Ashkelon

Ashkelon was an ancient Philistine seaport on the east coast of the Mediterranian sea just north of Gaza. Ashkelon is also the name of a modern city in the western Negev, in the Southern District of Israel in Israel, which was formed out of the Arab town of Al Majdal in the 1950s. Ashkelon was the oldest and largest seaport in ancient Canaan, one of the "five cities" of the Philistines, north of Gaza. Archeological excavations began in 1985 led by Lawrence Stager of Harvard University are revealing the site with about 50 feet of accumulated rubble from successive Canaanite, Philistine, Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Crusader occupation.

The oldest layers are shaft graves of pre-Phoenician Canaanites. The city was originally built on a sandstone outcropping and has a good underground water supply. It was relatively large as an ancient city with as many as 15,000 people living inside walls a mile and a half long, 50 feet high and 150 feet thick. Ashkelon was a thriving Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 BCE) already city of more than 150 acres, with commanding ramparts including the oldest arched city gate in the world, eight feet wide, and even as a ruin still standing two stories high. The thickness of the walls was so great that the mudbrick Bronze Age gate had a stone-lined tunnel-like barrel vault, coated with white plaster, to support the superstructure: it is the oldest such vault ever found. The Bronze Age ramparts were so capacious that later Roman and Islamic fortifications, faced with stone, followed the same footprint, a vast semi-circle protecting Ashkalon on the landward side. On the sea it was defended by a high natural bluff. Within the huge ramparts, in the ruins of a sanctuary, a votive silver calf was found in 1991. During the Canaanite period, a roadway more than 20 feet in width ascended the rampart from the harbor and entered a gate at the top. Nearby, in the ruins of a small ceramic tabernacle was found a finely cast bronze statuette of a bull calf, originally silvered, 4 inches long. Images of calves and bulls were associated with the worship of the Canaanite gods El and Baal (the "lord," whose name was translated into Hebrew as "Moloch"). Calf worship was execrated repeatedly by Old Testament prophets, a proscribed Canaanite religious practice that the Hebrews only too easily fell into. Besides the Golden Calf of Exodus, Hosea inveighs against kissing calf-images The Philistines conquered Canaanite Ashkelon about 1150 BCE. Their earliest pottery is similar to pottery found at Mycenae in mainland Greece, adding weight to the hypothesis that the Mycenaeans and Philistines were among the "Sea Peoples" that upset cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Ashkelon became one of the five Philistine cities that were constantly warring with the Israelites and the kingdom of Judah. When this vast seaport, the last of the Philistine cities to hold out against Nebuchadnezzar finally fell in 604 BCE, burnt and destroyed and its people taken into exile, the Philistine era was over.