Archaeology of Israel

[1] Although he never travelled to the Levant, or even left the Netherlands, the first major work on the antiquities of Israel is considered to be Adriaan Reland's Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum, published in 1708.

It is estimated that the people who left the remains discovered on the two sites mentioned belonged to the species Homo erectus, although the human fossils found were too few and incomplete to make a positive identification possible.

In December 2020, archaeologists from the University of Haifa announced the discovery at the Tabun Cave at the Mount Carmel site of the oldest known tool used for grinding or scraping, dating back about 350,000 years.

The term "Natufian" was coined by Dorothy Garrod in 1928, after identifying an archaeological sequence at Wadi al-Natuf which included a Late Levallois-Mousterian layer and a stratified deposit, the Mesolithic of Palestine, which contained charcoal traces and a microlithic flint tool industry.

Israel Finkelstein[30] suggests that the empire of David and Solomon (United Monarchy) never existed and Judah was not in a position to support an extended state until the start of the 8th century.

[33][32] It has been suggested by Finkelstein that this early Israelite state—and not David's 'unified kingdom', which he sees as a "literary construct"—had been the target of the campaign of Shoshenq I to Canaan, in the middle of the second half of the 10th century BCE.

There is evidence of a large scale abandonment of settlements in the heartland of the Kingdom of Saul, as described in the Old Testament, around that time—in the land of the Tribe of Benjamin, just north of Judah, the area of Gibeah.

[37][38][39][40] In May 2021, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority led by Dr. Rachel Bar Nathan announced the discovery in the Ashkelon National Park of the remains of a 2,000-year-old Roman basilica complex dated to the reign of Herod the Great.

[41][42] In August 2021, marine archeologists headed by Yaakov Sharvit from the Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of 1,700-year-old coins weighing a total of 6 kg., dated back to the 4th century AD in Atlit.

The transition from the Roman to Byzantine period coincided with the growth of extensive imperial funding to construct Christian religious institutions in the area, often by transforming the older pagan buildings.

[61][62][63] In 2021, archaeologist from Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) led by researchers Tzachi Lang and Kojan Haku found in the village of Et Taiyiba an engraved stone from the late 5th century from the frame of an entrance door of a church, with a mosaic Greek inscription.

[67][68][69] In August 2021, Israeli archaeologists led by Yoav Arbel, have announced the discovery of Byzantine-era wine press paved with a mosaic along with an old coin minted by Emperor Heraclius.

The teams uncovered handheld stone tools and blades as well as animal bones, dating to 250,000 years ago, at the time of the Mousterian culture of Neanderthals in Europe.

[81] In January 2018 it was announced that a fragment of an early modern human jawbone with eight teeth found at Misliya cave, Israel, have been dated to around 185,000 (between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago [95% CI]).

[95] Major finds include an elaborate water system and a huge cistern[96] carved out of the rock beneath the town, and a large horned altar which was reconstructed using several well-dressed stones found in secondary use in the walls of a later building.

[97] A UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005, Tel Megiddo comprises twenty-six stratified layers of the ruins of ancient cities in a strategic location at the head of a pass through the Carmel Ridge, which overlooks the Valley of Jezreel from the west.

The site was excavated briefly in 1899 by the British archaeologists Frederick Jones Bliss and Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, and since 1996, by a team from Bar-Ilan University directed by Aren Maeir.

[100] Among the noteworthy finds from the ongoing excavations are the impressive late 9th-century BCE destruction level (Stratum A3), apparently evidence of the destruction of Gath by Hazael of Aram (see II Kings 12:18), a unique siege system relating to this event that surrounds the site (the earliest known siege system in the world), a 10th/9th-century BCE inscription written in archaic alphabetic script, mentioning two names of Indo-European nature, somewhat reminiscent of the etymological origins of the name Goliath, and a large stone altar with two "horns" from the 9th-century BCE destruction level – which while very similar to the biblical description of the altar in the Tabernacle (in Exodus 30), has only two horns (as opposed to four in other known examples), perhaps indicating a unique type of Philistine altar, perhaps influenced from Cypriot, and perhaps Minoan, culture.

Tel Gezer is an archaeological site which sits on the western flank of the Shephelah, overlooking the coastal plain of Israel, near the junction between Via Maris and the trunk road leading to Jerusalem.

Excavations at the site conducted by Israeli archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni in 1962[107] have unearthed an extensive early Bronze Age settlement that was completely deserted and destroyed by 2700 BCE.

One school of thought, represented by Yigael Yadin, Yohanan Aharoni and Amnon Ben-Tor, dates the destruction to the later half of the 13th century, tying it to biblical descriptions in Joshua which hold the Israelites responsible for the event.

The second school of thought, represented by Olga Tufnell, Kathleen Kenyon, P. Beck, Moshe Kochavi and Israel Finkelstein, tends to support an earlier date in the first half of the 13th century, in which case there is no necessary connection between the destruction of Hazor and the process of settlement by Israelite Tribes in Cannan.

Excavations in Sepphoris, in the central Galilee region, six kilometers north-northwest of Nazareth, have uncovered a rich and diverse historical and architectural legacy that includes Assyrian, Hellenistic, Judean, Babylonian, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Arabic and Ottoman influences.

[116] Bnot Ya'akov Bridge is a 780,000-year-old site on the banks of the Jordan River in northern Israel currently excavated by Naama Goren-Inbar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

First discovered in the 1930s, Bnot Ya'akov had been the site of several excavations that provided archaeologists with crucial information about how and when Homo erectus moved out of Africa, most likely through the Levantine corridor that includes Israel.

[130] Rather than attempting to understand "the natural process of demolition, eradication, rebuilding, evasion, and ideological reinterpretation that has permitted ancient rulers and modern groups to claim exclusive possession," archaeologists have instead become active participants in the battle over partisan memory, with the result that archaeology, a seemingly objective science, has exacerbated the ongoing nationalist dispute.

[135] In a letter to the United Nations, Yosef Tekoa, Israel's representative to the UN, protested Jordan's "policy of wanton vandalism, desecration and violation,"[135] in which all the synagogues in the Old City apart from one were blown up or used as stables.

[136] A road was cut through the ancient historic Jewish graveyard on the Mount of Olives, and tens of thousands of tombstones, some dating from as early as 1 BCE, were torn out, broken or used as flagstones, steps and building materials in Jordanian military installations.

"[139] Work carried out by the Islamic Waqf since the late 1990s to convert two ancient underground structures into a new mosque on the Temple Mount damaged archaeological artifacts in the area of Solomon's Stables and the Huldah Gates.

[142] The 2011 annual report of the Israeli State Comptroller criticized Waqf renovations on the Temple Mount, which were carried out without permits and employed mechanical tools that caused damage to archaeological relics.