; this was surely one of the most impressive engineering achievements of the Late Bronze Age.

The great Temple of the Storm God, Teshub, once dominated the Lower City at Hattusa. The temple is clearly visible at left-center in the photo (which looks northwest over the ancient Lower City to modern Boghazkoy), surrounded by ritual chambers and storerooms. The temple was built by Hattusili III (1267–1237 B.C.)—perhaps on the site of an older temple to Teshub—just northwest of Hattusa’s ancient acropolis (not visible in the photo). Credit: Yann Arthus Bertrand/Corbis.

What prompted this sudden and dramatic—perhaps even frenetic—surge of building activity in these last decades of the kingdom’s existence?

One is left with the uneasy feeling that the Hittite world was living on the edge. Despite outward appearances, all was not well with the kingdom, or with the royal dynasty that controlled it. To be sure, Tudhaliya had some military successes; in western Anatolia, for instance, he appears to have eliminated the threat posed by the Mycenaean Greeks to the Hittite vassal kingdoms, which extended to the Aegean Sea.³ But he also suffered a major military defeat to the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta, which dispelled any notion that the Hittites were invincible in the field of battle. Closer to home, Tudhaliya wrote anxiously to his mother about a serious rebellion that had broken out near the homeland’s frontiers and was likely to spread much farther.

The collapse of the Hittite Empire is just one of many destructions at the end of the late Bronze Age. Learn more about the Bronze Age collapse and new evidence of droughts in the region >>

Excavators at Hattusa found this five-inch-high, 15th-century B.C. ceramic fragment that may depict the cyclopean walls and defensive towers that surrounded the acropolis. Credit: Hirmer Fotoarchiv Muenchen.

Within the royal family itself, there were serious divisions. For this, Tudhaliya’s father, Hattusili, was largely responsible. In a brief but violent civil war, he had seized the throne from his nephew Urhi-Teshub (c. 1272–1267 B.C.) and sent him into exile. But Urhi-Teshub was determined to regain his throne. Fleeing his place of exile, he attempted to win support from foreign kings, and he may have set up a rival kingdom in southern Anatolia.

Urhi-Teshub’s brother Kurunta may also have contributed to the deepening divisions within the royal family. After initially pledging his loyalty to Hattusili, he appears to have made an attempt upon the throne when it was occupied by his cousin Tudhaliya. Seal impressions dating to this period have been found in Hattusa with the inscription “Kurunta, Great King, Labarna, My Sun.” A rock-cut inscription recently found near Konya, in southern Turkey, also refers to Kurunta as “Great King.” The titles “Great King,” “Labarna” and “My Sun” were strictly reserved for the throne’s actual occupant—suggesting that Kurunta may have instigated a successful coup against Tudhaliya.

The seal of Tudhaliya IV (1237–1228 B.C.) is stamped on this 4-inch-high fragment of a letter sent to the king of Ugarit. Although the letter is written in cuneiform, the seal is in Hittite hieroglyphics. Credit: Erich Lessing.

Kurunta had every right to mount such a coup. Like Urhi-Teshub, he was a son of the legitimate king, Muwatalli. Urhi-Teshub’s and Kurunta’s rights had been denied when their uncle, Hattusili, usurped royal power for himself and his descendants. If Kurunta did indeed rectify matters by taking the throne by force around 1228 B.C., his occupancy was short-lived, for Tudhaliya again became king, and he remained king for many years after Kurunta disappeared from the historical record.

Nevertheless, the dynasty remained unstable. In an address to palace dignitaries, Tudhaliya made clear how insecure his position was:

The Land of Hatti is full of the royal line: In Hatti the descendants of Suppiluliuma, the descendants of Mursili, the descendants of Muwatalli, the descendants of Hattusili are numerous. Regarding the kingship, you must acknowledge no other person (but me, Tudhaliya), and protect only the grandson and great grandson and descendants of Tudhaliya. And if at any time(?) evil is done to His Majesty—(for) His Majesty has many brothers—and someone approaches another person and speaks thus: “Whomever we select for ourselves need not even be a son of our lord!”—these words must not be (permitted)! Regarding the kingship, you must protect only His Majesty and the descendants of His Majesty. You must approach no other person!

Another serious problem confronted the last kings of Hatti. There may well have been widespread famine in the Hittite kingdom during its final decades. The Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203 B.C.) refers to grain shipments sent to the Hittite king “to keep alive the land of Hatti.” Tudhaliya himself sent an urgent letter to the king of Ugarit, demanding a ship and crew for the transport of 450 tons of grain. The letter ends by stating that it is a matter of life or death! Was the Hittite kingdom being slowly starved into oblivion?

The Early Bronze Age Great Temple at Megiddo is “the most monumental single edifice so far uncovered in the EB I Levant and ranks among the largest structures of its time in the Near East.” Discover what the temple and Megiddo teach us about the birth of cities in the Levant >>

The Hittite economy was based primarily on agriculture, requiring a substantial labor force. At the same time, the annual Hittite military campaigns were heavily labor-intensive—draining off Hatti’s strong young men from the domestic workforce. To some extent this was compensated for by captives brought back to the homeland and used as farm laborers. Even so, the kingdom faced chronic shortages of manpower.

Increasingly, the Hittites came to depend on outside sources of grain, supplied by vassal states in north Syria and elsewhere. After 1259 B.C., when the Hittites signed a treaty with the Egyptians,⁴ Hatti began importing grain from Egypt.

In times of peace and stability, foreign imports made up for local shortfalls. But once supply routes were threatened, the situation changed dramatically. Grain shipments from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean were transported to Ura, on the Anatolian coast, and then carried overland to Hatti. The eastern Mediterranean was always a dangerous place for commercial shipping, since it was infested with pirates who attacked ships and raided coastal ports. As conditions throughout the region became more unsettled toward the end of the 13th century B.C., the threats to shipping became ever greater.

This provides the context for the Hittite military operations around the island of Cyprus during the reigns of Tudhaliya and his son Suppiluliuma II. The operations were almost certainly aimed at destroying enemy forces that were disrupting grain supplies. These enemies were probably seaborne marauders who had invaded Cyprus to use its harbors as bases for their attacks on shipping in the region. Dramatic evidence of the dangers they posed is provided by a letter from the last king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, to the king of Cyprus, who had earlier asked Ammurapi for assistance:

My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka? … Thus the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.⁵

On a wall of his mortuary temple at Thebes, called the Ramesseum, the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.) carved scenes showing the Battle of Kadesh—a clash between the Egyptians and the Hittites fought in 1274 B.C. near the Orontes River in modern Syria. Thirteen years later, Ramesses signed a peace treaty with the Hittite king Hattusili III (1267–1237 B.C.), putting an end to the protracted war between the two Late Bronze Age superpowers. Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

So, while a grave crisis was mounting in the land, with periods of famine, unrest and war aggravated by a dysfunctional royal dynasty, the Hittite kings decided to rebuild Hattusa!

This project obviously required enormous resources. Where did the workers come from? It would have been dangerous to deplete the ranks of the army during a period of conflict with Assyria in the east, rebellion near the homeland’s frontiers (the one Tudhaliya described to his mother) and attacks by marauders in the Mediterranean. The construction workers had to be recruited from among the able-bodied men working the farms—yet another strain on the already taxed Hittite economy.⁶

How do we explain this?

The new city was the brainchild of Tudhaliya’s father, Hattusili, who was always conscious of the fact that he was not the legitimate successor to the throne. Hattusili thus made great efforts to win acknowledgment from his royal peers: the kings of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria. It was also important for him to win acceptance from his own subjects. His brother and predecessor King Muwatalli had transferred the royal seat to Tarhuntassa.

Very likely Hattusili decided to win favor from his people—and the gods—by reinstating Hattusa, the great ancestral Hittite city, as the kingdom’s capital, and to do so on a grander scale than ever before. In this way, Hattusili-the-usurper could assume the role of Hattusili-the-restorer-of-the-old-order.

Did this provide a compelling motive for his son, Tudhaliya, who actually undertook the project? Or was Tudhaliya’s commitment to rebuilding the capital as a city of the gods an expression of religious fervor,⁷ especially as his kingdom was beginning to crumble around him? Or was he engaging in a gigantic bluff—creating a spectacular mirage of wealth and power in an attempt to delude subjects, allies and enemies into believing that the fragile empire he ruled was embarking upon a grand new era? Dramatically appealing as such explanations may be, they do not square with the picture we have of Tudhaliya as a level-headed, responsible and pragmatic ruler.

