Pharaoh’s Fury: Merneptah’s Destruction of Gezer

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The Canaanite city of Gezer was brutally destroyed at the very end of the Late Bronze Age. Explore the vivid archaeological evidence for the city’s destruction and discover why the devastation might be attributed to Pharaoh Merneptah, who infamously claimed to have conquered not only Gezer but also a people known as “Israel” in the late 13th century B.C.E.

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Footnotes

1. Hershel Shanks, “The Trowel vs. the Text: How the Amarna Letters Challenge Archaeology,” BAR, January/February 2009.

2. Hershel Shanks, “The Sad Case of Tell Gezer,” BAR, July/August 1983.

Endnotes

1.
The site’s first excavator, R.A.S. Macalister, identified several Late Bronze Age buildings on the tell’s acropolis in the early 20th century. The later Hebrew Union College excavation (1965–1973), led by William Dever, uncovered a palace which they dated to the Late Bronze Age IIA (c. 14th century B.C.E.), but which likely dates to the Late Bronze Age I (c. 1500 B.C.E.).

2.
For our in-depth summary, see Steven Ortiz and Samuel Wolff, “A Reevaluation of Gezer in the Late Bronze Age in Light of Renewed Excavations and Recent Scholarship,” in Aren Maeir, Itzhaq Shai, and Chris McKinny, eds., The Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of Southern Canaan (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), pp. 62–85.

3.
See, e.g., Yuval Gadot, “The Late Bronze Egyptian Estate at Aphek,” Tel Aviv 37 (2010), pp. 48–66.