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This past summer saw the first full field season
at the Museum's newest excavation site, Tel Kedesh in the Upper Galilee
of modern Israel. This project is jointly sponsored by the University of
Michigan and the University of Minnesota. It is funded by the two universities,
private donations, and a generous grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities. The 1999 season was one of surprises and spectacular finds,
which confirmed our assessment of the site as an ideal place to learn more
about Hellenistic Phoenicia but also led us to upgrade our identification
of the site's status in the Hellenistic era from mere farming village to
major administrative center.
The Site
As described in previous reports, Kedesh is a large tel site, nearly
a kilometer long from north to south and rising some 120 feet above the
surrounding apple orchards of northern Israel's kibbutz Malkiya. It dominates
a fertile upland valley in the Anti-Lebanon range, where the temperate climate
and bountiful natural water sources have supported farming villages from
the Early Bronze Age to modern times.
According to the Old Testament, Kedesh was one
of the great Canaanite cities, whose population joined in early battles
against the Israelites (Joshua 12). By New Testament times, ancient literary
references to Kedesh seem to indicate that it had devolved from a large
urban center and strategic stronghold to a rural village in the far eastern
hinterland of the Phoenician city of Tyre. Medieval sources mention Kedesh
only occasionally. By the time of Israel's 1948 War of Independence, Kedesh
housed a few farmsteads, a cemetery, and a grazing field.
Hellenistic and Early Roman Kedesh
The new Michigan/Minnesota excavations concentrate on the Phoenician
village of Hellenistic and Early Roman times. This was an exuberant era
of conflict and change marked by interaction and exchange among peoples
brought forcibly into the Greek orbit by Alexander's conquest of the East.
The site of Kedesh, then as now, lay at a flash point of interaction: today
on the border between Israel and Lebanon; in Hellenistic times at the intersection
of Jewish and Phoenician spheres of influence.
While the cosmopolitan Phoenicians appeared to
take easily to the ways of the Greeks, the Jews of ancient Palestine had
a more difficult time. During these years in Israel the previously isolated
and provincial population began to participate in the economic prosperity
that came in the wake of Alexander. This led to quarrels among themselves
over the increased commercialization of their culture, sparking the Maccabean
uprising and the establishment of their religious kingdom. Subsequently,
the area endured the heavy-handed rule of Herod the Great and the Roman
procurators. Eventually, the Jews united in battle against the mighty Roman
Empire and finally saw their dream of independence crushed by Roman legions,
ending with the brutal destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year
70 C.E.
Reconstructing Daily Village Life
Dramatic political events such as these are all that constitute most
reconstructions of life in Palestine before and during these times. The
Michigan/Minnesota team chose to excavate Tel Kedesh to get a different
perspective: a ground-eye view of what day-to-day life was like in a rural
border village during these years. We are also seeking to expand the very
meager body of evidence on the material culture of Hellenistic Phoenicia
and thereby augment our understanding of the complex intermix that constituted
Hellenistic culture(s).
While all the ancient mentions of Kedesh indicated that the site was ideal for these purposes, sad experience has shown that the actual archaeological remains do not always live up to their ancient press. Our preliminary season in 1997 was designed to check on the preservation of the Hellenistic remains and their accessibility, while our 1998 magnetometric survey was meant to give us a sitewide preview of what lay below the surface (a kind of archaeological MRI).
As reported in the 1998 Newsletter, this preliminary work showed the site to be quite promising for our purposes. In the 1997 probes we found that Hellenistic remains were well preserved and very accessible, in fact the latest things preserved below the modern surface in the southern and western sectors of the tel. The most notable was a house dating to the time of the Maccabees (second century B.C.E.) with a wide array of intact and nearly intact household objects, including cooking pots, perfume juglets, loomweights, and a mortar and pestle left on the floor.
Some vessels had been made in the immediate vicinity,
while others were imported from the Phoenician coast. Finding so many vessels
essentially intact is unusual, and we suspected that the inhabitants must
have fled the premises in a hurry. After some time back in the library we
connected these finds with a battle between Jonathan, the Hasmonean commander,
and Demetrius, the Syrian Greek king, which ended in a rout of the Greeks
at Kedesh in the year 145 B.C.E. (I Maccabees 11.6364, 6774).
First Hints of Administrative Center
The architecture and finds in the 1997 probe were consistent with the
small rural settlement implied by the extant Hellenistic references to the
site. The 1998 magnetometric survey, however, gave us our first clue that
there might be something more to Hellenistic Kedesh. The survey revealed
the presence of what appeared to be an enormous building at the southern
end of the tel, about 45 feet to the east of the house mentioned above.
The building, if the walls indeed proved to be part of a single integrated
structure, would be approximately 170 by 120 feet, with a series of rooms
arranged around the perimeter, hardly a humble farmer's abode. Since magnetometry
does not give a good sense of the depth of the images it produces, the possibility
remained that the large building was something of a mirage and with excavation
would prove to be a melange of smaller, superimposed but chronologically
discrete structures.
Building on the information gained from the 1997
and 1998 expeditions, we were able to design a three-year excavation plan
that would explore both the large southern building and neighboring houses
as well as sample the occupation history of other sectors of the tel. The
1999 season was the first of the projected three-year campaign. The team,
consisting predominantly of students from both the University of Michigan
and the University of Minnesota, was in the field from May 20 to July 18.
We concentrated our efforts on the southern sector of the tel, where we
opened large parts of five 10-by-10-meter excavation squares. We were also
able to explore three other areas briefly.