In short, the massive rebuilding of Hattusa at this time remains a mystery, one of the many mysteries attending the collapse of the Bronze Age.⁸

Only a handful of texts survive from the reign of Tudhaliya’s son Suppiluliuma II, and these tell a mixed story. On the one hand, some texts point to continuing unrest among his own subjects, including the elite elements of the state, and to acts of outright defiance by vassal states. On the other hand, military documents record conquests in southern and western Anatolia and naval victories off the coast of Cyprus. These conflicting documents from Suppiluliuma’s reign bring our written records of the Hittite kingdom abruptly to an end. Suppiluliuma, the last known monarch to rule from Hattusa, was almost certainly the king who witnessed the fall of the kingdom of Hatti.

The tablet, found at Hatttusa, is the Egyptian version of the treaty of Kadesh, written in Akkadian. Credit: Erich Lessing.

What happened at the royal capital? The evidence of widespread destruction by fire on the royal acropolis, in the temples of both the Upper City and Lower City, and along stretches of the fortifications, suggests a scenario of a single, simultaneous, violent destruction in an all-consuming conflagration. The final blow may have been delivered by bands of Kaskan peoples from the Pontic zone in the north, who had plagued the kingdom from its early days.

As we have seen, however, recent archaeological investigations indicate that by this time the city had already been largely abandoned. The Hittites saw the end coming!

Perhaps Suppiluliuma arranged for the departure of his family while it was still safe, and ordered the evacuation of the most important members of his administration, including a staff of scribes (who carried off the tablets), and a large part of his troops and personal bodyguards. The hoi polloi were left to fend for themselves. Those who stayed behind scavenged through the leavings of those who had departed. When Hattusa was little more than a decaying ruin, outside forces moved in, plundering and torching a largely derelict settlement.

This raises an important question. If the elite elements of Hittite society abandoned Hattusa, where did they go? Did Suppiluliuma set up a new capital elsewhere? That is not beyond the realm of possibility, for we know of at least two earlier occasions when king and court left Hattusa and re-established their capital in another place (Samuha and Tarhuntassa). We know, too, that at Carchemish on the Euphrates River, which had been made a vice-regal seat in the 14th century B.C., a branch of the Hittite royal family survived for perhaps several centuries after the fall of Hattusa. In fact, northern Syria became the homeland of a number of so-called neo-Hittite kingdoms in the early part of the first millennium. Did Suppiluliuma and his entourage find a new home in Syria?

It may be that the final pages of Hittite history still exist somewhere. In the last few decades, thousands of tablets have been found at sites throughout the Hittite world. This inspires hope that more archives of the period have yet to be found, including the last records of the Hittite empire. If Suppiluliuma II did in fact arrange a systematic evacuation of Hattusa, taking with him everything of importance, the stuff had to go somewhere. Maybe it still lies beneath the soil, awaiting discovery.

The Minoans, like the Hittites, shaped Bronze Age history in the Eastern Mediterranean. Who were they? Despite extensive research at palatial Minoan sites, many questions are yet to be answered. Learn what recent DNA studies have revealed about the ancestry of Crete’s great civilization >>

How We Know What We Know: The Hittite Archives

Credit: Erich Lessing.

The Hittites were perhaps the world’s first historians. On numerous clay tablets recovered largely over the last century by archaeologists, they wrote down what we today recognize as history, rather than merely relating myths or the acts of the gods.⁹ Much of what we know about the Hittites, therefore, comes from the pen (or stylus) of the Hittites themselves. The earliest excavations on the site of Hattusa were conducted by the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler in the first decade of the 20th century. They brought to light thousands of tablets, often fragmentary, from Hattusa’s palace and temple archives. A total of eight languages are represented in the tablets, all inscribed in the cuneiform script developed in Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C. Many of the tablets found at Hattusa are written in Akkadian, a Semitic language used by the Babylonians and Assyrians. During the Late Bronze Age, Akkadian also functioned as the international language of diplomacy; many of these tablets are thus correspondence between Hittite kings and their vassal states in Syria or foreign kingdoms (such tablets have also been found, for example, at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, site of the pharaoh Akhenaten’s capital).

Most of the tablets, however, are written in a language that was unknown to Hattusa’s first excavators. This language turned out to be Hittite, the language of the Hittites themselves (though they called it Nesite). The Hittite language was deciphered during the First World War by a Czech scholar named BedrŠich Hrozny´, who concluded (correctly) that it was a member of the Indo-European family of languages and thus related to Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.

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The tablets vary widely in content: historical annals, treaties and diplomatic correspondence, collections of laws and prayers, ritual texts, lists of festivals, literary and mythological texts, and lists of towns with ties to the Hittite empire, such as the 13th-century B.C. tablet shown. In 1986, an intact bronze tablet—the first metal tablet from the Hittite world—was discovered near Hattusa’s Sphinx Gate. This tablet is inscribed with the text of a treaty between the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV (1237–1209 B.C.) and his cousin Kurunta, ruler of the Hittite appanage kingdom of Tarhuntassa.

On seals and in monumental rock-cut inscriptions, the Hittites used a hieroglyphic script written in the Luwian language. Luwian is an Indo-European language closely related to Hittite. The only writing found so far in Late Bronze Age Troy, for example, is a bronze seal inscribed with Luwian hieroglyphics.¹⁰

Hittite archives have also come to light in outlying parts of the Hittite empire (at Emar on the Euphrates River in modern Syria, for instance) and at administrative centers in and near the Hittite homeland. Archaeologists recently found over 3,000 tablets at the site of ancient Sapinuwa (modern Ortaköy), northeast of Hattusa. Although these tablets have not yet been published, provincial archives from other sites have taught us much about the day-to-day administration of the kingdom’s provinces and the lives of local officials.

“The Last Days of Hattusa” by Trevor Bryce originally appeared in the January/February 2005 issue of Archaeology Odyssey. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily on September 27, 2013.

Trevor Bryce is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Honorary Research Consultant at the University of Queensland, Australia. His publications include The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), and The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms: A Political and Military History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).

Notes:

1. Jürgen Seeher, “Die Zerstörung der Stadt Hattusa” in Akten des IV. Internationalen Kongresses für Hethitologie Würzburg, 4.-8. Oktober 1999, StBoT 45, ed. Gernot Wilhelm (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001).

2. See Eric H. Cline, “Warriors of Hatti,” review-article on Trevor Bryce’s The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford, 1999), Archaeology Odyssey, January/February 2002).

3. One of the Hittite vassal kingdoms was almost certainly Troy (called “Ilios” and “Troia” by Homer and “Wilusa” by the Hittites). See the following articles in Archaeology Odyssey: “Greeks vs. Hittites: Why Troy is Troy and the Trojan War Is Real” (interview with Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier), July/August 2002; and “Is Homer Historical?” (interview with Gregory Nagy), May/June 2004.

4. For more on this treaty, signed with the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (1279–1213 B.C.), see Jack Meinhardt, “‘Look on My Works!’ The Many Faces of Ramesses the Great,” Archaeology Odyssey September/October 2003.

5. Document from Ras Shamra, trans. M.J. Astour, “New Evidence on the Last Days of Ugarit,” American Journal of Archaeology 69 (1965), p. 255.

6. Given the fragile condition of Hittite food production at this time, any number of events could have precipitated a crisis, such as severe drought or earthquakes (see Amos Nur and Eric H. Cline, “What Triggered the Collapse? Earthquake Storms,” Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 2001).

7. Tudhaliya IV was also responsible for the impressive sculptural decorations in the sanctuary at Yazilikaya, about a mile northeast of Hattusa (see E.C. Krupp, “Sacred Sex in the Hittite Temple of Yazilikaya,” Archaeology Odyssey, March/April 2000).

8. Hattusa was one of many cities in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean—including Ugarit, Troy, Knossos and Mycenae—that were destroyed toward the end of the second millennium B.C. See the following articles in Archaeology Odyssey, September/October 2001: William H. Stiebing, Jr., “When Civilization Collapsed: Death of the Bronze Age”; and Amos Nur and Eric H. Cline, “What Triggered the Collapse? Earthquake Storms.”

