Another View: Was the Earliest Philistine City of Ekron Fortified?

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In the 12th century B.C.E., when the Philistines arrived by land and by sea on what is now the southern coastal plain of Israel, they destroyed Ekron, the Canaanite settlement at Tel Miqne. Then they proceeded to establish at Tel Miqne/Ekron their own city, one of the five cities of the Philistine Pentapolis, as described in the Bible.

For 14 extensive seasons, Trude Dothan of the Hebrew University and Seymour Gitin of the Albright School for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem have led excavations at Tel Miqne. They have exposed enough of the first Philistine city at the site to conclude convincingly that it was both large (50 acres) and wealthy. Moreover, it was surrounded, they tell us, by massive fortifications. In this, however, I believe they are mistaken; this great Philistine urban center was unfortified in this period.

To explain how the excavators made this egregious mistake will take us into the trenches, looking at the details as an archaeologist would. Not surprisingly, some of these details are difficult to understand. And archaeologists not infrequently disagree with one another. In this case, however, I think the matter is clear: Philistine Ekron of the 12th century B.C.E., covering both the upper mound (or acropolis) and a very large lower mound, was unfortified.

The excavators made their mistake by jumping to a conclusion too quickly and apparently by allowing some preconceptions to influence what should be a strictly archaeological judgment. I am intimately familiar with the Ekron excavation because for nearly 20 years I directed the excavation of nearby Lachish, only 14 miles south of Ekron. I frequently visited Tel Miqne and studied in depth the excavated data (which unfortunately are still largely unpublished).¹

The excavation of Tel Miqne by Dothan and Gitin began with a “pilot” season on April 26, 1981. A trench (labeled Field I NE) consisting of six squares, each 6 by 6 meters, was opened on the slope of the upper mound under the supervision of Ann Killebrew (now of Pennsylvania State University) where a massive mud-brick wall was encountered. This mud-brick wall was quickly identified as a city wall dated to “the beginning of the Philistine occupation of the site” (i.e., to the very beginning of the Iron Age [c. 1175 B.C.E. according to the conventional chronology or, more probably, c. 1130 B.C.E. as I suggested]).

The latest pottery fragments embedded in the mud-bricks of this wall dated to the Late Bronze Age. Hence, the conclusion that the mud-bricks had been manufactured and the wall built afterward was correct. But how many years later? Dothan and Gitin jumped to the conclusion that the wall had been built immediately afterward, that is, in the immediately succeeding archaeological period—Iron Age I—when the Philistines first occupied the site. This was the excavators’ first and most basic mistake.

Their next mistake was in regarding this mud-brick façade as a wall. It was not a true wall, as their own investigation would reveal. As they themselves observed, the mud-brick façade of the wall was “unfinished.” In their own words, “Against it [this wall] was laid hard compacted mud-brick material, a type of artificial slope.”²

The façade of the mud-brick wall was not plastered and had been left “unfinished” 069for a good reason: It was never exposed to the elements. It was never meant to be seen. In short, it was not in itself a true wall. It was only a stabilizing wall of a rampart. A fill or earthen rampart had covered it from the day of its construction and hid it from view.

Excavations continued in this trench during the second “pilot” season in 1982. It was then found that the earthen rampart supporting the façade of the massive mud-brick wall contained pottery later in date than the pottery in the mud-brick wall. Instead of concluding that this entire construction—mud-brick wall and supporting rampart—must have been constructed after the latest pottery in the rampart, they decided that the rampart was built long after the internal mud-brick supporting wall. In their own words: “While the structural relationship of the artificial slope and the mud-brick city wall seems to show that they were built in the same phase, the ceramic data indicate that the artificial slope may have been a secondary feature, perhaps part of a repair to the city wall system.”³

Naturally the question arises as to why Dothan and Gitin, both experienced and cautious field archaeologists, hastened—already during the first “pilot” season—to identify this thick mud-brick wall as the city wall dating from the beginning of the Philistine settlement. After all, the season lasted only three and a half weeks, about 17 working days, and the digging was carried out by only 19 students. In this very brief, limited season they managed only to scratch superficially the mammoth, virgin and unknown site at one point, and encountered only a very small segment of the mud-brick wall. The observation that the mud-bricks of the wall contained Late Bronze pottery fragments indeed showed that the wall was built later than the Late Bronze Age, but it could have been built in any later period.

