Abstract
RECENT correspondence in the daily Press on the Exodus and its relation to the fall of Jericho was no doubt to some extent responsible for the interest taken hi the account of the third season's excavations on the site of that city given by Prof. John Garstang before the Royal Asiatic Society on May 12. Although two seasons' work had produced no certain evidence of dating, Prof. Garstang on opening his third season had arrived at an opinion, based on the evidence of stratification as well as the absence of any sign of Mycenæan contact, that the conflagration which destroyed the city, and of which there is abundant evidence, had taken place during the late Bronze Age, probably somewhere about 1400 B.C. With the view of obtaining datable objects which might or might not confirm this view, the Bronze Age cemetery some four hundred yards west of the city mound was attacked and twenty-five tombs were opened and cleared. Objects numbering eighteen hundred, the great majority pottery, were obtained covering the history of the site throughout the Bronze Age. Most significant of all, however, were ninety-four royal Egyptian scarabs, which have been examined by Prof. Newberry and pronounced by him to range from the Hyksos period to the reign of Amnhotep III. Egyptian influence first appears about 1500 B.C.; but nothing of the Tel el-Amarna period and the age of Akhenaton has been found. It is, therefore, concluded that the city was destroyed at some date between 1411 B.C. and 1375 B.C. Evidence of re-occupation appears in the Iron Age; but the walls were not rebuilt until about 900 B.C.
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Jericho. Nature 129, 753 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129753c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129753c0