9. See Richard H. Beal, “History’s History: Learning to Distinguish Fact from Fancy,” Origins, Archaeology Odyssey, January/February 2003.

10. See Birgit Brandau, “Can Archaeology Discover Homer’s Troy?” Archaeology Odyssey, Premiere Issue 1998.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Who Were the Hittites?

Bronze Age Collapse: Pollen Study Highlights Late Bronze Age Drought

The Decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Did Climate Change Bring Sumerian Civilization to an End?

The post The Last Days of Hattusa appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

“After the conclusion of the treaty they left with their families and chattels, not fewer than two hundred and forty thousand people, and crossed the desert into Syria. Fearing the Assyrians, who dominated over Asia at that time, they built a city in the country which we now call Judea. It was large enough to contain this great number of men and was called Jerusalem.”
–Josephus, Against Apion 1.73.7, quoting Manetho’s Aegyptiaca

Excavations at Tel Habuwa, thought to be ancient Tjaru, reveal evidence of the expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmose I at the end of the Second Intermediate Period.

In the Second Intermediate Period (18th–16th centuries B.C.E.), towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the West Asian (Canaanite) Hyksos controlled Lower (Northern) Egypt. In the 16th century, Ahmose I overthrew the Hyksos and initiated the XVIII dynasty and the New Kingdom of Egypt.

Archaeological discoveries at Tel Habuwa (also known as Tell el-Habua or Tell-Huba), a site associated with ancient Tjaru (Tharo), shed light on Ahmose’s campaign. A daybook entry in the famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus notes that Ahmose seized control of Tjaru before laying siege the Hyksos at their capital in Avaris.

Excavations at the site, located two miles east of the Suez Canal, have uncovered evidence of battle wounds on skeletons discovered in two-story administrative structures dating to the Hyksos and New Kingdom occupations. The site showed evidence of burned buildings, as well as massive New Kingdom grain silos that would have been able to feed a large number of Egyptian troops. After Ahmose took the city and defeated the Hyksos, he expanded the town and built several nearby forts to protect Egypt’s eastern border. Tjaru was first discovered in 2003, but until now, the excavation only uncovered the New Kingdom military fort and silos. This new discovery confirms a decisive moment in the expulsion of the Hyksos previously known from textual sources.

Tomb painting from Beni Hasan, Egypt. A figure named Abisha and identified by the title Hyksos leads brightly garbed Semitic clansmen into Egypt to conduct trade. Dating to about 1890 B.C.E., the painting is preserved on the wall of a tomb carved into cliffs overlooking the Nile at Beni Hasan, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor. In the early second millennium B.C.E., numerous Asiatics infiltrated Egypt, some of whom eventually gained control over Lower Egypt for about a century and a half. The governing class of these people became known as the Hyksos, which means “Rulers of Foreign Lands.”

The Hyksos are well known from ancient texts, and their expulsion was recorded in later ancient Egyptian historical narratives. The third-century B.C.E. Egyptian historian Manetho–whose semi-accurate histories stand out as valuable resources for cataloging Egyptian kingship–wrote of the Hyksos’ violent entry into Egypt from the north, and the founding of their monumental capital at Avaris, a city associated with the famous excavations at Tell ed-Dab’a. After the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt, Manetho reports that they wandered the desert before establishing the city of Jerusalem.

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While Josephus cites Manetho’s history associating the Israelites with the Hyksos, many modern scholars see problems with Manetho’s conflation of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the Biblical narrative. Manetho lived many centuries after these events took place, and he may have combined two different narratives, wittingly or unwittingly, when associating the Hyksos and Israelites. Ahmose’s defeat of the Hyksos occurred centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus. In addition, the basic premise of the Hyksos and Exodus histories differ: the Hyksos were expelled rulers of Egypt, not slaves, and they were forced out, not pursued.

Learn more about the fortress excavated at Tel Habuwa—the largest discovered to date in Egypt.

The expulsion of the Hyksos may not have been a single event, and many still read Manetho’s texts on the Hyksos expulsion as a record of the Israelites’ Exodus. After the Hyksos were defeated by Ahmose, some Hyksos people likely remained in Egypt, perhaps as a subjugated class. The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (1489–1469 B.C.E.) recorded the banishment of a group of Asiatics from Avaris, the former Hyksos capital. While this second expulsion would still have been centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus, there may exist parallels between these events and the Exodus narrative, or the earlier Biblical accounts of Abraham, Sarah and Lot’s own expulsion from Egypt in Genesis 12:19.

Watch full-length lecture videos by top Exodus scholars, including Hyksos capital excavator Manfred Bietak, online for free.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published in March 2013.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Reinterpreting the Tempest Stela

Severed Hands: Trophies of War in New Kingdom Egypt

The Exodus: Fact or Fiction?

Who Were the Minoans?

The Last Days of Hattusa

Bronze Age Collapse: Pollen Study Highlights Late Bronze Age Drought

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

Out of Egypt: The Archaeological Context of the Exodus by James K. Hoffmeier

“Look on My Works”: The many faces of Ramesses the Great by Jack Meinhardt and O. Louis Mazzatenta

An Ancient Israelite House in Egypt? by Hershel Shanks

Jacob in History by Aharon Kempinski

The post The Expulsion of the Hyksos appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Who were the Minoans? The Minoan civilization is remembered for its ornate frescoes, including this Prince of the Lillies from the palace at Knossos.

Who were the Minoans? Their civilization in Crete has long been considered Europe’s first great Bronze Age society. The floruit of the Minoan civilization, which spread across Crete in the third millennium B.C.E., occurred in the 18th–16th centuries B.C.E., in the late Middle Bronze Age and the start of the Late Bronze Age. The island is dotted with magnificent palaces, including labyrinthine Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia, and Minoan art and traditions have captivated and influenced the Mediterranean world for thousands of years.

Despite their celebrated legacy, the Minoan civilization remains shrouded in mystery. We do not know what language was spoken on Crete, and the scripts of the early Minoan civilization—Cretan Hieroglyphs and Linear A—have eluded translation attempts for over a century. Despite extensive archaeological research exploring the history of Crete, the Minoan civilization has always kept close ties to the world of mythology. Sir Arthur Evans, the first person to carry out extensive excavations in Crete, named the society after the mythological king Minos. Crete’s  landscape serves as the setting for countless legends, including the birthplace of Zeus, the labyrinth where Theseus killed the Minotaur and the prison that Deadalus and Icarus fled with their ill-fated wings.

But who were the people that left us with such grand mysteries and ornate palaces?

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Sir Arthur Evans claimed that the ancestors of the Minoan civilization came from North Africa, but more recent scholars have suggested dozens of additional forefathers. On May 14, 2013, Nature Communications published the study “A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete,” analyzing mitochondrial DNA from Minoan osseous tissue found in caves at the Cretan Lassithi plateau. It suggests that the Minoan civilization was comprised of local Europeans rather than outsiders. The Greek and American research team writes that “Our data are compatible with the hypothesis of an autochthonous development of the Minoan civilization by the descendants of the Neolithic settlers of the island” and that “shared haplotypes, principal component and pairwise distance analyses refute the Evans North African hypothesis.”

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Who were the Minoans? Knossos’s Ladies in Blue are genetically related to modern Europeans, according to a recent DNA study. Archaeological Museum of Iraklion.

The researchers examined over 100 bone samples from the third and second millennia B.C.E. and found a combination of distinctly European and uniquely Minoan characteristics—with no trace of African descent. The DNA samples are consistent with that of Neolithic, Bronze Age and modern European populations, especially Crete’s modern population. The Minoan people may be related to groups that migrated from Anatolia millennia earlier; if true, this would allow researchers to use cues from known Indo-European languages to help decipher the still-unknown language of the Minoan civilization.

While mysteries about the seafaring Minoan civilization remain, we are one step closer to answering the question: Who were the Minoans? As University of Washington geneticist George Stamatoyannopoulos says, “We now know that the founders of the first advanced European civilization were European.”

Read “A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete” in Nature Communications.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri

Phaistos Disk Deciphered? Not Likely, Say Scholars

Bronze Age Collapse: Pollen Study Highlights Late Bronze Age Drought

Early Bronze Age: Megiddo’s Great Temple and the Birth of Urban Culture in the Levant

What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World?