It seems to me that the most likely explanation for their misinterpretation is that their conclusion was guided, if not determined, by their preconceptions: From the beginning Dothan and Gitin believed that the Philistine cities in the Coastal Plain must have been strongly fortified. This view was based on several sources. An Egyptian document, known as Papyrus Harris I, discusses events during the first half of the 12th century B.C.E.: There Pharaoh Ramesses III declares:

I extended all the frontiers of Egypt and overthrew those who attacked them from their lands … [The Sea Peoples, including Philistines, were] captured all together and brought in captivity to Egypt like the sands of the shore. I settled them in strongholds, bound in my name.⁴

These “strongholds”—if indeed they were located in Canaan rather than in Egypt and associated with the settling Philistines—might hint at the possibility that the newly established Philistine settlements were fortified. Moreover, Biblical references to Philistine Ekron and Gaza suggest that these cities were surrounded by a city wall: 1 Samuel 17:52 recounts that following the encounter between David and the Philistine giant Goliath in the Valley of Elah, “the men of Israel and of Judah … pursued the Philistines … to the gates of Ekron.” Judges 16:1–3 describes the plot in Gaza to kill Samson in the “gate of the city.” At midnight Samson arose, and “took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them.” From all this Dothan and Gitin no doubt inferred that the earliest Philistine cities were massively fortified.

In the years prior to the beginning of the excavations at Tel Miqne, this idea gained support from another direction—from excavations at ancient Ashdod, another large Philistine city and a member of the Philistine Pentapolis. There the late Moshe Dothan, Trude’s husband and colleague who held identical views, identified a city wall protecting the Philistine settlement.⁵

Therefore, in their own minds Dothan and Gitin could easily expect to find a strong city wall in Ekron dating from the time when the Philistine city was established. When, at the very beginning of the 14-year excavation, they found what seemed to be a post-Late-Bronze-Age mud-brick wall, this clinched it: Here was the expected Iron I fortification of the Philistine city. As summarized about a decade later by Amihai Mazar, Trude Dothan’s disciple: “Thus, city walls were part and parcel of the thriving urban culture that was established by the Philistines in Philistia.”⁶

When—and for what purpose—was the mud-brick wall and associated rampart built?

The mud-brick wall of the rampart is about 12 feet thick and was preserved to a height of about 5 feet. Dothan and Gitin believe that the wall originally rose “from 6 to 10 meters [20–30 feet] higher than its presently preserved height.”⁷ The wall does not have proper stone foundations. Neither its exterior or interior face is plastered, and both faces are not vertical or properly shaped. Had the unplastered faces of the wall been exposed to the winter rains, the unburnt, sun-dried mud-bricks would have soon crumbled and melted, to be followed by the immediate collapse of the wall or parts of it. I am sure that the Philistine builders in Ekron were definitely not that clumsy—they would have never built such a free-standing structure!

The ancient builders of the wall first cut a trench in the debris along the slope of the mound. They then constructed the wall in the trench. Such a trench is well-known and is referred to as 070a “foundation trench.” In this way the builders could construct their wall on solid, horizontal ground rather than on the slope. The builders then filled the space between the inner face of the wall and the slope with debris. On the outside, they laid a sloping earthen fill or ramp. The fills of the foundation trench as well as the ramp were sealed by a layer of mud-bricks (or mud-brick material) that reached the top of the mud-brick wall.

The mud-brick wall was obviously meant to strengthen and support in position the earthen fills laid on the slope, which in turn probably supported or formed the basis for monumental buildings on the summit of the mound.

The lower edge of the earthen rampart supporting the façade of the mud-brick wall extends down to the top of a city wall extending along the lower slope and correctly dated by the excavators to the later part of the Iron Age. This suggests that the rampart and the later city wall were built as parts of the same scheme.

Moreover, the rampart supporting the façade of the thick mud-brick wall contained decorated Philistine pottery of the Iron I period (1130–950 B.C.E.), as well as charcoal pieces, limestone chips, bones, shells and flint tools. It is clear that this debris was taken from a ruined, domestic, early-Philistine level. Hence, the rampart (and the adjoining mud-brick wall) must date later than the Iron I Philistine strata.⁸

As the excavations developed, one year after another, Dothan and Gitin identified the so-called early Philistine mud-brick city wall in two more trenches located at the southern end of the lower mound (Field III SE) and at its northwestern edge (Field X NW). In my view, a stratigraphical analysis shows that in those two fields as well—as in the above-discussed Field I NE—the uncovered remains have been wrongly interpreted by Dothan and Gitin. These fortification remains should in fact be associated with the later Iron Age wall surrounding the city.

It is thus clear that an early Philistine city wall was not found in any of the trenches dug along the edges of the huge site. It also follows that only one massive city-wall, which surrounded the entire site, was constructed in Iron Age Ekron at a much later date. When was it built?

