The Fury of Babylon: Ashkelon and the Archaeology of Destruction

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In 586 B.C.E. Nebuchadrezzar (also known as Nebuchadnezzar II), king of Babylon, attacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and burned the city. This of course is the focal point of the Biblical story. For Nebuchadrezzar, however, Jerusalem was only one of many prizes, part of a major military operation in the West extending over many years. The real battle was between two superpowers—the newly ascendant Babylonian Empire in the East (replacing the Assyrians) and Egypt in the West. Hebrew University professor Avraham Malamat has aptly applied the term “bipolar politics” to this contest.¹

By the last half of the seventh century B.C.E., Egypt dominated neighboring countries like Philistia and Judah (the northern kingdom of Israel having already been destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E.).

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During the reigns of Pharaoh Psamtik I (664–610 B.C.E.) and his son Necho II (610–595 B.C.E.), Egypt moved into the vacuum left by the withdrawal of Assyria from the West. For four decades Egypt held sway over former Assyrian provinces as far north as Megiddo (Magiddu).² Referring to this mortal engagement between East and West, between Babylonia and Egypt, the prophet Jeremiah rebuked Judah in the harshest terms for allying itself with Egypt. Philistia made the same mistake.

In 605 B.C.E., as crown prince and field commander, Nebuchadrezzar led Babylonian troops in a critical battle with the Egyptians under Pharaoh Necho II at Carchemish on the Euphrates River, in what is today western Syria. A decisive Babylonian victory emboldened Nebuchadrezzar, now king, to move south. (It was to this Babylonian victory that the prophet Jeremiah referred when he predicted that Judah too would be devastated by Nebuchadrezzar [Jeremiah 25:8–11]; the stamp of the battle of Carchemish is also seen in explicit references in Jeremiah 46:2–6.)

After Carchemish, the new king campaigned throughout most of 604 B.C.E., right into the winter when the rains begin, sometimes falling in torrents. Ordinarily, nobody would think of conducting military operations—especially campaigns so dependent on horse and chariot—during the rainy season. But late in 604 B.C.E. Nebuchadrezzar decided to strike at the primary seaport of the Philistines—Ashkelon. At least that is what we are told in the fragmentary Babylonian Chronicle written in cuneiform:

(Nebuchadrezzar) marched to the city of Ashkelon and captured it in the month of Kislev (November/December). He captured its king and plundered it and carried off [spoil from it … ]. He turned the city into a mound (Akkadian ana tili, literally a tell) and heaps of ruins …³

Usually, when an ancient city was besieged, the gates and fortifications were the first features to come under attack. If the assault on these fortifications was successful, the defenders normally surrendered and the rest of the city was spared.^a That was not what happened at Ashkelon, however, according to Nebuchadrezzar’s version of events. For his description to be accurate, Nebuchadrezzar’s armies must have advanced far into the interior of the city and reduced this major metropolis to a heap of ruins—in other words, made it a tell.

The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon has given us an opportunity to test the accuracy of the Babylonian ruler’s account. It has also provided us with a detailed still life of a Philistine metropolis in the late seventh century B.C.E., on the eve of Nebuchadrezzar’s vaunted destruction of the city.

As a seaport (after 11 seasons of terrestrial excavations and 4 of underwater exploration, we have found anchors and ballast from several shipwrecks; however, we are still searching for the harbor), Ashkelon provides evidence of diverse international influence. Phoenician Red-Slipped Ware is abundant, as is its locally made version. (This pottery is most abundant at Philistine sites on the Mediterranean coast—Ashkelon and Ashdod—and is significantly rarer at contemporaneous sites on the inner coastal plain, such as Ekron [Tel Miqne] and Timnah [Tel Batash].)

Cargoes from Phoenician ports such as Tyre arrived in Ashkelon loaded with elegant bowls and cups of Phoenician Fine Ware, including so-called Samaria Ware as well as red- and cream-polished table ware, the latter imitating ivory or alabaster. The prophet Jeremiah was an insightful observer of the geopolitics of his day 059in referring to Philistia as the “helper” of Tyre and Sidon (Jeremiah 47:4). A special trading relationship between Philistia and Phoenicia, known as hËubuµr, has been inferred from the 11th-century B.C.E. Egyptian “Tale of Wenamon.”⁴ Such trading agreements persisted into the late seventh century B.C.E., and it is to those agreements that Jeremiah alludes.