Read more about Minoan civilization in the BAS Library:

The Minoans of Crete: Europe’s Oldest Civilization: Excavating Minoan Sites

Past Perfect: In Pursuit of Minoan Crete

Ancient Life: Bull Jumping

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The post Who Were the Minoans? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Things were different in the southern Levant. Scholars traditionally depict the EB I Levant as a village-level society, with cities first appearing in the early third millennium B.C.E. (Early Bronze Age II and III). However, monumental finds at Megiddo may change that picture.

Excavations in Megiddo Area J uncovered a temple of unparalleled scale in the Early Bronze Age I Levant. This photo is from the 2008 field season. Photo: Courtesy of the Megiddo Expedition.

Recent excavations in and around Early Bronze Age I Megiddo have exposed a complex society, “settlement explosion” and monumental construction that are unparalleled elsewhere in the late-fourth millennium Levant. At the center of these discoveries lies Megiddo’s Great Temple, a structure that, according to its excavators, “has proven to be the most monumental single edifice so far uncovered in the EB I Levant and ranks among the largest structures of its time in the Near East.”

Two recent articles in the American Journal of Archaeology and Near Eastern Archaeology explore not only the excavation of the Great Temple and its construction, but also the occupation of greater Early Bronze Age I Megiddo, a “dual site consisting of a cultic acropolis at Tel Megiddo and the settlement at Tel Megiddo East.”

Who built the Great Temple? And what does their settlement size and complex labor organization suggest about the Early Bronze Age I Levant? In personal correspondence with Bible History Daily, Megiddo archaeologist and W.F. Albright Institute Dorot Director Matthew J. Adams describes EB I Megiddo:

The society of the Great Temple builders is still something of a mystery. We used to think that EB I society in general was not complex enough for political and social hierarchies, but the Great Temple and the settlement at Tel Megiddo East are changing that. At both sites, substantial activity and construction suggest a prosperous mid-to-late EB Ib society, culminating in the Great Temple phase, which featured monumental architecture, standardization of measurements in public and private buildings both on the acropolis and in the settlement and planning over broad spaces. All of these things are characteristic of complex political and social structures.

As the point where three of the world’s major religions converge, Israel’s history is one of the richest and most complex in the world. Sift through the archaeology and history of this ancient land in the free eBook Israel: An Archaeological Journey, and get a view of these significant Biblical sites through an archaeologist’s lens.

Megiddo at a Glance

Tel Megiddo

Before examining the Early Bronze Age Great Temple, let’s take a look the site’s broader history. Megiddo played a central role in the region’s history for millennia, both before and after its Early Bronze Age occupation. Over a century of investigations at the storied site of Megiddo have uncovered evidence of a thriving city that has been described as “the jewel in the crown of Biblical archaeology.” Timothy P. Harrison’s 2003 BAR article “The Battleground” included the following sidebar summarizing the extended history of Megiddo:

Strategically located on the important Via Maris trade route, ancient Megiddo (Tell el-Mutesellim) was designated “Armageddon” in the Book of Revelation, the site of the ultimate battle at the end of days. Megiddo was settled as early as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (8300–5500 B.C.E.). The Early Bronze Age I (3300–3000 B.C.E.) saw the creation of a large, unfortified settlement in an area to the east of the mound, which today rises 100 feet above the floor of the Jezreel Valley.

From the 20th century B.C.E. through the 12th century B.C.E., Megiddo flourished as a Canaanite city-state. In about 1479 B.C.E. it was conquered by Pharaoh Thuthmose III. Egyptian domination continued for over 300 years.

Canaanite Megiddo was destroyed by fire; the evidence of this destruction is assigned to Stratum VII (discussed by Timothy Harrison in the accompanying article). Somewhat later—the dating is still hotly disputed—the city represented by Stratum VI, which seems to have been of a mixed Israelite and Philistine character, also fell victim to fire. (A contorted skeleton and smashed pottery from this stratum testify to the violence of its end.)

Megiddo rose again in the ninth century B.C.E. as a lavish city, boasting an impressive gate, three palaces and puzzling structures often interpreted as stables. Following Tiglath-pileser III’s conquest of Megiddo in 732 B.C.E., the town became the capital of the Assyrian province Magiddu. By the fourth century B.C.E. Megiddo’s importance waned, and it ceased to be an important site.

Discover the Bronze Age in Bible History Daily, from the Minoans in Crete to the Hittites in Turkey, and learn more about the cataclysmic international Late Bronze Age collapse.

The Great Temple of Megiddo

An isometric drawing of the Early Bronze Age I Great Temple at Megiddo. Illustration: Matthew J. Adams.

Two decades of renewed excavations at Megiddo have uncovered the unprecedentedly monumental cult complex described by Matthew J. Adams, Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin in “The Great Temple of Early Bronze I Megiddo” in the April 2014 American Journal of Archaeology. The authors identify the Great Temple as a broad-room sanctuary (a vague Chalcolithic and EBA designation), or more specifically, a broad-room table temple, a type “defined by two elements: a broad room and central ground-level stone slabs at regular intervals within the room.” The temple, which replaced an earlier structure on the same site, was built according to a systematic geometric plan. Its thick mudbrick walls surround a main room featuring orderly planned sets of basalt tables and columns.

While we know of other Levantine broad-room sanctuaries, the AJA report reminds readers:

In considering the sophistication of the Great Temple and these aspects of its construction, it is useful also to reflect on the size of the building (1,100 m2) in comparison with that of contemporary and slightly later cultic structures. The Great Temple is roughly six times the size of the average broad-room table temple and similar in size to average temples in contemporary Mesopotamian cities. Ultimately, the Great Temple was one of the most sophisticated buildings of its day and required significant expenditures of ideological capital to rally the specialized and unspecialized labor necessary for its construction.

While cultic activity surely took place in the Early Bronze Age Great Temple, the monumental structure was cleaned and the sanctuary was uncovered devoid of cultic remains. So what was going on in the Great Temple at Megiddo? In correspondence with BAS, Adams noted that some questions remain unanswered:

Cult/religion in this period is still something we can’t describe very well. Some work has suggested that fertility cults associated with water and grain may have been the norm in the Early Bronze Age. Generally, in this model, EB religion is seen as similar to other types of Semitic religions attested in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, for example, at Ugarit. It’s hard to tell on the basis of present evidence if this is really applicable to the Megiddo temple.

The sheer size of the Great Temple provides clues about the complexity of the community’s structure. Construction of the Great Temple and Megiddo’s surrounding cultic precinct surely involved large-scale resource accumulation and labor organization. (For example, workers would have needed over a square mile of arable land just for straw used as temper in the Great Temple’s mudbricks.)

Complex administrative societies existed in contemporaneous Mesopotamia and Egypt, but Early Bronze Age I society in the Levant was not “globalized” like the later Bronze Age, and the Megiddo phenomenon should be evaluated primarily as a local development. What does this tell us about Early Bronze Age I Megiddo and the surrounding Jezreel Valley?

Which finds made our top 10 Biblical archaeology discoveries of 2014? Find out >>

The Temple Builders, Megiddo and Tel Megiddo East in the Early Bronze Age

The excavations at Tel Megiddo East. Photogrammetry: Adam Prins.

Megiddo owes its importance in part to its location in the Jezreel Valley, a fertile and strategically located region in northern Israel. Jezreel Valley Regional Project (JVRP) archaeologists Matthew J. Adams, Jonathan David, Robert S. Homsher and Margaret E. Cohen recently published the article “The Rise of a Complex Society: New Evidence from Tel Megiddo East in the Late Fourth Millennium” in the March 2014 issue of Near Eastern Archaeology (NEA). The article details investigations at Tel Megiddo East, the settlement responsible for the construction of the Great Temple, as well as the broader Jezreel Valley landscape in the Early Bronze Age I.

Project director Matthew J. Adams told Bible History Daily:

The JVRP was originally designed to contextualize the Great Temple by studying contemporary sites around the valley. We wanted to be able to understand how regional developments allowed for such a tremendous leap in social and political organization represented in the Great Temple. Once we realized that this regional approach to research would be valuable for any period, we redesigned the JVRP to embrace all periods. In fact, we’re doing essentially the same thing for the Roman camp at Legio — studying the entire region to understand how the presence of the Roman army in the 2nd – 3rd centuries affected local pagan, Jewish and early Christian populations.