The earliest Philistine city was unfortified, although it was a large, prosperous city that occupied not only the upper mound at Tel Miqne but the lower mound as well, about 50 acres. This city, as Dothan and Gitin note, was destroyed in the tenth century B.C.E. By whom it is not clear. But, according to the excavators, a large reconstituted Philistine city occupying both the upper and lower mound did not emerge again until the seventh century B.C.E. In the interim, the city was confined to the upper tell. According to Dothan and Gitin, only after 700 B.C.E., when Ekron prospered under Assyrian hegemony and became a large center for oil production, was the lower tell again occupied. But is that so?

The historian Nadav Na’aman, my colleague at Tel Aviv University, has supplied the proper historical background clearly indicating that the large city and its fortifications must be dated earlier than 700 B.C.E.⁹ Ekron was already a very important city-state in the later part of the eighth century B.C.E. Two sources are of particular interest in this regard. The first is a stone relief which decorated a wall in the royal palace of Sargon II (722–705 B.C.E.), built in Sargon’s capital Dur Sharukin (Khorsabad) in Assyria. The stone relief depicts Sargon’s attack on a fortified Ekron in 720 B.C.E. Ekron is shown protected by two concentric city walls.

The second source is a fragmentary Assyrian cuneiform tablet discovered many years ago in Assyria, known as the “Azekah inscription,” which describes Sennacherib’s campaign to Philistia and Judah in 701 B.C.E. The attack on Ekron is apparently discussed there, although the name of the city has not been preserved.¹⁰ The attacked city is described as the “royal city of the Philistines which [King] Hezekiah [of Judah] had captured and strengthened for himself.” It was “surrounded with great towers and exceedingly difficult [its ascent?].” The city had “a palace like a mountain” and probably a water tunnel, and “a moat was dug around it.” This description suggests that Ekron was a large city surrounded by complex and 071massive fortifications in the late eighth century B.C.E.

I believe that Ekron was surrounded by a massive fortification ring by the eighth century B.C.E. This was the sole fortification system constructed in Iron Age Ekron. As reflected in the Assyrian sources cited above, this was the fortification that enabled Ekron to challenge the armies of both Sargon II and Sennacherib.

These are radical changes from the conclusions of Dothan and Gitin. They lead to an entirely different reconstruction of the history of the Iron Age Philistine city. The Philistines who first settled in Ekron did not bother to surround their huge settlement with a wall, and it remained unfortified till the second half of the eighth century B.C.E. By that time Ekron became a strong city-state, heavily fortified, which challenged Sargon II and Sennacherib during their campaigns in the coastal plain. Contrary to the conclusions of Dothan and Gitin, the prosperity and growth of the late Iron Age Philistine city started before Sennacherib’s campaign of 701 B.C.E. and not as a result of it.

Ekron was a central Philistine city, and hence Na’aman’s and my historical and archaeological conclusions have wider significant implications. The fact that Philistine Ekron of the 12th and 11th centuries was not fortified indicates the character of the Philistine settlement in the coastal plain. A recent stratigraphical analysis of Philistine Ashdod by Israel Finkelstein and Lily Singer-Avitz convincingly indicated that the so-called early Philistine city wall identified by the excavator, Moshe Dothan, is definitely not part of a fortification system.¹¹ Based on the analysis of the finds from Ekron and Ashdod, Finkelstein reached the conclusion that in general the early Philistine cities apparently were not fortified.¹² The Philistine settlements can hardly be identified with the “strongholds” described in Papyrus Harris I.

And as to the later part of the Iron Age: The conclusion that Ekron was such a strong city-state in 701 B.C.E. helps us understand the special role Ekron played in the Assyrian campaigns and during Hezekiah’s revolt against Assyria, when Ekron allied itself with Hezekiah.

Finally, the methodological aspect should be emphasized. In my view the wrong interpretation of the archaeological data in Philistine Ekron by Trude Dothan and Seymour Gitin, excellent and field-experienced archaeologists, stems from concepts anchored in historical and Biblical interpretation. This is a clear case in which such concepts blurred the archaeological issues rather than helping to elucidate them. Unfortunately, it is not the only case of this kind in the archaeology of ancient Israel.

Uncredited photos courtesy of the author.

In the 12th century B.C.E., when the Philistines arrived by land and by sea on what is now the southern coastal plain of Israel, they destroyed Ekron, the Canaanite settlement at Tel Miqne. Then they proceeded to establish at Tel Miqne/Ekron their own city, one of the five cities of the Philistine Pentapolis, as described in the Bible. For 14 extensive seasons, Trude Dothan of the Hebrew University and Seymour Gitin of the Albright School for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem have led excavations at Tel Miqne. They have exposed enough of the first Philistine city at the site to […]