Archaeology vids Tell Beit Mirsim, part A 720p30

In this lecture, we'll explore Talbeit Mirsin and the role that the excavation of this site played in the development of archaeology for Palestine. Using this relief map, we'll begin to get a sense of its location. It's in the transition zone between the hill country and the Shefei La, moving from east to west. And you can locate it north-northwest of Beersheba, roughly on a latitude with the depression of the Arnon River to the east of the Dead Sea. Let's take advantage of Google Earth to get oriented on the location of Talbeit Mirsin. You can see it's roughly midway between the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the Dead Sea on the right. It's north-northwest of Beersheba, and it is east-southeast of Tel al-Hessi. One of the things I like about Google Earth is you can get a sense of the terrain. So notice the wrinkledness over on the east, and that's the hill country. And then it begins to smooth out into the Shefei La, the plains, heading towards the coast as we move to the west. Talbeit Mirsin is roughly at the juncture of those two types of topography. If we zoom in a bit more, you can see the civilization that's developed around it, and also get a sense of the mound itself, just a little bit to the right of the yellow pin. As to dimension, seven and a half acres. And one of the reasons for their locating this particular excavation, investing in it, is because of the size relative to other ancient habitations in that locale. Initially the excavators, and particularly William Foxwell Albright, who was a leading figure in this excavation, he thought it might have been the biblical town of Debir, also known as Kiryat Sefer, which happens to mean the village of the book. Subsequent to Albright's excavations, however, another archaeologist, Kochavi, identified Kirbet al-Bud as Debir, so that rules out Talbeit Mirsin. At this point, the specialists are frankly not sure which biblical site would correspond to this location. Who was operating this excavation, and what institution and time frame? Again, William Foxwell Albright. First in 1924 he examined the site, and subsequent to that there were four years, springs and summers, initially a spring and then summer excavations, when the actual digging took place. The coordinator on site was a C.S. Fisher. As to institutions, there was a seminary then located in St. Louis, known as Xenia Theological, and the American School of Oriental Research, otherwise known as ASOR, which becomes a very prominent institution for archaeology in the Middle East. They partnered together at this time. And now let's begin to piece together what were the periods of habitation for Talbeit Mirsin. When they peeled down, excavated to bedrock or virgin soil, the earliest habitation would be early Bronze III, and you see the time frame listed there on the screen. How long did habitation last? Iron II, and this would correspond to the Nizralite monarchy after the splitting of the kingdoms. Initially it was thought that the end of habitation coincided with the Babylonian invasion, 586. Later excavation or research, and subsequent to William Foxwell Albright's work, updated that and said, no, it looks like it was the Assyrian invasion of 701. Now that's not the same as the fall of the Northern Kingdom, that's 721, fall of Samaria, northern capital. But 701 was a later Assyrian invasion that attacked southern Israel's Judah. And you can see the basis of it, ceramic and epigraphic studies. That's the basis for the redating. In a moment we'll go through layer by layer and talk about what was the time frame and what were the noteworthy observations from the excavation at that level. But as we continue with some of the main features, the time periods when a site goes unoccupied are noteworthy. And the archaeologists deduce that around the centuries 22 to 20, for three or four centuries, and that would be after early Bronze III, there was a period of non-habitation, a vacancy. And then subsequent to that, Stratum D, which ended around 1540 BC, it ended with a burn layer, a very distinct thick ash burn layer. And after that, for a period of more than a century, the archaeologists deduced that people were not living there. Now Albright, in his article in the New Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, which is a resource that I highly recommend to you, in our seminary it's a reference work. It's very, very useful for getting a snapshot, particularly of sites. So, in the New Archaeological Encyclopedia article, which incidentally is authored by Albright himself, with an update by Raphael Greenberg, and that in itself is interesting, isn't it? We've got the originator, the original excavator, Albright, writing this article. The excavation was done in roughly the 1930s. The encyclopedia comes out in 1993, and we've still got Albright that's authoring this. But someone comes along after his article and says, you know, there's a few more things that we found out after Professor Albright. So just the layout of that article I found fascinating. I'll try to make copies of those pages available to you within this same folder, so that you can see what I've digested, in a sense, for this. That's one of the sources that's heavily reflected in this lecture. All right, back to the gap, non-habitation, stratum D, 1540. Albright points out that that corresponds with something going on in Egypt, namely, they're pushing