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Impressive ashlars, now partially fallen, formed the outer face of a 22-foot-wide mudbrick tower that helped protect Ekron. The tower, dating from about the mid-tenth century B.C.E. until the end of the seventh century B.C.E., was attached to a mudbrick wall built at the foot of the 10-acre upper city. To strengthen the wall, the ashlars were laid header-and-stretcher fashion—blocks with long side facing out alternating with blocks whose short side faces out.

When the ashlars toppled, mudbrick was exposed. The mudbrick shows signs of dark ash, associated by the excavators with the destruction caused by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in his campaign of 603 B.C.E.