The Ancients - Origins of Gaza

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

Throughout history, the area today known as Gaza has often been a contentious site. Its historical significance is a history that spans nearly 3 millennia, and archaeological evidence shows us that it was an international hub frequented by the Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Hittites and more.In this episode, Tristan welcomes Professor Louise Steel to the podcast to talk both about about her team's excavations of Gaza and what the archaeology can tell us. Together, they look at Gaza’s transition into the Bronze Age, the early Egyptian discoveries, and assess Gaza’s significance in the ancient world.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.  You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we're talking about the origins of Gaza. We're going to explore what the archaeology unearthed in the Gaza Strip had so far revealed about the people who lived in this area of the world in antiquity. Now on the ancients we're well aware of the current conflict and the horrors that have

defined it so far. But at this time when news feeds across the world are filled with upsetting stories from both sides of the war, well we want to highlight the extraordinary archaeology and ancient history that the Gaza Strip possesses and is now vulnerable to destruction. Because Gaza has not become a contested zone in recent history, that part of its story stretches back more than 3,000 years into pre-history to the time of the Bronze Age. And we know this thanks to excavations and surveys that have been done in the Gaza Strip over the past century. These missions have revealed how the people who lived in this area of the world more than 3,000 years ago were part of an interconnected Bronze Age world, having close contacts with Egyptians, Canaanites, Bronze Age world, having close contacts with Egyptians, Canaanites, Mycenaeans, Cypriots, Hittites and more.

Evidenced through an incredible array of artefacts that have been unearthed, from Egyptian-influenced mummy mask coffins to Cypriot pottery. And yet, there is still so much about Gaza's ancient history that remains shrouded in mystery. So in this episode, we're shining a light on Gaza's archaeology and what it has revealed so far about this region in antiquity. Our guest is Professor Louise Steele from the University of Wales Trinity St David, who was part of a team that excavated in the Gaza Strip in the late 1990s. This was a really eye-opening episode, I really do hope you enjoy it. And here's Louise. Louise, thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. You're more than welcome. Now, the area of Gaza, people have lived in this area for thousands of years. It's been so significant for so many civilizations. This area of the Mediterranean, it has a very rich ancient history and archaeology. It has indeed. And I think we're thinking right from the beginning, it's always been a contested landscape. That's something that when I was working in Gaza many years ago, back in the 1990s, I organized with my colleague, Joe Clark, we organised an

illustrated history of Gaza, which was funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, hosted by the British Council. And it was actually quite a depressing litany of invasion, going right the way back to the Egyptians. So the Egyptians, the reign of Thutmose III, the year 22 of his reign, the Assyrians in the 8th century, the Babylonians in the 7th century, Alexander the Great, the Romans, you name it, the Ottomans, they all came, they all tramped over it. So, a very rich, long history. A very rich, long history. And you mentioned names like Thutmose III there, so going back beyond the first millennium BC, which is where we're going to start. I mean, to learn about Gaza's very early history, what types of sources do you have available as an

archaeologist today? It's actually quite challenging because it's a landscape which is repeatedly being covered by sand dunes. So in terms of field walking the landscape, it was actually quite difficult. It just depends as the sand blows on and blows off what'ses. So in terms of field walking the landscape, it was actually quite difficult. It just depends as the sand blows on and blows off what's exposed. So in terms of what's visible on the ground, it's really looking around the area of the Wadi Gaza and other river systems to see what's readily visible. In terms of written sources, the earliest documentation is probably from the reign of Thomas III, and he wrote his annals, which are in the temple, I think, Karnak, and he wrote his annals and recorded there. There's other documents which mention a temple at a place called Gadet, which is assumed to be Gaza,

and the Egyptians mention Gaza and other places, Saruhen, in their texts. But there's certainly not that much on the ground in Israel or Palestine in that part of the world. So it's all external, what other people write about it. And then the Assyrians mentioned it because they invaded. The Babylonians mentioned it because they invaded it. And I think it's really only once you hit the Greco-Roman period and you get people like Josephus writing about it.

I suppose also I forgot the biblical sources and Samson and Delilah. So yes, there are other, you know, sort of the Philistines. But again, always people writing from outside about these people who they're conquering or they're fighting against or they're controlling. So we don't really hear their voice from ancient sources, written sources. It's only really the material record which allows the ancient Gazans to speak for themselves. You mentioned names there such as the Wadi Gaza and of course, the Sanjuns. When picturing this area of the world today, of the Near East, if you were there thousands of years ago, what made this particular area

such an attractive place to settle? Well, the main thing, the primary thing, is the Wadi Gaza, which still has water running in it. So when we visited and we'd be working maybe late spring or going there in the autumn, there was water running in the Wadi Gaza. And it's a really fertile landscape. Even today, a lot of farming activity going on there and a lot of farming produce being exported from Gaza to the rest of the world. So it's very, very rich and fertile. It's also, because of its geographical position, it's really important. It sort of links together the African landmass. It's at the end of what's known as the Ways of Horus, which is a land route from northern Egypt, the Nile Delta, up to the Wadi Gaza.