Phoenician (and perhaps Philistine) ships also brought amphoras and fine wares from Ionia, the Greek islands, Corinth and Cyprus. Elegant wine pitchers (oinochoai) decorated with wild goats, stags, and geese arrived from East Greece. Ionian drinking cups (skyphoi) were also on board.

At Ashkelon, commerce and religion apparently marched hand in hand. We found an ostracon, a potsherd with writing on it, used as a receipt in a room with smashed jars, charred wheat, weights and a scale balance. On top of this rubble was the collapsed roof of the building, which consisted of reed-impressed and mat-impressed clay. Sitting on top of the roof debris was a small incense altar (without horns) made of sandstone and used to offer incense, such as myrrh and frankincense, to Philistine deities.

This is the first time anyone has found stratified evidence for rooftop altars. In his catalogue of Judah’s sins, Jeremiah lists rooftop rituals such as incense offerings, and wine and oil libations, in worship of pagan deities. He declares that the “Chaldeans [Babylonians] who are fighting against this city [Jerusalem] shall come, set it on fire, and burn it, with the houses on whose roofs offerings have been made to Baal and libations have been poured out to other gods, to provoke me [Yahweh] to anger” (Jeremiah 32:29). Jeremiah obviously knew what he was talking about, and we now have an example of a rooftop altar from Ashkelon.

Egyptian influence, both commercial and religious, has been documented far beyond our expectations. Among the Egyptian artifacts we found were barrel jars and tripod stands made of Nile clay and a jewelry box made of abalone shell, in which a necklace of Egyptian (or Phoenician) amulets found nearby had once been kept. But there were also Egyptian religious items found in a building we identified as a winery. A bronze statuette of Osiris lay near a cache of seven bronze bottles (situlae). A procession of Egyptian 062deities in relief files around the bottles. In the midst of the cache of bronze bottles was a bronze votive offering table engraved with what appears to be a loaf of bread flanked by libation flasks. Two baboons sit at opposite corners of the offering table. At another corner sits a falcon; a jackal crouches at the fourth corner. Between the jackal and the falcon is a frog. The most prominent deity represented on the situlae is Min or Amen-Re, with erect phallus. Although not especially clear from this example, from other statues of Min we can interpret what is happening here: The god masturbates with his left hand and raises his right hand in a gesture of joy or pleasure.⁵ In Egyptian creation myths, divine masturbatory semen provides the initial life-giving force from which all other generative power derives.⁶ These bronze bottles probably contained offerings of actual semen or liquids, such as milk or water, symbolic of this revivifying fluid.

A “twin” of our bronze Osiris statuette was uncovered more than 60 years ago in a small salvage excavation at Ashkelon. The excavator, J.H. Iliffe, dated it to the fourth century B.C.E., but it is now clear that this statuette and 25 other bronze statuettes of Egyptian deities, as well as 14 other Egyptian bronze artifacts (including cube-shaped weights) found in Iliffe’s excavation⁷ were contemporaneous with our bronzes—that is, late seventh century B.C.E., not fourth century B.C.E.

What were all these Egyptian artifacts doing at Ashkelon? Very probably there was an Egyptian enclave there with its own sanctuary.

The building in which these Egyptian artifacts were 064found was in the center of the city. Three rooms in this monumental building contained wine presses, hence our designation of the building as a winery. The winery platforms, vats and basins were lined with cobblestones and coated with smooth, shell-tempered plaster of unusually high quality. The best preserved wine press had a shallow plastered platform (where the grapes were pressed by foot) with a low rim on all four sides; the rim on one side had a small hole through which the grape juice flowed into a channel leading to an intermediate-sized plastered tank or vat. Another channel drained the juice into a deeper plastered vat, with a small sump or catchment in the corner. Juice from Ashkelon’s wine presses was decanted into wine jars and left to ferment in adjacent storerooms. Dipper juglets and fat-bellied storage jars (amphoras) with pointed bases and protruding handles were the predominant pottery types found in the winery.

