Tel Yarmuth

We left this morning quite early, the boy, the nephew and I. We set out to find Tel Yarmuth. I have been studying the Early Bronze age in my archaeology class and Tel Yarmuth is a key site for the EB in the Levant. The Tel is a classic example of an EB city. It has huge walls and fortifications as well as palaces and temples. The Early Bronze age is around 3000 BCE so we are talking 5K years back. This is actually before there was any serious bronze (or metal) production or real writing in this area. So it is quite remarkable that the Canaanites managed to build a city of this size. There are those that claim that this city was conquered by Joshua (Kirbet el-Yarmut), but there have been few Iron Age or even Late Bronze Age pottery or artifacts found to substantiate this. My prof thinks the whole Joshua conquest is bunk anyway.

The directions I found on the web said there is a slight climb to get to the Tel. Well it was more like the side of a mountain. I was completely out of breath by the time we got to the top. It was worth it though and you should all go.

This is a cool little bridge over a stream. It's not the way to the site, and we had to backtrack over it. Still it is cute.
This is the easy part of the climb. If you look closely you can see the cyclists pushing their bikes up. There are millions of bikers in the Beit Shemesh area on a Saturday morning.
The boy and nephew preparing coffee at the site.
Some of the buildings. There are a lot of these. I wish I had a map of the place as I could not figure out where the entrance or gate house was. The walls are huge.
More (boring) buildings. I always get in trouble from my family about posting these pictures of walls and stuff. But, it never ceases to amaze me that this was built 5000 years ago.
Serious walls. The outer fortifications were said to be 4 meters high. Thats a lot of stone.
This is a picture along the top (at ground level) of one of the walls (I think). Very impressive.

We had fun. This is the kind of site I really like. I will do more research on this and one day go back when I can make more sense of what is going on. There has been a lot of digging here in the past, some of the pits are very deep.