Jezreel Valley Regional Project investigations at Early Bronze Age I Megiddo reveal that the main mound and Tel Megiddo East (TME) formed a dual site. The two together make up one of the largest-known Early Bronze Age sites in the southern Levant (with larger sites like Bet Yerah and Yarmut developing later in the EBA II/III periods). JVRP excavations reveal that construction at TME, the settlement of the Great Temple builders, parallels that of the acropolis, suggesting that there was “a prosperous mid-to-late EB Ib society, culminating in the Great-Temple phase, which featured monumental architecture, standardization of measurement in a variety of public and private buildings both on the acropolis and in the settlement, and an effort to plan over broad spaces in the settlement,” according to the recent NEA article.

Jezreel Valley Regional Project archaeologists teamed up with Israeli archaeologist Yotam Tepper to expose a Roman camp just south of Tel Megiddo known as Legio. In a web-exclusive report, directors Matthew J. Adams, Jonathan David and Yotam Tepper describe the first archaeological investigation of a second-century C.E. Roman camp in the Eastern Roman Empire.

What does this mean for the broader Jezreel Valley, or the whole southern Levant? Is Megiddo a unique phenomenon, or will further excavation in the region uncover greater evidence of early urbanism? JVRP excavations will continue to expose Megiddo’s network in the Jezreel Valley, and perhaps further excavations elsewhere will reveal broader EB I urbanism in the Levant. Adams told Bible History Daily:

It seems likely that the developments at Megiddo are not totally unique. Other contemporary sites in the southern Levant show signs of fortifications and monumental architecture. However, these sites have not been as extensively excavated as Megiddo. While Megiddo may be unique in sheer size and monumentality, I suspect that future excavations will show this to be part of a broader phenomenon of social and political development in the southern Levant. That said, we know that while there is general cultural homogeneity across the southern Levant, there are also evidence of notable cultural regionalism. It’s difficult to predict how this regionalism will be manifested in the development of social and political organizations.

The End of the Early Bronze Age

Early Bronze Age I Megiddo fell during a period of widespread crisis in the region, and the Great Temple was abandoned along with half of the other sites in the Jezreel Valley. But, as we said at the start of the article, Near Eastern society flourished during the subsequent EB II and III, with major new states, technologies and social organization developing during these periods. However, in the second half of the third millennium B.C.E., the great Early Bronze Age states also succumbed to widespread destruction and decline. What happened? The cause of the collapse is still still a matter of scholarly debate, and one potential trigger is environmental. In the sidebar to his 1994 Bible Review article “Climate and Collapse,” William H. Stiebing, Jr. ascribed the decline to climate change:

Recent research points to climate as the culprit in the widespread cultural upheaval during the transition from the Early Bronze Age to the Middle Bronze Age (2300–2000 B.C.E.). In 1993 Professor Harvey Weiss of Yale University announced that his excavations at Tell Leilan in Syria had uncovered evidence of a severe late third-millennium drought that, he says, caused the end of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. Weiss this joins an increasing number of scholars who recognize climatic change as a significant factor in the political and cultural changes that took place in the eastern Mediterranean around 2300–2000 B.C.E.Previously, during a moist climatic phase in the eastern Mediterranean that began around 3500 B.C.E., widespread urbanization developed in Early Bronze Age Greece, in Asia Minor, in Syria and in Palestine, as well as in the civilizations of Old Kingdom Egypt and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia. During the Early Bronze II–III period (c. 3050–3200 B.C.E.), large walled cities, often much larger than those of later times, flourished in Palestine and Transjordan. Settlements even expanded into the Negev and Sinai, areas that are now deserts.

As the point where three of the world’s major religions converge, Israel’s history is one of the richest and most complex in the world. Sift through the archaeology and history of this ancient land in the free eBook Israel: An Archaeological Journey, and get a view of these significant Biblical sites through an archaeologist’s lens.

But virtually all of Palestinian Early Bronze villages were destroyed around 2300–2200 B.C.E. and lay abandoned for two or more centuries. In most parts of the Negev, sedentary occupation was not resumed until the Iron Age II, after 1000 B.C.E. At the same time as these third-millenium destructions, the flood level of the Nile was extremely low, causing famine and turmoil in Egypt, leading to the collapse of the Old Kingdom.

There thus seems to have been a relatively dry period in the Near East during the Egyptian First Intermediate Period and the Palestinian Early Bronze IV (or the Early Bronze/Middle Bronze transition) about 2300–2000 B.C.E. It is evidence of this dry period that Weiss has uncovered at Tell Leilan. During this era, urban civilization virtually disappeared in Palestine. The population dropped drastically, leaving the land to groups of pastoral seminomads.

Major migrations also took place during this time. Seminomads invaded Mesopotamia, the Delta area of Egypt, and possibly Palestine. Indo-European speaking groups from the north moved into Asia Minor and Greece. In both areas cities were destroyed. The revival of urbanism in much of the eastern Mediterranean area occurred only after 2000 B.C.E., when moister weather seems to have returned.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on May 21, 2014.

Notes:

Matthew J. Adams, Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin, “The Great Temple of Early Bronze I Megiddo,” American Journal of Archaeology 118.2 (2014), pp. 1-21.

Matthew J. Adams, Jonathan David, Robert S. Homsher and Margaret E. Cohen, “The Rise of a Complex Society: New Evidence from Tel Megiddo East in the Late Fourth Millennium,” Near Eastern Archaeology 77:1 (2014), pp. 32-43.

Many thanks to Matthew J. Adams for his correspondence with Bible History Daily regarding the finds at Megiddo and Tel Megiddo East.

This article was originally published on April 8, 2018.

More on Megiddo in the BAS Library:

Eric H. Cline, “Why Megiddo?” Bible Review, June 2000.

Israel Finkelstein and David Ussishkin, “Back to Megiddo,” Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1994.

Hershel Shanks, “Wet-Sift the Megiddo Dumps!” Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2013.

Timothy P. Harrison, “The Battleground,” Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2003.

Not a BAS Library member yet? Sign up today.

The post Early Bronze Age: Megiddo’s Great Temple and the Birth of Urban Culture in the Levant appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Sites destroyed in the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 B.C.E.

During the Late Bronze Age (1500–1200 B.C.E.), the Eastern Mediterranean boasted a flourishing network of grand empires sustaining sophisticated infrastructures, the likes of which the world would not see again for centuries to come. An interregional destruction (attested in Greece, Turkey, Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt) known as the Bronze Age collapse is one of archaeology’s greatest mysteries.

In the Archaeology Odyssey article “When Civilization Collapsed: Death of the Bronze Age,” William H. Stiebing describes the Late Bronze Age collapse:

It was a cataclysm of immense proportions: Near the end of the 13th century B.C.E., the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Near East suddenly collapsed. In the latter part of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1400–1200 B.C.E.), Mycenaean civilization flourished in Greece and Crete. The Hittites controlled most of Anatolia and northern Syria from their capital at Hattusa. The Egyptian New Kingdom ruled not only in the Nile Valley but also in Palestine and southern Syria. Commerce flowed over trade routes that crisscrossed both land and sea. A late-14th-century B.C.E. ship excavated off the Uluburun promontory in southern Turkey, for example, carried cargo from Cyprus, Canaan, Egypt, Anatolia and Mycenaean Greece. A century later, all these civilizations had begun to unravel. Cities burned, trade became almost nonexistent, and large groups of people migrated from one place to another.

The Bronze Age collapse was swift and sudden, ushering in a so-called “Dark Age” of decreased literacy, population and technology in much of the Eastern Mediterranean. However, as Thomas Fuller wrote in A Pisgah Sight of Palestine in 1650, “It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.” The power vacuum and increased migration surely played a role in the emergence of the Biblical Israelites and classical Greeks.

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But what caused the Bronze Age collapse? Scholars have proposed a combination of factors including marauding Sea Peoples, plagues and earthquakes leading to a so-called “systems collapse,” in which complex societal networks broke down under mounting interregional economic or demographic pressures. Some see Homer’s Iliad as an illustration of the warfare that brought about (or occurred in the wake of) the Late Bronze Age collapse.