Excavation of Large Building
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As was to be expected, our most exciting finds came from the southern sector. There we uncovered parts of five rooms and both the southeast and northwest corners of the large building foreshadowed by the magnetometric survey. It is now very clear that this is indeed a single integrated building covering some 20,000 square feet. Buildings of this size tend to be sites of public administration and the residences of high-ranking officials. The presence of such a structure at Tel Kedesh leads us to believe that it was at least a regional administrative center.
Although we cannot be sure when the building was originally constructed, finds from in and under the final floors show that it was in use down to the middle of the second century. Interestingly, several of the walls of the building make use of large column drums reused from an earlier structure. This implies that it was not the first monumental building on the site and, coupled with other finds from the Persian period, leads us to believe that the Hellenistic building may succeed an earlier, Persian-period public structure.
If indeed Kedesh is the Upper Galilee's administrative
center in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, this would solve a problem
that has long puzzled archaeologists and historians. Up until the Assyrian
invasion of the late eighth century B.C.E. the nearby site of Hazor had
filled this administrative role, but excavations have shown that Hazor never
regained this status after the Assyrian conquest, and the location of regional
administration in the Upper Galilee is unknown.
Discovery of Storage Vessels and Bullae
The most spectacular Hellenistic finds of the 1999 season come from
the area of the northwest corner of the large building, where we excavated
part of the corner room and all of the room to its east. The latter turned
out to be a magazine for the storage of wine and probably grain and oil
as well. Fourteen massive jars (5 feet tall) stood in place along the walls.
Most were locally made, but one was imported from the Phoenician coast,
and three others were wine amphoras from the Greek island of Rhodes. The
amphora handles bore stamps of local officials, whose dates of office fall
within the decade prior to 146 B.C.E.
The jars, and the room, had been damaged in antiquity; there were smaller vessels found in pieces, clearly thrown and smashed on the floor, and the whole room was covered in a layer of lightly burned debris. The combination of destruction evidence and the chronological confirmation of the Greek amphora stamps secures our earlier hypothesis that the site was hastily abandoned in the course of the battle of 145 B.C.E.
In the corner room, next to the magazine, the finds were even more impressive, and the evidence for violent destruction more pronounced. Much of the room is covered by a layer of bright red burned mudbrick at the top of which five large roofing nails were found; this room was clearly destroyed by an intense fire. At one end of the room, below the burned layer lay more than twenty small oil flasks, smashed together in a tight pile, as if they had fallen straight from a shelf to the floor.
Just in front of the oil flasks was a heap of 1,832
small clay balls with stamped impressions, a type of object known as a bulla
(plural bullae). The bullae indicate that at one time the
room was an official repository for documents, further evidence that the
building served an administrative function. The actual documents would have
been written on papyrus and probably stored in wooded chests, all of which
would have been destroyed by the fire. Ironically, the same fire is what
preserved the bullae.
Significance of Bullae
Bullae such as those found at Kedesh were used by private individuals
and by public officials as a way to ensure the validity of various documents
in the Hellenistic world. In some instances, an official would have rolled
up a piece of official correspondence written on papyrus, tied it with twine,
pressed a small piece of clay around the twine, and then stamped that piece
of clay with his signet. These sorts of bullae are the equivalent
of ancient envelopes: They ensured the security of a communication, as well
as identified the sender. Bullae are also used to identify the signers
and witnesses (up to six) of various legal contracts, such as land sales,
loans, wills, and marriage contracts.
The cache of bullae found at Kedesh brings to thirteen the number of such Hellenistic archives found in the ancient world from Carthage in the west to Seleucia-on-the-Tigris in the east. No other such archive from this period has ever been found in Israel or indeed anywhere in the southern Levant. In fact, the Kedesh bullae constitute the fourth largest Hellenistic corpus found in the Near East to date and thousands more are to be expected from the yet-unexcavated portion of the room.
The bullae are quite small--on average 23 centimeters in height and less than a centimeter in width. They carry on their unstamped surface the impression of the papyrus and the string against which they were pressed. Many preserve partial fingerprints of the individual who stamped them. They vary in the type of clay and especially in the type of symbols and pictures they carry. There are easily recognized Greek gods and goddesses in familiar poses, such as Aphrodite bathing or an armed Athena striding; there is Hermes with his caduceus. More complicated narratives are also represented, such as Zeus in the form of an eagle carrying off the hapless Ganymede. Some carry one of the official symbols of the Seleucid kings, the anchor; others bear the symbol of Tanit, a Phoenician fertility deity, and Phoenician lettering. There are many portraits, heads of Hellenistic monarchs as well as what appear to be private portraits of older men; others bear motives that hint at Persian and Egyptian influences. The entire array encapsulates the complicated cultural milieu that existed within the Hellenistic Near East.
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| Bulla showing Aphrodite bathing. | Bulla showing symbol of Tanit, a Phoenician fertility deity. | Bulla showing the head of a horse. |
Looking Ahead
What is next for the Kedesh project? We
plan to excavate two more seasons at the site and have already begun analysis
of the bullae. We are working to raise the money to conserve, record,
and study this amazing windfall. It will take many years to wring every
bit of information possible out of these rare finds, but the first step
is to recover the remainder left in the room so we will have the complete
archive. Our initial research goals of studying the day-to-day life of a
border settlement and adding to our understanding of Hellenistic Phoenicia
remain in place. The previous characterization of the site as an out-of-the-way
village now clearly needs revision, but it is even more apparent that the
ground-eye view we can recover from Tel Kedesh will illuminate aspects of
this region's history that never made it into the books.
Sharon Herbert, University of Michigan
Andrea Berlin, University of Minnesota
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Copyright © 1999 The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan. All rights reserved.