We also found in this building dozens and dozens of puzzling unbaked clay balls, some as large as grapefruits, with a single perforation through the center. At first we thought they might be loom weights for weaving. Since wine-making is a seasonal activity that takes place during and after the grape harvest in August/September, perhaps the building was used for weaving during other seasons. But many of these clay balls are too large and heavy to be loom weights.

The more probable explanation connects them to wine production: They fit nicely into the mouth of the fat-bellied storage jar, the most common Philistine wine jar found at Ashkelon. When wine ferments, it gives off gases. To prevent explosions, the gases are released, sometimes through a bunghole in the side of the wine jar or cask. Of course, a puncture in the side of a pottery vessel damages it permanently. The same effect, without damaging the vessel, could be obtained if perforated stoppers, such as these clay spheres, were sealed in the mouth of the jar, and the hole opened or closed at the appropriate time to release the gases. Israeli archaeologist Zvi Gal was the first to propose the function of these clay balls, which he found in an excavation at H|urvat Rosh Zayit, and we think he is right. If the clay spheres are not loom weights, then there is no reason for us to believe that the winery was converted into a textile factory during the off-season.

The winery at Ashkelon shatters another modern myth about the Philistines: that they were beer-guzzling louts. One of the most characteristic pottery vessels found at Philistine sites is a jug with a strainer spout, commonly referred to as a Philistine “beer jug.”⁸

The strainer supposedly functioned to strain out the beer dregs. The ecology of Philistia, however, favors the production of grapes over barley. The sandy soils and warm, sunny climate of the coastal plain produced many palatable wines, ranging from the light varieties 065at Ashkelon to the heavier ones at Gaza.⁹ The winery at Ashkelon and similar contemporaneous wine presses recently excavated near Ashdod suggest that coastal Philistia was an important producer of wine both for local consumption and for export. Wine, not beer, was the beverage of choice. The “beer-jugs” really served as carafes for wine. The strainer spout acted as a built-in sieve, which filtered out the lees and other impurities. To remove even finer unwanted particles from the wine, the pourer might have placed a linen cloth over the ceramic strainer.¹⁰ The Philistines were not the only winebibbers to filter their wine. Egyptian wall reliefs depict royalty and nobility pouring wine through sieves into their drinking bowls or cups.

While Ashkelon produced wine, Philistine Ekron, located in the inner coastal zone, with its expansive rolling fields of deep fertile soils, was the undisputed olive oil capital of the country, if not the world.¹¹ More than a hundred olive oil factories lined the outer industrial belt of Ekron. The coast and interior of Philistia thus formed complementary zones for the production 066of two of the most important cash crops of the Levant—olive oil and wine. Largely because of these exports to Egypt and other Mediterranean countries, Philistia grew fat from its oil and heady from its wine during the last half of the seventh century B.C.E.^b

The bazaar, or marketplace, of Ashkelon overlooked the sea. A row of shops flanked the street on one side. The floor of one of the shops (Room 423) was littered with dipper juglets and wine jars. It might well have been a wine shop. Just outside the shop lay an ostracon, which Professor Frank Cross has dated to the late seventh century based on the shape and form of the letters. The inscription lists so many units (bottles) of red wine (yn dm) and so many units of sûeµkaµr. The verb-form of this latter term means to get drunk, so the noun-form is usually translated as “strong drink”; it probably refers to a particularly strong wine made from dates and known as sûakraµ in Syriac.¹² To this day, date palms thrive in the Yadin National Park, where the tell of Ashkelon is located.

Another shop (Room 431) contained cuts of meat, including two complete forelegs of beef, which prompted staff zooarchaeologist Brian Hesse to label this the Butcher Shop (see the sidebar “The Zooarchaeological Record: Pigs’ Feet, Cattle Bones and Birds’ Wings”). It is easy to imagine the various cuts of meat hanging in the windows and doorway of this shop in Philistine times, much as they do today in the meat-markets of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Without doubt, the most famous reference to Ashkelon is the lament of David on the death of his friend Prince Jonathan and King Saul at the hands of the Philistines (2 Samuel 1:20):

Tell it not in Gath,
proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon,
lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
the daughters of the uncircumcised exult.