out the Hyksos pharaohs, these outsiders that ruled for a period of time. Why is that interesting? Well, we've got destruction in Palestine, and we've got overthrow in Egypt. So it makes you wonder, are these connected? Well, notice the final bullet. The Telbet-Mirsim burn layer there at the end of stratum D is not likely due to anything, anyone from Egypt making an incursion, Egypt stretching their power up into Palestine. Instead, as far as we know, our best evidence is something of that sort didn't happen until about a century later under Pharaoh Thutmose III. And incidentally, dates for the Egyptians, I commend to you Bill Manley's Penguin Historical Atlas. I'm including with the digital handouts for this course, I've included his chronology or pharaoh list along with the dynasties list. One of the frustrating things can be to try and correlate when somebody said, well, this is the 18th dynasty, and unless you have those dynasties memorized, you're kind of clueless how that corresponds to, for example, early bronze, late bronze, Iron Age 2A, or something like that. So it's very helpful to have some of these cheat sheets, these reference sheets, and again you'll find that in the digital handouts for the course. Now let's proceed through the various strata at Talbeit Mersim and observe the distinguishing features. The layout that you see, indicated by the column on the left, is the actual physical layering of the various strata. So the first layer that the archaeologists were processing at the top, the surface stratum, they labeled layer A, and after they processed that, the next one distinguished itself, was labeled B and C and so forth, down to J, which below J they hit virgin soil. That was the lowest stratum. So let's walk through it in the order in which the archaeologists encountered it. As they worked at stratum A, they found destruction. Initially, that layer A was dated as 586 because of the destruction and the presumption that this would have been Babylonian invasion. Subsequently, it was redated earlier to have been due to Assyrian invasion, 701. Why was it thought to be the Babylonian? Because of two jar handles that had the impression, the actual stamp on them, belonging to Eliakim steward of Jehoiakim. Now if that's the next to the last Judean king, it makes sense that the destruction would be right towards the end of southern Israel. But because of some paleographic studies, as indicated earlier, it's felt that those artifacts should not determine the dating. Either the Jehoiakim referred to is not the penultimate Judean monarch, or if it is the penultimate Judean monarch, somehow these artifacts were sprinkled in at a different time and do not correspond to the layer within which they're found. This is a reminder that even inscriptional artifacts do not necessarily belong to the layer in which you find them, as informative as they can be, because particularly if there's a name that we know historically, it's likely to be a figure in a chronology. Even so, you have to examine, does this artifact belong, is it indigenous to this layer, or has it been dislodged? Has it been sprinkled on top of it at a subsequent time and kind of mixed in with it, or has it been dug down and pushed to an earlier layer? So these are all part of the detective work. So in the center column you see that stratum A, and similarly B, belongs generally to the Iron Age. So just prior to the start of the Israelite monarchy, through the close, would be the Iron Age. Again, this site not reaching as far as the end of the Iron Age, but being unpopulated, depopulated around 701. Notice with stratum B in the features column, besides the fact that they didn't find too much evidence for human occupation, there was a casemate wall. Now this is a feature that we'll want to get familiar with. A casemate wall is a very strong defensive outer wall. This is not a house wall, this is a town wall. And for casemate, just think of it as being double thick. But the doubling of the wall is not like two stacks of stones or mud brick, depending on the site, that are just adjacent to each other, but there's actually a gap between these two walls. And it's not uncommon that the inner of these two parallel walls actually then will make up the back wall of a house. Can you picture that? You've got a house that's butting up against the city wall, but not directly against the city walls, butting up against an interior wall that runs parallel to the city wall. And it's not uncommon for the cavity of the double wall to have some divisions in it, some kind of separators, and sometimes it seems to be used for storage and things of that sort. Alright, so we have a casemate wall that dates to the 10th century, the 900s. And it's supposed that the United Monarchy, and that would be the Israelite monarchy, developed this as part of an effort to bring fortification to certain sites. Now, that wall and that layer suffered damage by a pharaoh, Shishak, 924 BC. Footnote on the Egyptian names. Shishak will sometimes appear as Shishank. In fact, Bill Manley's list of pharaohs spells him Shoshank, the first and the second, and so forth. Shoshank dates 945 to 924 BC. So, when you're working with these pharaoh names, sometimes the spelling of them will change depending on which list you're working with. And initially that may be a bit unsettling. You don't know whether you're correlating the right one. Just kind of stay with it, and if you see