So it joins Africa and Southwest Asia together. And with the Mediterranean Sea then brings in the Mediterranean populations, the people of Cyprus and later on Greece and Rome. So I think it's really more its position. It's really well placed as a communication nexus. Right, because as you highlight there, it's not just a place that is contested over time and time again, but it's also this place of intense cultural contact of these trade connections, whether it's with the Mediterranean world or further east or to the south. Absolutely. And these trade routes are really, really important in antiquity.

The first people to excavate in the 1990s was a team from the Ecol Bibiq in Jerusalem, and they were excavating the ancient port of Gaza, a place called Balakia, and obviously right on the coast because it's the ancient port. And there are links there. They're dating to probably the 5th century BC, 5th, 6th century BC. And there's lots of evidence for trade and exchange with the wider Mediterranean world. And textual sources tell us in the Greco-Roman period it was important for spices, it was important for perfume. So lots of luxurious goods from the exotic East traveling into the Mediterranean world and things coming up from Egypt going into what we call the Levant today into Syria, Palestine. But also, yeah, other things.

It's very close to Sinai and you've got rich turquoise resources there and copper resources. So there's lots of stuff on the doorstep. And stuff that we found when we were doing survey at the site called El Mograka was a lot of luxurious things like alabaster and carnelian and mother of pearl, which is obviously being transported over long distances and coming through this part of the world. I'd love to ask about your work at El Mograka in a bit of time. But before we get there, there are a couple of other sites. If we almost go through, it's chronologically

the story of Gaza and it's thousands of years ago. If we go, say, more than 5,000 years ago to the 4th millennium BC, do we know much about the Gaza region, the people who lived in this area that long ago, maybe just as the Bronze Age is beginning? We're getting tiny little hints about what's going on there. So I worked there in Gaza in the 1990s, and it was an exciting time. There was a lot of promise of archaeological riches coming up from the ground. And one of the most important sites, I think, to be excavated there was a site called Tulsakan, which means the mound of ash.

And it wasn't very far from where I ended up working. It was about 500 metres north of the Wadi Gaza, and it was an early Bronze Age settlement. And the earliest evidence of activity there dates to what Egyptians would call Dynasty Zero. So it's just before the unification of Egypt. It's just before Egypt becomes the Egypt that we know. And in Near Eastern terms, we would be looking at the early Bronze I period. And there's evidence for establishment of an Egyptian, what's called an Egyptian colony. There was an Egyptian building established there.

It was a massive building. The architecture was Egyptian. It was built using mud brick. It was very well protected. There's an Egyptian stronghold. And this is one of just a series that some of the earliest pharaohs or proto-pharaohs, some of the earliest rulers of probably northern Egypt were establishing in what is modern day Israel and Palestine, a series of these fortified locations. And a lot of the pottery was Egyptian or Egyptianizing,

maybe made locally, but Egyptian pottery. And the really, really exciting thing is you get little scraps of Egyptian writing, what's known as a seraph, which is the earliest way the Egyptian kings wrote their names. You have a little palace facade, and inside the palace facade, there's a little name, the Egyptian ruler's name. And when you get into Dynasty I, there's usually a little horse sitting on top of it, a little falcon sitting on top. That's the first king's name. We know the horse name. And there are a few of these Sereks.

I think there's about five or six of them from Tel Es Sagan, which show this very, very early phase where the Egyptians, sort of the Egyptian kingship is being established. But really, probably just before we get to dynasty one, and then there is one, the clincher is this one, which looks like it's the name of King Nama. And Nama is the king who, famous for his palette, who's the king who's supposed to have unified Upper and Lower Egypt. And what these are doing, these are marks on pottery, and it's primarily on wine jars. So it's a trade of wine between egypt

and palestine and it's showing this it's a royal trade that there's royal control over that so you got these wine jars in these fortified settlements and it's absolutely fascinating but it's just a tantalizing glimpse you know what the locals were doing there who the locals were what how they lived that isn't clear we don't know presumably that road people were otherwise you wouldn't need to fortify against them but to kind of add a bit more to that so this area before manetho's 30 dynasties before the creation of iconic monuments like the great pyramid of giza you have this archaeological evidence in the area of Gaza that shows an Egyptian influence there. That is absolutely mind-blowing from this archaeology.

