Gezer is an ancient southern Levantine city well-known from Egyptian, Biblical and Assyrian sources, associated with power struggles, conquests, and intriguing tales involving figures such as Milkilu and Amenhotep III, Merneptah, the Philistines, Solomon and his unidentified pharaonic father-in-law, and Shishak / Sheshonq I.
Aerial view of Tell Jezer, Israel. Image credit: Webster et al., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293119.
For scholars seeking to reconstruct the Bronze and Iron Age history of the southern Levant and explore the interplay between text and archaeological evidence, Gezer is among the most intriguing sites.
This ancient city is mentioned in many textual sources and its strategic importance is amply attested by the attention it received from foreign rulers.
Gezer is securely identified with Tell Jezer, which at ca. 12 ha is among the largest mounds in the southern Levant and easily the largest in the foothill region of Shephelah in south-central Israel.
The site is located at a key crossroad between the Via Maris coastal road and the road leading inland to the highlands and beyond to Transjordan.
Sitting atop a promontory at 225 m elevation, it commands an impressive, almost 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain: across the southern coastal and Sharon plains and eastward to the Judean hills.
The inhabitants had access to wells and springs, and to fertile fields in the Ayalon and adjacent valleys.
Gezer is mentioned in Egyptian, Assyrian and Biblical texts — sources that carry varying weight for reconstructing history.
The Egyptian and Assyrian texts are contemporary with the events they describe and thus generally accepted as describing real events (notwithstanding political biases of the authors).
The Biblical texts were written centuries later and thus the historical realities behind them are less clear and more strongly debated.
The last major reference to Gezer during the Iron Age occurs in contemporary Assyrian sources: a siege of the city by Tiglath-pileser III, dated by textual evidence to 734 BCE, is depicted in a palace relief at Nimrud.
Recent excavations at the site have uncovered a continuous stratigraphic sequence that allows for detailed dating and the establishment of an absolute chronology for events at the site.
In new research, Austrian Archaeological Institute archaeologist Lyndelle Webster and her colleagues obtained 35 radiocarbon dates on organic materials (mostly seeds) from seven distinct stratigraphic layers at Gezer.
These dates range from the 13th to the 9th centuries BCE, a time period that covers numerous significant changes in the city, including multiple destructive events, rebuilding episodes, and the fortification of the city.
The study provides a detailed dataset that can be used to test proposed correlations between the archaeological record and ancient texts.
These dates suggest, for example, that the correlation of a certain destructive episode with the actions of the pharaoh Merneptah is plausible, while the proposed link between another such episode and the campaign of Hazael is not.
Ultimately, this new dataset provides an independent source of absolute dates that will allow archaeologists to better understand the events at Gezer and to place them in a regional perspective.
“The development of a radiocarbon-based chronology at Tell Jezer illustrates the crucial role radiocarbon dating can and must play in reconstructing individual site histories, resolving long-running debates and testing possible correlations between archaeological remains and written sources,” the archaeologists said.
The results appear in the journal PLoS ONE.
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L.C. Webster et al. 2023. The chronology of Gezer from the end of the Late Bronze Age to Iron Age II: A meeting point for radiocarbon, archaeology egyptology and the Bible. PLoS ONE 18 (11): e0293119; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293119