The free eBook Island Jewels: Understanding Ancient Cyprus and Crete takes you on a journey to two stunning, history-laden islands in the Mediterranean. Visit several key historical places on both islands and discover many of the great objects that have been unearthed there by archaeologists.

A 12th-century inscription describes Ramesses III’s defeat of the Sea Peoples. The Sea Peoples, a range of groups including the Philistines, led raids on the Eastern Mediterranean during the period of the Bronze Age collapse and are often cited as the reason for the collapse.

A study of pollen grains in sediment cores beneath the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea provides a new view of the Bronze Age collapse. The research, published in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, suggests that drought may have played a major factor leading to the Bronze Age collapse. Every plant produces a distinct pollen print (see below), and the studies show a decrease in trees requiring a great deal of water and an increase in the cultivation of dry-climate trees, such as olive trees, during the period between 1250 and 1100 B.C.E. Tel Aviv University professor Israel Finkelstein told the New York Times that pollen counts taken every 40 years are the “highest resolution yet in this region.” When compared with pollen data from Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria and the Nile Delta, the studies suggest a broader climate change across the Eastern Mediterranean around the time of the Bronze Age collapse.

The three-year pollen study is part of a broader scientific research project conducted by Israel Finkelstein and the Weizmann Institute’s Steve Weiner that includes DNA and molecular studies of archaeological data.

The pollen data is critical for understanding the Late Bronze Age collapse. While a single source for the centuries-long upheaval seems unlikely, an extended period of drought may have led to economic failures and population migration, sparking broader military and other conflicts that broke down the extended imperial network of the Late Bronze Age. While Egypt, Hatti, Mycenae and others would never rise to their pre-collapse levels of prosperity again, the so-called Dark Ages saw the birth of some of history’s most prodigious cultures, including the Biblical Israelites.

Read more about the pollen study in The New York Times.

Read the American Friends of Tel Aviv University Press Release.

Read more about pollen studies in Bible History Daily.

Read about the Early Bronze Age Levant in Bible History Daily.

Read “Earthquake Storms: What triggered the collapse?” by Amos Nur and Eric H. Cline as it appeared in the September/October 2001 issue of Archaeology Odyssey.

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City by City: Death of the Bronze Age

Special Feature: Read “City by City: Death of the Bronze Age” as it appeared in the September/October 2001 issue of Archaeology Odyssey below. Read William H. Stiebing, Jr.’s full article “When Civilization Collapsed: Death of the Bronze Age” in the BAS Library.

Mycenae: The City of King Agamemnon

Described by Homer as a “strong-founded citadel” that was “rich in gold,” Mycenae was the greatest of the Mycenaean cities that flourished in mainland Greece from about 1600 to 1200 B.C. (In the Trojan War, Mycenae’s king, Agamemnon, is the king of kings who leads the Greeks into battle.) Around 1500 B.C. Mycenaeans conquered the island of Crete and adapted the Minoan script, called Linear A, to write their own language, an ancient form of Greek. This new script, called Linear B, was used solely for recording inventories and commercial transactions; hundreds of Linear B tablets have been found both on Crete and in such Mycenaean cities as Tiryns, Pylos and Mycenae itself. When Heinrich Schliemann excavated Mycenae in the 1870s, he uncovered royal shaft graves filled with extraordinary gold artifacts (such as the famous Mask of Agamemnon, shown above). All of the Mycenaean cities were destroyed toward the end of the 13th century B.C. or the beginning of the 12th century B.C.

Knossos: Center of Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations

The island of Crete gave rise to Europe’s first and most splendid Bronze Age civilization. In the early second millennium B.C., the Minoans, named by modern archaeologists after the legendary King Minos, built an elaborate palace complex at Knossos, which was excavated—and partly restored—by the British antiquarian Arthur Evans about a century ago. The Minoans were extremely influential in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean—trading textiles, timber and wine to Cyprus for copper and Anatolia for tin. Minoan frescoes dating to the 17th century B.C. have been found in the Nile Delta, in the northern Levant and on the Anatolian coast. The Minoans also developed a script, the still-undeciphered Linear A, to write their language. In Knossos’s maze-like palace complex, Evans found frescoes of bull-leapers and exquisite bull’s-head rhytons, reflecting the Minoans’ reverence for the bull as well as the myth of Minos and the labyrinth he built to house the Minotaur. In the early 15th century B.C. Crete was invaded by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland—who absorbed numerous aspects of Minoan culture (such as writing) and occupied the palace at Knossos.
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Troy: Homer’s great Late Bronze Age City

Located near the western entrance to the Dardanelles, ancient Troy (modern Hisarlik, in northwestern Turkey) grew rich levying mooring fees on vessels waiting to negotiate the straits leading to the Black Sea. First inhabited in the early third millennium B.C., Troy became an important commercial center for wool, horse-breeding and metalworking. (The gold objects of “Priam’s Treasure,” excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1873, are from the end of the third millennium B.C.) Late Bronze Age Troy, perhaps the city described by Homer, lasted from about 1700 to 1200 B.C.; this settlement featured towering fortifications and a great defensive moat. The citadel’s palaces were destroyed around 1250 B.C.—either by earthquake, fire or attack—and replaced by more modest buildings. Some 70 years later, Troy was attacked and burned, perhaps giving rise to oral stories that four centuries later would be written down by Homer.

Hattusa: Capital of the Hittite Empire

So vast was the Hittite capital of Hattusa (modern Bogazköy, in central Turkey) that its circuit walls ran for six miles. The city contained a temple complex with a remarkable library of over 3,000 clay tablets—many of them written in Hittite, the earliest recorded Indo-European language. The Hittites worshiped their “One Thousand Gods” in the sanctuary of Yazilikaya, a rock outcropping 2 miles from Hattusa that was carved with images of Hittite and Hurrian deities and kings. By the mid-14th century B.C. the Hittites had become one of the Near East’s superpowers, rivaling Egypt in the south and Assyria in the east. Toward the end of the 13th century B.C., however, their kingdom suddenly collapsed and Hattusa was destroyed.

Ugarit: A Fusion of Canaanite and Syrian culture

During the second half of the 14th century B.C., Ugarit, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, experienced a period of great peace and prosperity. Ugarit’s merchants traded for Mesopotamian and Lebanese timber, Mycenaean pottery, Egyptian ivory, Cypriot copper and Anatolian tin. This was one of the Bronze Age’s most scintillating cities: Its citizens carved delicate ivory figurines (above), made elaborate inlaid furniture, adapted the Semitic alphabet for cuneiform characters and recorded numerous Canaanite myths, songs and stories. (Much of this was revealed by the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer, who excavated Ugarit from 1929 to 1970.) Ugarit’s golden age ended around 1300 B.C., when an earthquake struck the region and a tidal wave and fire engulfed the city. A century later, invading Sea Peoples from the Aegean disrupted the city’s commercial routes and forced much of its population to migrate to other sites. The Sea Peoples eventually conquered Ugarit and set the city ablaze.

Megiddo: City of Armageddon

Perhaps no other city in the ancient world is so associated with destruction as the mountaintop citadel of Megiddo, in north-central Israel. (The word “Armegeddon,” referring to the final battle between Good and Evil, derives from har Megiddo, a Hebrew term meaning “mountain of Megiddo.” Settled by Canaanites in the fourth millennium B.C., Megiddo prospered greatly during the Late Bronze Age. During this period, a palace was built near the gateway of the city, with an ingenious passageway cut through the bedrock to link the citadel to a spring outside the city’s walls. Around 1130 B.C., Megiddo and other Canaanite cities were violently destroyed—perhaps by a strong earthquake.

Learn about Megiddo’s Early Bronze Age Great Temple and what it can teach us about the birth of cities in the Levant for free in Bible History Daily.

The free eBook Island Jewels: Understanding Ancient Cyprus and Crete takes you on a journey to two stunning, history-laden islands in the Mediterranean. Visit several key historical places on both islands and discover many of the great objects that have been unearthed there by archaeologists.

How to Read Pollen

Special Feature: Read “How to ‘Read’ Pollen” by Vaughn M. Bryant, Jr. as it appeared in the November/December 2000 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review below. Read Bryant’s full article “Does Pollen Prove the Shroud Authentic?” in the BAS Library.