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The Hebrew word translated as “streets” is huûssoµt. It does not really mean “streets,” however. As Benjamin Mazar pointed out 30 years ago, the word means “bazaars.” The poet who composed this early Hebrew verse knew about Ashkelon as a great commercial center and entrepôt, where news and information traveled fast. Was it the bazaars of Ashkelon that the poet had in mind? The bazaar was the most bustling part of any Middle Eastern city, then as now. The bazaar that we uncovered from the late seventh century was probably not much different in layout or function from the earlier bazaars to which the Biblical elegist alludes.

Across the street from the shops was a major public building, probably the town’s Administrative Center. As one walked toward the sea, past the shops on the right and the Administrative Center on the left, the street opened up into a square, which we have dubbed “Piazza Philistina.” Bordering the west side of the plaza is a series of long narrow rooms (Rooms 421, 276 and 287), probably magazines of a warehouse, where produce and goods were stored before being put on sale in the shops. Turning left at the plaza, a narrow corridor leads to a square building on the right, tentatively identified as the Counting House because of some of the small finds located there. Nearby were a dozen scale weights of bronze and stone along with two bronze pieces of pans and part of a bronze beam from a scale balance. An ostracon found there appears to be a receipt for grain paid for in silver (see the sidebar “The Epigraphical Record: A Philistine Ostracon from Ashkelon”). In this period just prior to the introduction of minted coinage in the Levant, ingots, jewelry and precious metals served as currency. By the seventh century B.C.E., commodities were often paid for in silver.¹³ Prices could be compared using an equivalent unit of value, such as a shekel weight of silver.

The script on the ostracon is also interesting. It is an alphabetic script similar to, but not identical with, Hebrew and Phoenician, peculiar to Philistia in the seventh century. When the Philistines first came to the eastern Mediterranean littoral from the Mycenaean world (including coastal Asia Minor, Crete and the Cyclades, 069and other sites) in the early 12th century B.C.E., they probably brought with them a language related to Greek and a script that will be related to Linear B—whenever it is found; we still have no sure example of early Philistine writing. Our ostracon indicates that by the seventh century B.C.E., and perhaps as early as the time of David and Solomon, the Philistines were using a local script and had adopted a Semitic dialect as well.

One thing is clear: this large, sophisticated Philistine metropolis of the late seventh century B.C.E. was thoroughly destroyed. The destruction of Philistine Ashkelon was complete and final. The Iron Age, in archaeological terms, had ended.

Archaeology cannot be so precise as to date the destruction of Ashkelon to 604 B.C.E., but the Babylonian Chronicle leaves little doubt that the late seventh-century destruction we found all over the site, followed by a 75- to 80-year gap in occupation until the Persian Period, was the work of Nebuchadrezzar in 604 B.C.E.

Earlier in the late eighth-early seventh centuries the Assyrians had made a serious investment in the West. They established administrative provinces where former kingdoms and city-states had been. They developed a complex imperial apparatus and infrastructure to insure that Mediterranean wealth was siphoned into their coffers. Nebuchadrezzar probably lacked the capability of imposing an effective imperial bureaucracy on these small Mediterranean states as Assyria had done. His overriding concern was with Egypt. And his instrument of foreign policy toward real or potential allies of Egypt was a blunt one—annihilation, and for those who survived, deportation. Throughout Philistia, and later throughout Judah, his scorched-earth policy created a veritable wasteland west of the Jordan River. Those fortunate enough to survive this devastation were usually deported to Babylonia.

Philistines, Jews and many others were exiled to Babylonia by Nebuchadrezzar. He needed deportees to repopulate and rehabilitate his empire after the depletion of its manpower in the earlier Assyro-Babylonian wars.¹⁴ In a rations list in cuneiform, dated to 592 B.C.E., we find prominent Ashkelonians serving Nebuchadrezzar in Babylon: two sons of Aga (the last king of Philistine Ashkelon), three mariners, several officials and chief musicians—all deportees from Ashkelon.¹⁵

A century and a half later, as we know from the Murashu Archive, masses of deportees from the West had been settled in the Nippur region, southeast of Babylon. Philistines from Ashkelon and Gaza were living in their own ethnic communities located along canals leading into Nippur, where they were doing business with a big firm run by the Jewish Murashu family.¹⁶

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Only with Cyrus the Great, the Persian successor to the Babylonians, does the archaeological record begin again in Ashkelon (where Phoenicians settled; Philistines did not return from the diaspora)—as in Jerusalem^c and in Judah, where many Jewish exiles returned to their homeland.

