CHAPTER V

OUTLINE OF PALESTINE'S ARCHEOLOGICAL HISTORY

THE EARLY STONE AGE. THE LATE STONE AGE. THE AMORITES. THE CANAANITES. EGYPTIAN DOMINATION: Thothmes III. Palestine in the El-Amarna Letters. Seti I. Ramses II. Merneptah. Ramses III. THE PHILISTINES. THE HEBREWS. PHILISTINE CIVILIZATION. THE HEBREW KINGDOMS. THE EXILE AND AFTER: The Samaritans. Alexander the Great and his successors. The Maccabees. The Asmonæans. THE COMING OF ROME: The Herods. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A. D. LATER HISTORY.

1. The Early Stone Age.-Palestine appears to have been inhabited at a very remote period. Scholars divide the races of prehistoric men, who used stone implements, into two classes-Palæolithic and Neolithic. Palæolithic men did not shape their stone implements. If they chanced to find a stone shaped like an axe, they used it as such; if they found a long, thin one with a sharp edge, they used it for a knife. Neolithic man had learned to shape his stone tools. He could make knives for himself out of flint and form other tools from stone. The earliest inhabitants of Palestine belonged to the palæolithic period. Unshaped stone implements have been found in many parts of the country. They have been picked up in the maritime plain, in still larger numbers on the elevated land south of Jerusalem, and again to the south of Amman, the Biblical Rabbah Ammon, on the east of the Jordan. The Assumptionist Fathers of Notre Dame de France at Jerusalem have a fine collection of flint implements in their Museum.

These paleolithic men lived in caves in which they left traces of their occupation. Several of these caves in Phoenicia have been explored by Père Zumoffen, of the Catholic University of St. Joseph, Beirut. It has been estimated that these cave-dwellers may have been in Palestine as early as 10,000 B. C.

2. The Late Stone Age. Of neolithic men in Palestine much more is known. This knowledge comes in part from the numerous cromlechs, menhirs, dolmens, and "gilgals" which are scattered

1 See R. A. S. Macalister, History of Civilization in Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 1912, pp. 10, 11.

over eastern Palestine. A cromlech is a heap of stones roughly resembling a pyramid;1 a menhir is a group of unhewn stones so set in the earth as to stand upright like columns; a dolmen consists of a large unhewn stone which rests on two others which separate it from the earth;3 and a "gilgal" is a group of menhirs set in a circle.2 These monuments are the remains of men of the stone age who dwelt here before the dawn of history. They were probably erected by some of those peoples whom the Hebrews called Rephaim1 or "shades"-people who, having lived long before, were dead at the time of the Hebrew occupation.

Similar monuments of the stone age have been found in Japan, India, Persia, the Caucasus, the Crimea, Bulgaria; also in Tripoli,5 Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, Malta, southern Italy, Sardinia, Corsica, the Belearic Isles, Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the German shores of the Baltic. Some scholars hold that all these monuments were made by one race of men, who migrated from country to country. As the monuments are not found at very great distances from the sea, the migrations are supposed to have followed the sea coasts. Others scout the idea of a migration over such long distances at such an early epoch of the world's history, and believe that the fashion of making such monuments was adopted from people to people by imitation. Be this as it may, these monuments seem to have been in Egypt and Palestine before the Semites and Hamites developed into the Egyptians, Amorites, and Hebrews, for they were adopted by them as the "pillars" which are so often denounced in the Old Testament, and in Egypt were gradually shaped and prolonged into the obelisks.

Of the men of this stone age the excavations have furnished us with some further information. At Gezer the native rock below all the cities was found to contain caves, some natural and some artificial, which had formed the dwellings of men of the stone age. They, like men today, were lazy. If one found a cave that would protect him from heat, cold, and rain, he would occupy it and save

1 See Barton, A Year's Wandering in Bible Lands, Philadelphia, 1904, p. 143.

2 See Barton, in the Biblical World, Chicago, 1904, Vol. XXIV, p. 177.

* See Conder, Survey of Eastern Palestine, I, pp. 125-277, and Mackenzie in the Annual of the Palestine Exploration Fund, I, pp. 5-11.

4 See Gen. 14: 5; 15: 20.

'See H. S. Cowper The Hill of the Graces, a Record of Investigation among the Trilithons and Megalithic Sites of Tripoli, London, 1897, and Brandenburg, Über Felsarchitektur im Mittelmeergebiet

in Mitteilungen der Vinderasiatischen Gesellschaft, 1914.

6

See the Annals of Archeology and Anthropology, Vol. V, Liverpool, 1913, pp. 112-128.

7 See Macalister, The Excavation of Gezer, I, 72–152.

But there were not enough

himself the trouble of making one. caves to go around, so some of the men of ancient Gezer cut caves for themselves out of the soft limestone rock. It must have been a difficult task with the stone implements at their disposal, but they accomplished it, sometimes cutting stairs by which to descend into them. One such cave seems to have been used by them as a temple. In it were found a quantity of pig bones, which were apparently the remains of their sacrifices. If they offered the pig in sacrifice, they were certainly not Semitic, for Semites abhorred swine. These early men sometimes adorned the sides of their dwellings by scratching pictures on the walls. Several pictures of cattle were found. One cow seemed to have knobs on her horns to keep her from goring! One drawing represented a stag that was being killed with a bow and arrow. These early men burned their dead, and one of the caves in the eastern end of the hill was used as their crematory. Steps in the rock led down to its entrance. The cave itself was 31 feet long, 24 feet 6 inches wide, and the height varied from 2 to 5 feet. Near one end a hole had been cut to the upper air to act as a flue. Below this the fires that burned their dead had been kindled; cinders and charred bones of these far-off men were found as grim tokens of their funeral rites. Shortly after these bones were found the anatomist, Prof. Alexander Macalister, of Cambridge University, father of the excavator, visited the camp at Gezer and made a study of the bones. He found that they represented a nonSemitic race. The peculiar modifications of the bones caused by the squatting so universally practised by Semites were absent. The men whose bones these were could not have been more than 5 feet 6 inches in height, and many of the women must have been as short as 5 feet 3 inches. A pottery head found in one of the caves, which may be a rude portrait of the type of face seen in Gezer in this period, has a sloping forehead, which afforded little brain-space, and a prominent lower jaw. These people used flint knives, crushed their grain in hollow stones with rounded stones, employed a variety of stone implements, and made pottery of a rude type, which will be described in a later chapter.

2

The city of Gezer in this cave-dwelling period was surrounded by a unique wall or rampart. This consisted of a stone wall about 6 feet high and 2 feet thick, on the outer side of which was a ram