some minor differences in spelling, take it in stride. Let's proceed to Stratum C. Now we're shifting to Late Bronze. Here they located a large building, and you'll see a picture later on of a libation tray, a fairly shallow libation tray, with a clay figure of a lioness on the side. That dates to this level C. They found sacrificial animal bones. Put that together, a large building. We're talking larger than a domestic home. A ceremonial tray and sacrificial animals makes you wonder. Perhaps this was a temple, some kind of a cultic center. Within level C, two burn levels, and then two royal scarabs. These particular ones have the shape or the message, the identification of Thutmose I and Amenhotep III. Now, when you find something like that, your first inclination is to say, let's figure out when did they reign, and this layer then probably corresponds to that. Good on the first point, but tentative on the second. What about the dates of the reign? Thutmose I, 1493 to 1481. Again, coming from Bill Manley's Chronology of the Pharaohs, which resource you have access to. How about Amenhotep III? About a century later, 1382 to 1444. And here's what Albright in that encyclopedia article comments, and this is instructive as far as how to process inscriptional evidence like this. He writes, two royal scarabs, one of Thutmose I and the other of Amenhotep III, cannot be used for precise dating purposes. Because, please notice, they may have been used as ornaments at a later date. And he comments they were found in Stratum Sea debris. They may have been used as ornaments at a later date. If you're trying to track how that works, imagine going through a dig somewhere in Europe and finding the Mona Lisa. Now, let's assume that your research has so far informed you that the Mona Lisa was painted in the 1500s by Leonardo da Vinci. And so when you discover it, you say, I'm at the level of the 1500s. Well, right now you're at the level of Paris in the 21st century. That's where it is, in the Louvre. You're not in the 1500s. So this is what they mean by an artifact with a known date being used as a decoration at a later date. FYI, those years that I gave for those two pharaohs do fall within the Late Bronze Zone that you see in the corresponding era, 1550 to 1200. But that's why Albright says we can't use these for precise dating, nailing a really narrow time frame within the Late Bronze Era. Now, the Stratum Sea material was built on a burn layer. So as we're digging down, that means the prior inhabitants, that would be Stratum D, concluded with destruction. And that's why in the features comment you see the mention of fire destruction, thick ash layer. That's what the excavators worked through as they finished peeling away layer C, then a burn layer, which was marking the conclusion of Stratum D. Notice again in the features column the comment that Pottery manufacture was inferior at this later level, D, than at its predecessor, which is Stratum E. Pottery manufacture, they say, was carelessly or hastily made. So there was some kind of deterioration. In contrast, notice the features opposite Stratum E. They say this was the richest phase of life for the overall Middle Bronze Era. As we continue peeling away the layers, we come to layer F, and we're instructed that the way they were able to distinguish between F and G was, again, G left a burn layer and F was on top of that. You'll notice that we're working through the Middle Bronze, aren't we? Middle Bronze BC was layers D and E, and now we're in Middle Bronze IIA, 1925-1700. Incidentally, biblical history, think of Abraham and Sarah, roughly 2000-1800, so this is patriarchal time frame. At Stratum H, there's an interesting inference concerning the existence of a wall or a rampart. Now, they didn't find the actual vertical structure of the wall or a rampart, that would be a sloping reinforcement portion of a wall. But what they did find is an accumulation of debris. Think of trash that's blown up against a fence. And enough trash is blown, and then somehow dust and things accumulate, and the trash is immobilized there, and after a while, somebody dismantles the fence. You have no fence, but you've got that accumulation of debris. That's what they found. And so, because of that concentration, they said, seems like this was butting up against something that stopped it, and that would have been a wall. So they infer that the town of Stratum H was surrounded by a wall that is no longer evident. Stratum I, again, fire destruction. And then a 3-4 century gap before Stratum J, which they date to early Bronze III. As they examine the pottery, of which there's not a lot at that level, not surprising, further down we go, we would expect to have fewer and fewer attestations of culture at that level, in general. And they notice that the pottery style corresponds to Egyptian pottery of the 6th dynasty. Once again, looking to Bill Manley's chronology of Egypt, you can see that that's around 2323 to 2150 BC. And now take those dates and lay them over in the middle column. When Albright says it's early Bronze III, you can see that the 6th dynasty does fit within that time frame. So I hope you're getting an idea of how to digest the information that's given us in an excavation report, or an encyclopedia article in this case, which condenses the more detailed excavation reports, in order to try and reconstruct what life was like, as best we know, at these various levels.