Absolutely. It's so amazing. It is published, which is fantastic, but it's just this little hint of this very, very early occupation. There is another site nearby Gaza, a site called Tar-Ish-Bene, but again, not much has been done there. I think it's just outside the Gaza Strip. And it again shows this very, very early phase of occupation and maybe a little bit of what the local populace, how they lived. So if this is some of the earliest archaeology that we currently know of, you mentioned how the local people at that time, it's unclear who they were. When do we start getting more of an idea of who the local people are that live in this area? So the first locals that we

see are still at the same site, but the Egyptian stronghold is abandoned. And there appears to be, I'll just say it appears to be because obviously it hasn't been shown in excavation, a long period of abandonment, a long period of nothing happening there, which is interesting. Is it because people remember it being an Egyptian site or is it just not? They're just living somewhere else very close by and we just haven't picked it up archaeologically. Early Bronze III, so probably moving towards the mid to later part of the third millennium BC, we see the establishment of a Canaanite stronghold or a local stronghold, a type of fortified town in that part of the world, which looks very similar to other early Bronze III fortified settlements in the southern Levant. So the same, you know, sort of a densely occupied settlement, massive fortification walls. I think there's evidence of a little streetway, but we don't

know much about them, but we know that there was something there. But again, the sense of them being fortified, again, you know, sort of maybe a slightly difficult place to live, but also fortifications project a message, maybe a lot of symbolic competition between whoever's living there and the nearby settlements. So yeah, we've got little glimpses of them, but these are just little snapshots, you know, just tiny, it's not a fully excavated site. They're just getting little test trenches, really. And forgive my ignorance, but who are the Canaanites? Ah, no, that's a good question. Whether or not these people are the Canaanites is another matter. I mean, they're a bit of a slate of handlers, but the Canaanites are what we call the Bronze Age

population of Syria-Palestine, maybe more in the middle and late Bronze Age, more the second millennium BC. We don't really necessarily know if you can extrapolate that back to the third millennium this is a place where terminology is problematic so um canaanites are sort of quite a nice safe term but it's not necessarily what they were to call themselves well it's still interesting whoever these local people were how even this far back as you say we have fortifications visible from these trenches that have been dug so far and no doubt more hopefully will be done in the future but as we move on as we go later into the bronze age we're already at the third millennium bc but this is when we start to see new sites emerging as the preeminent centers and then i've got my notes places like tel el ajul and el maraca now if we talk about the former

first please correct me if I've got the pronunciation wrong, but what is the site of Tell el-Ajul? Tell el-Ajul is absolutely the most fantastic site. This is one of the richest sites in the Levant, and it is sadly quite a complicated site. It was excavated in the 1930s by Flinders Petrie,, a great name in archaeology went there. He spent about four or five years excavating there. Apparently a bit of a tyrant as well. He used to get across with his excavation team for playing jazz music. There's all sorts of lovely stories. He had a policy of he'd keep an eye on the price of gold in the times. And if they found gold, he'd pay them the value of the gold. So I think that's probably one of the reasons the Tell-a-Lazule stands out

as being one of the richest Canaanite settlements or one of the richest Bronze Age settlements that's been excavated in the region. It stands out in particular for its gold. If you want to see some, there's some in the British Museum, so there's some close at hand. There's plenty of material from Tell Olojul in numerous museums in the UK, as well as in the Rockefeller Museum and other places in Israel and Palestine. So it stands out for that reason. It's also, again, I think Tel Olojul stands out because it was

such an important trading centre. So it was involved in quite a high level trade with Cyprus. I think the greatest quantity of Cypriot pottery imported to the Near East is found at Tel Olyzyl, really, really rich from the later Middle Bronze Age into the earlier part of the Late Bronze Age, large quantities of Cypriot pottery, which again is one of the key things. It is a bit of a nightmare site, so you can make sense of it. It is published, but there are problems with Petrie's publication. There is a plan of Tell-a-Lazure, which was done much later by Olga Tufnel, who was one of the people who worked at the site. But there's a missing area, Area C. Nobody knows what happened in Area C or where it is, but we know it existed because there's material from Area C which is in the Institute of Archaeology

in London and other places. So it's very, very problematic trying to decipher what it was that his record keeping wasn't the best there and it's very problematic. There's a team based in the Institute of Archaeology who've been trying over many years to make sense of what they've got and they've done some fantastic work. But there's more questions. But it's such a fantastic site though. It's probably my favourite site in the Levant. It's amazing. Absolutely. What an enigma because I was going to ask, it seems time and time again when someone mentions this site the word palace is bounded about and of course this is the bronze age you've also got the mycenaeans and the minoans and their great

administrative centers being these palaces but it sounds to what you're saying there's not enough evidence just yet to come to those assumptions that they were administrative centers is that still out that's a really good question and this is something that archaeologists are working on at the moment, not just at Tell el-Lazul, but other sites in Israel and the surrounding area. So Flinders Petrie identified a series of five structures built in the same part of the site, which he identified as palaces. The first of these, or the earliest of these, which is a Middle Bronze Age structure, is commonly accepted as being a palace. But there's a bit of a debate at the moment just on a wider level as to what a palace actually is. There's a lot of terminology that archaeologists use or have used sort of unthinkingly, which is increasingly being seen to be problematic.