Pollen analysis—the application of statistical methods to the study of pollen—is less than a century old. Its basic principles were set forth by German geologist Lennart von Post (1884–1951), who used pollen to study past environments. He noted five key features of pollen. First, many plants produce vast amounts of pollen, which are dispersed by the wind. The average pine tree, for example, produces more than 100 billion pollen grains. Second, pollen has a very durable outer wall, called the exine, which can stay intact for a very long time. Examples have been found that are 250 million years old. Third, the general shape and the surface features of pollen vary between plant species, yet they are the same in all plants within the same species. Fourth, the distribution of pollen-producing plants is governed by such ecological factors as moisture, temperature and soil type; the more favorable the conditions for a particular plant, the more of that plant—and its wind-borne pollen—one would expect to see in that region. Fifth, almost all wind-borne pollen falls back to earth within about 30 miles of the plant that produced it, with the overwhelming majority (95%) found within a mile.

Pollen, in sum, is plentiful, hardy, identifiable and traceable to its point of origin.

Plants can produce a staggering amount of pollen. Swedish scientists estimate that the spruce forests in the southern third of their country release more than 75,000 tons of pollen into the atmosphere each year. Some flowering plants, however, generally those with colorful flowers to attract insects, produce relatively tiny amounts of pollen, relying on insects, birds or bats—rather than the wind—to carry out pollination.
The rate of pollen production is an important factor in palynology. Specialists must first determine the expected amounts and the dispersal patterns (called the pollen rain) of a specific pollen type in a particular region and then compare that to what they find on the item under study. With the Shroud of Turin, for example, we must ask if the types and amounts of pollen on the shroud match the pollen patterns in Jerusalem.

In court cases where pollen evidence is introduced, it is the pattern of pollen types—the “pollen print”—that can link a suspect to a crime scene. For example, in a case that took place in New Zealand in 1995–1996, a young woman was attacked and killed in a botanical garden. The suspect swore that he had never been at the site, but pollen embedded in his sweater came from plants not found in the area—except in the botanical garden. The suspect was convicted.

The free eBook Island Jewels: Understanding Ancient Cyprus and Crete takes you on a journey to two stunning, history-laden islands in the Mediterranean. Visit several key historical places on both islands and discover many of the great objects that have been unearthed there by archaeologists.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

The Decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Did Climate Change Bring Sumerian Civilization to an End?

The Last Days of Hattusa

What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World?

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on October 22, 2013.

The post Bronze Age Collapse: Pollen Study Highlights Late Bronze Age Drought appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Louise Hitchcock

The term “Aegean” refers to Greece in the Bronze Age and includes the Minoan civilization, which inhabited Crete (c. 1900–1450 B.C.E.), as well as the Mycenaean civilization, which inhabited Mainland Greece (c. 1500–1200 B.C.E.) and Crete (c. 1450–1200 B.C.E.).

In her Archaeological Views column “View from the West: Why Aegean Archaeology Matters” in the May/June 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, University of Melbourne professor Louise Hitchcock explains that one needs to explore the connections between these Aegean cultures and their Eastern Mediterranean neighbors in order to fully comprehend the pervasive influence each had on the other.
 

 
Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.
 

Aegean archaeology specialist Louise Hitchcock explains that the appearance of the Egyptian goddess of childbirth Tawaret in the art of the Aegean world is one example of the influence the east and west had on one another. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the Aegean world, the Minoans and Mycenaeans enjoyed extensive trade with their eastern neighbors. Through archaeology, we have been able to observe that the Minoans, for instance, imported copper, tin, gold and ivory from the Near East, while Near Eastern civilizations seem to have imported artistic styles from the Aegean world. The east and west even exchanged cultural icons and religious traditions. The Egyptian goddess Tawaret, the goddess of childbirth, became a frequent image in Aegean art, while the Aegean flying gallop motif made its way into Near Eastern imagery.

Louise Hitchcock demonstrates that the extensive exchange between the Aegean world and the Near East makes Aegean archaeology critical to understanding the Biblical world.

For more on the importance of Aegean archaeology, read the full Archaeological Views column “View from the West: Why Aegean Archaeology Matters” by Louise Hitchcock in the May/June 2015 issue of BAR.

BAS Library Members: Read the full Archaeological Views column “View from the West: Why Aegean Archaeology Matters” by Louise Hitchcock in the May/June 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Not a BAS Library member yet? Join the BAS Library today.
 

Related reading in the BAS Library:

Tristan Barako, “One if by Sea…Two if by Land: How Did the Philistines Get to Canaan? One: by Sea,” Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2003.

Assaf Yasur-Landau, “One if by Sea…Two if by Land: How Did the Philistines Get to Canaan? Two: by Land,” Biblical Archaeology Review, March/April 2003.

James D. Muhly, “Mycenaeans Were There Before the Israelites,” Biblical Archaeology Review, September/October 2005.

Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau, “Aegeans in Israel: Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri,” Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 2013.

Not a BAS Library member yet? Join the BAS Library today.
 

 
This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on May 18, 2015.
 

The post What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Located in the southern Argolid, Nauplion is an easy drive from Athens. You can get to the town within a lazy day’s drive with plenty of touristy stops along the way.

Nauplion is a city that has two distinct halves: the modern part of the city and the historic part. The majority of the tourist focus is the historic district, which is located by the port. It features older homes, civic buildings, hotels, shops, and restaurants.

The Dendra Panoply in the Archaeological Museum in Nauplion, Greece. Photo: Hercules Milas/Alamy Stock Photo.

Well lit, with signs in both Greek and English, the museum is set up to guide you from the earliest history of the area around Nauplion, and the artifacts on display date from the Palaeolithic through the Roman periods. Objects from the more famous sites of Tiryns, Berbati, Asine, and Dendra are also displayed in the galleries. (Objects from nearby Mycenae are housed in an on-site museum in Mycenae and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and so are not represented in the Nauplion museum.)

The first gallery (on the second floor) has objects that date from some of the earliest sites on mainland Greece, including a display of objects excavated from the Franchthi Cave in the southeastern Argolid. The majority of the artifacts on this floor, however, date to the Bronze Age.

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

The second gallery displays (on the top floor) focus on the Iron Age and later periods. On this floor are four seventh-century B.C. terracotta ceremonial masks excavated from the bothros at Tiryns. This bothros was a votive pit deposit, possibly devoted to the goddess Hera, and was excavated on the Upper Citadel of Tiryns. The bothros also included some impressive terracotta votive shields from the early seventh century B.C. It is suggested that these pieces may be some of the earliest examples of narrative scenes of Greek myth. One of these shields depicts a male warrior killing a female warrior, perhaps showing Achilles killing the Amazon warrior queen, Penthesilea.

The centerpiece of the museum’s collection is the Dendra Panoply, a complete bronze suit of body armor excavated from a male burial in Chamber Tomb 12 (the “cuirass tomb”) in the cemetery at Dendra. This cemetery is associated with the palatial site of Midea and held 16 chamber tombs and one tholos tomb (underground circular stone burial chamber with a corbelled vault roof and entered through a long passageway). The armor, which dates to the late 15th century B.C. (Late Helladic IIIA), is at once imposing and fascinating, foreign and familiar. Although Chamber Tomb 12 was looted shortly before the excavation, silver cups, weaponry, and bronze vessels were also discovered by the excavators in addition to the armor.

Pieces of similar armor have been found at other sites, such as Thebes, Mycenae, and Phaistos. Additionally, ideograms depicting this type of body armor have been found in Linear B texts from Knossos, Pylos, and Thebes. Although this armor is unique because it is a full suit, its style seems to have been somewhat popular in the Late Bronze Age Aegean.

The helmet is the traditional boar’s tusk helmet, which is often represented in Aegean art. The pieces of boar’s tusk were attached to a leather or felted wool cap. There are several examples, in addition to this one, that are on display in museums in Athens, Heraklion, and elsewhere.

I’ve seen this armor in print and in presentations, but standing in front of it was literally breathtaking. It is not the most graceful suit of armor, and it looks bulky and uncomfortable to walk around in, let alone fight in. But it is another touch point to the Mycenaean world and their relations within the Aegean and the larger Eastern Mediterranean.