According to the Chronicler, writing in the fifth century B.C.E., long after Nebuchadrezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. Judah “lay desolate” for 70 years “until the land had made up for its sabbaths” (2 Chronicles 36:20–23).

Before Nebuchadrezzar’s juggernaut advanced toward Ashkelon, the Philistines probably felt secure in their well-fortified city of 10,000–12,000 inhabitants. They had refortified the seaport by adding another thick sheath of sand and debris over the mile-and-a-half arc of artificial earthen ramparts (the so-called glacis construction) around the city. We have excavated two large mudbrick towers on the crest of the glacis, about 60 feet apart. If this pattern persists along the crest of the arc, as many as 50 towers may have fortified the city when Nebuchadrezzar attacked. This fortification system was destroyed at the end of the seventh century B.C.E., presumably by Nebuchadrezzar’s forces.

In the winery mentioned earlier, remnants of charred wood were all that remained of the panelling that once framed mudbrick doorjambs. Indeed, the path of fiery destruction could be traced throughout the building by carefully observing the crushed pottery, charcoal, vitrified mudbrick, and wall and ceiling fragments. There was no doubt that the building had come to an abrupt and catastrophic end. We may conclude that vineyards that took numerous generations of peace, stability and nurturing to produce were destroyed almost overnight by Nebuchadrezzar and his vandals.

As with the winery, so with the Counting House. A large container of olive oil had spilled on the floor; when the fires of destruction reached that part of the building, they burned so hot that mud bricks and other clay materials were vitrified.

The rest of the bazaar, too, was plundered and pillaged in every area. In the winter of 604 B.C.E., wailing and despair replaced the joy and laughter that had once rung throughout the Ashkelon bazaar. Everywhere in the bazaar we found smashed pottery vessels by the hundreds amid the destruction debris, much of it identical to what we saw in the winery.

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Evidence of just how far into the city Nebuchadrezzar’s troops proceeded came to light in one of the shops of the bazaar (Room 406), where we found the skeleton of a middle-aged woman, about 35 years old, who had been crouching down among the storage jars, attempting to hide from the attackers. When we found her, she was lying on her back, her legs flexed and akimbo, her left arm reaching toward her head. The skull was badly fragmented. We removed the skeleton to the laboratory of physical anthropologist Patricia Smith of Hebrew University, who carefully reconstructed the skull and determined that the woman had been clubbed in the head with a blunt instrument.

“Ashkelon is silenced,” wailed the prophet Jeremiah at the destruction of Israel’s arch enemy; “For the Lord is destroying the Philistines” (Jeremiah 47:5, 4).

After destroying Philistine Ashkelon, Nebuchadrezzar moved on to the inland Philistine city of Ekron (Tel Miqne), which is being excavated by a joint Israeli-American team headed by Hebrew University professor Trude Dothan and the director of the W.F. Albright School of Archaeological Research, Seymour Gitin. The devastation of Ekron at the hands of Nebuchadrezzar in 603 B.C.E. (or perhaps in 601 B.C.E.) has left an incredible yield of material remains, including thousands of whole or restorable pots, animal bones and a rich array of small finds, including several Egyptian objects.

During the seventh century B.C.E., the kings of Judah vacillated between Egypt and Babylonia half a dozen times or more. Ashkelon and Ekron cast their lots with Egypt. Although Nebuchadrezzar never succeeded in conquering Egypt itself, he was nevertheless able to reduce Egypt’s actual and potential allies and client-states to rubble.^d Eventually, the pro-Egyptian policy of Judah (against the counsel of Jeremiah) led to the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah in 586 B.C.E. The First Temple period was at an end.

In 86 B.C.E. Nebuchadrezzar (also known as Nebuchadnezzar II), king of Babylon, attacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple and burned the city. This of course is the focal point of the Biblical story. For Nebuchadrezzar, however, Jerusalem was only one of many prizes, part of a major military operation in the West extending over many years. The real battle was between two superpowers—the newly ascendant Babylonian Empire in the East (replacing the Assyrians) and Egypt in the West. Hebrew University professor Avraham Malamat has aptly applied the term “bipolar politics” to this contest.1 By the last half of the seventh […]