Gezer is an ancient city in the southern Levant, well known from Egyptian, Biblical, and Assyrian sources, and about the power struggles, conquests, and battles of Mirchir and Amenhotep III, Merneptah, the Philistines, Solomon and the unidentified father-in-law of Pharaoh, etc. It relates to interesting stories involving people. -Law, and Shishak/Sheshonk I.
For scholars seeking to reconstruct the Bronze Age and Iron Age history of the southern Levant and explore the interplay of textual and archaeological evidence, Gesell is one of the most interesting locations.
This ancient city is mentioned in many texts and its strategic importance is well evidenced by the attention it received from foreign rulers.
Gezer is positively identified as Tell Jezer. At 12 hectares, this mound is one of the largest in the southern Levant, and definitely the largest in the Shefera Foothills region of south-central Israel.
The site is located at an important crossroads between the coastal Maris Street and roads leading inland to the highlands and further into Transjordan.
Perched atop a promontory at an altitude of 225 meters, it offers impressive nearly 360-degree views of the surrounding terrain, across the south coast and the Plain of Sharon, and east to the Judean Hills.
The inhabitants had access to wells, springs, and the fertile fields of Ayalon and the adjacent valleys.
Gezer is mentioned in Egyptian, Assyrian, and Biblical texts, making it a source of varying weight in reconstructing history.
Egyptian and Assyrian texts are generally accepted as describing real events (despite the political bias of their authors) because they are contemporary with the events they describe.
Because the Biblical text was written centuries later, the historical reality behind it is less clear and more hotly debated.
The last major mention of Gezer in the Iron Age is found in modern Assyrian sources. The siege of the city by Tiglath-pileser III, dated by textual evidence to 734 BC, is depicted on reliefs in the palace of Nimrud.
Recent excavations at the site have uncovered a continuous stratigraphic sequence, allowing detailed dating and the establishment of an absolute chronology of events at the site.
In a new study, archaeologist Lindell Webster of the Austrian Archaeological Institute and colleagues obtained 35 radiocarbon dates on organic matter (mainly seeds) from seven different stratigraphic layers in Gesell. .
These dates range from the 13th century BC to the 9th century BC, and this period includes numerous important changes in the city, including multiple destructive events, rebuilding episodes, and the fortification of the city.
This study provides a detailed dataset that can be used to test proposed correlations between archaeological records and ancient documents.
These dates suggest, for example, that while a correlation between one destructive episode and the actions of Pharaoh Merneptah is plausible, a proposed connection between another such episode and Hazael’s expedition is not. It suggests that there is no.
Ultimately, this new dataset provides an independent source of absolute chronology that allows archaeologists to better understand events at Gezer and place them in a regional perspective.
“The development of a radiocarbon-based chronology at Tell Jezer will reconstruct the history of individual sites, resolve long-standing debates, and clarify possible correlations between archaeological sites and written sources. “This shows the important role that radiocarbon dating can and must play in testing,” the archaeologists said.
The results will be published in a magazine PLoS ONE.
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lc webster other. 2023. Chronology of Gezer from the end of the Late Bronze Age to Iron Age II: the meeting place of radiocarbon, archaeology, Egyptology, and the Bible. PLoS ONE 18 (11): e0293119; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293119