Although the Dendra Panoply is the show-stopper for me, the museum’s entire collection is impressive. I found myself “oohing” over many pieces as I moved around the galleries. They have a collection of beautiful ceramic vessels as well as tomb groups from nearby ancient cemeteries. Combined with small models and photos of various sites, it brings select archaeological sites to life for the visitor.

Not only are there several things to do in the city, but Nauplion is also a very nice base from which to explore the larger area. If you would like to see where the Dendra Panoply was found, the cemetery of Dendra is an easy drive from Nauplion. Tiryns and Mycenae, some of the most famous Bronze Age palace sites, are also accessible day trips from Nauplion, as is Epidauros, the famous sanctuary site dedicated to the worship of Asklepios, the god of healing.

“Site-Seeing: Face to Face with Ancient Greek Warriors” by Beth Ann Judas was originally published in the July/August 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Beth Ann Judas researches interconnections between Middle and New Kingdom Egypt and the Bronze Age Aegean and has excavated in Egypt and Greece. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World?

The Greeks Go to Washington

Who Were the Minoans?

The Athenian Acropolis: Antiquity’s High Holy Place

Ancient Greek Human Sacrifice at Mountaintop Altar?

Amphipolis Excavation: Discoveries in Alexander the Great-Era Tomb Dazzle the World

Phaistos Disk Deciphered? Not Likely, Say Scholars

The post Site-Seeing: Face to Face with Ancient Greek Warriors appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Excavations at Tel Kabri have uncovered fragments of painted plaster reflecting an Aegean art style seen on Cycladic and Minoan frescoes. Why did the Canaanite ruler of Tel Kabri want to adorn his palace with Aegean art? Photo: Nurith Goshen.

Over 100 years of excavations on Crete have exposed elegant Minoan frescoes that once adorned the walls of the island’s Bronze Age palaces. This distinctively colorful Aegean art style flourished in the Middle Bronze Age (1750-1550 B.C.). The nearby inhabitants of Akrotiri, a city on the Cycladic island of Thera (modern Santorini), painted numerous artworks in the style of the Minoan frescoes before the island was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the late 17th or 16th century B.C.

Until recently, there was no archaeological evidence of Minoan frescoes beyond the islands of the Aegean. Art exhibiting Aegean characteristics has been uncovered at recent excavations in Egypt, Syria and Turkey—and at the Canaanite palace of Tel Kabri in Israel. In the July/August 2013 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Tel Kabri excavators Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau explore how Aegean art, architecture and painted plaster fragments reminiscent of Minoan frescoes ended up at Canaanite Tel Kabri.

The free eBook Island Jewels: Understanding Ancient Cyprus and Crete takes you on a journey to two stunning, history-laden islands in the Mediterranean. Visit several key historical places on both islands and discover many of the great objects that have been unearthed there by archaeologists.

Aegean art at Tel Kabri was first discovered in 1989, when Aharon Kempinksi and Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier uncovered a checkerboard floor with depictions of Aegean flora as well as 2,000 painted plaster fragments exhibiting characteristics similar to Minoan frescoes. The current Tel Kabri excavation, under the direction of BAR authors Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau,* has uncovered many more pieces of painted wall plaster. In addition to Aegean art, the team recently exposed an expensive building lined with Aegean-style orthostat blocks and dowel holes similar to those found in Aegean palaces.

In “Aegeans in Israel: Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri,” authors Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau write that “the distinctive colorful frescoes” from the Minoan palace of Knossos “are a part of every art history course.” Was the ruler of Tel Kabri familiar with the Aegean art at Knossos, such as this famous bull-leaping panel? Photo: Erich Lessing.

Why would the Canaanite ruler of Tel Kabri want to adorn his palace with Aegean art reminiscent of Crete’s Minoan frescoes? Were these Minoan/Aegean artists traveling on their own, or were they lent from one ruler to another? Do the presence of Minoan frescoes and Aegean art decorations suggest that Tel Kabri was part of a “cosmopolitan” Mediterranean group—or that the king wanted to style himself as such? Find out more in “Aegeans in Israel: Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri” in the July/August 2013 issue of BAR. Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau describe discoveries at Tel Kabri, comparable evidence of Minoan frescoes at Tell el-Dab‘a in Egypt, Qatna in Syria and Alalakh in Turkey and the mystery of the short-term spread of Aegean art around the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

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The free eBook Island Jewels: Understanding Ancient Cyprus and Crete takes you on a journey to two stunning, history-laden islands in the Mediterranean. Visit several key historical places on both islands and discover many of the great objects that have been unearthed there by archaeologists.

Notes:

* Eric H. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau, “Your Career Is in Ruins,” Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2006.

Further Reading in Bible History Daily:

Who Were the Minoans?

Excavating the Ancient Near East’s Oldest Wine Cellar: The Results of the 2015 Season at Tel Kabri

Digs 2014: Layers of Meaning
Learn how archaeologists and volunteers at Tel Kabri adapt their field methodologies to meet the specific needs of their site. Read the full article as it appeared in the January/February 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

From the Field
Bible History Daily’s blog on the 2013 excavations at Tel Kabri, straight from the soil to your screen.

What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World?

This Bible History Daily article was originally published on June 20, 2013.

The post Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

This nearly 4-foot-tall, two-horned altar from the site of Tell es-Safi (Gath of the Philistines) suggests the origins of the Philistines are to be sought in the Aegean world. Photo: Courtesy Aren Maeir/The Tell Es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project.

The excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath, the site of Gath of the Philistines mentioned in the Bible (e.g., 1 Samuel 6:17), have produced many fascinating finds,* and the summer of 2011 was no exception.

While uncovering an impressive destruction level dating to the second half of the ninth century B.C.E., when Gath was the largest of the five cities of the Philistines and perhaps the largest city in the Land of Israel during the Iron Age, excavators found an exceptionally well preserved horned altar reminiscent of the Israelite horned altars described in the Bible (Exodus 27:1–2; 1 Kings 1:50).

Had it not been for a stroke of luck, the horned altar may never have been discovered. Like most archaeological digs, the Tell es-Safi/Gath excavation leaves unexcavated “balks” between the excavation squares, thereby allowing easier access to the squares as well as providing a profile view of the excavated layers. In the winter of 2010/2011, however, strong rainstorms caused some of the balks to collapse.

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The horned altar stands nearly 3.5 feet high and measures just over 1.5 feet on each side. These dimensions more or less match the dimensions given in the Bible (Exodus 30:2) for the Israelite incense altar of the Tabernacle (though this altar shows no signs of having been used to burn incense). Moreover, the decorative features of the altar, including its horns and the groove and raised band of the base, are similar to Israelite altars described in the Bible (Exodus 27:2), as well as other Iron Age altars that have been found throughout the southern Levant.

But why does this altar have only two horns, when we know from the Bible and excavated examples that the altars of both the Israelites and, later, the Philistines, typically had four horns?**

The fact that the Tell es-Safi/Gath horned altar has only two horns may have to do with the cultural origins of the Philistines. As Louise Hitchcock, senior staff member of the Tell es-Safi/Gath excavations, has suggested, the very motif of the horned altar in the Levant may have been influenced by earlier Minoan “horns of consecration,” symbolic representations of the horns of the sacred bull in Minoan culture. In fact, there is an altar from the Late Bronze Age site of Myrtous Pigadhes in Cyprus that also has only two horns. The unique horned altar from Tell es-Safi/Gath, the earliest stone altar ever found from the land of the Philistines, may be another indication of the Aegean influences on early Philistine culture and quite possibly a hint to their origins.

Notes:

* See Aren M. Maeir, “Did Captured Ark Afflict Philistines with E.D.?” Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2008; Aren M. Maeir and Carl S. Ehrlich, “Excavating Philistine Gath: Have We Found Goliath’s Hometown?” Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2001.

** See Yoel Elitzur and Doron Nir-Zevi, “Four-Horned Altar Discovered in Judean Hills,” Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 2004, and “Horned Altar for Animal Sacrifice Unearthed at Beer-Sheva,” Biblical Archaeology Review, March 1975.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Iron Age Gate and Fortifications Uncovered at Philistine Gath

Philistine Cemetery Unearthed at Ashkelon

The Philistine Marketplace at Ashkelon

Remembering Trude Dothan by Seymour Gitin

Adornment in the Southern Levant

The “Philistines” to the North

Which Altar Was the Right One in Ancient Israelite Religion?

The post Where Did the Philistines Come From? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.