This is a large structure. It's a monumental structure. It's got a fabulous architecture. There's a lovely plastered bathroom in it. So, you know, sort of a nice sort of standard of living. It seems that a lot of the gold comes from the first palace. But again, there's lots of problems with Petrie and how he attributed material to certain parts of the site.

But the first one is accepted as being a palace, but whether or not palaces were administrative structures is seen as being a problem. And this isn't just Tell Elisul, there's other sites being excavated at the moment in other areas like Tell Kabri, where they've got a similar sort of problem. You've got monumental buildings, obviously very wealthy, but whether or not they administered a wider area or whether they're just sort of bringing in their own estates. So there's no administrative documentation, which is interesting. But there are links with Egypt again. So Egypt pops up again, not necessarily actually in the palace,

but there's a courtyard cemetery, which is associated with the first palace, whether or not it predates or is about the same date. Again, there's issues of stratigraphy and how it's been recorded, but lots of scarabs coming from there, but not from the palace itself. But that still feels like something that will continue as we go more and more into Gaza's ancient history, that connection connection with Egypt as we'll see. If we stay in the mid-Bronze Age for a bit longer, so we've got Tell al-Ajoul, but we've also got, not too far away, this other site that you mentioned earlier, and we're going to explore it now. First of all, in the mid-Bronze Age, El Magracha.

It seems to be important at the same time as Tell al-Ajoul. Yeah, definitely. El Magracha is the site that I and my colleague, Joe Clark, excavated in conjunction with the then-Palestinian Antiquities Authority. And I'll come on to the excavation in a bit. We also did a bit of survey in the adjacent fields. Amaraka was found in the mid-1990s because some sand dunes had been cleared away. And a lot of archaeological material material and I'll keep you really exciting stuff for a little bit but a lot of archaeological material of the Bronze Age popped up including pottery and in surveying sort of adjacent fields we found a lot of Middle Bronze

Age pottery and the lower levels that we excavated were Middle Bronze Age as well so I'll leave the Late Bronze Age as you said later, but we did find a series of quite massive pits. And in these pits, we found some really interesting material, lots of beautiful Middle Bronze Age pottery, quite fine sort of stuff you'd associate with feasting. And in one of the pits, we also found a little little cylinder seal which Dominique Collon from the British Museum studied for us and it was identified as an old Assyrian cylinder seal so

links going right up to northern Mesopotamia and Assyria so absolutely fascinating little things that we did also find some clay ceilings, which appear to be associated with the pits, so maybe from the Middle Bronze Age. Whether or not they actually said anything meaningful or not is another matter, but definitely you have things which look like the impressions made by scarabs with signs on them. So this is maybe the first evidence we've got of some sort of administrative activity in that part of the world but just a couple of them they are published so they are available for people to look at but yes it's just little scraps of them but it's amazing how even from these little scraps you get such a valuable insight into the extensive trade contacts that this region that the gaza

region had with you know further Egypt and the Mediterranean world, even as far back as the early to mid-second millennium BC. Now, you mentioned that there was some exciting stuff around the later Bronze Age. So let's go forward. Let's move this chronology on. Let's get to the later second millennium BC. So really the time of the late Bronze Age. Now, first of all, set the scene. The situation in the Southeast Mediterranean at that time, you're seeing the rise of a great power

in Egypt. Absolutely. And I think this is really fundamental for understanding what happens in Gaza because following the collapse of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, Egypt becomes disunified again. There are lots of smaller kingdoms. And in the area of the Delta, we see what looks like a Canaanite or an Asiatic ruling population moving in through later Greeks called the Hyksos. So this is how we know them. And so we've got this Hyksos population in the Delta. And in the later years of the Middle Bronze Age. There's lots of links with Cyprus and with Gaza. We've tell all Israel specifically in the horse burials, both in Israel and in the Hyksos capital. And then at some point, the Thebans emerge as a really important powerhouse and they defeat the Hyksos.

They expel them from Egypt, and they establish the New Kingdom. So it's the 17th Dynasty rulers of Thebes kick out the Hyksos, and they establish the New Kingdom of Egypt to reunify Egypt. It's the 18th Dynasty, which is the dynasty that really everyone knows and loves, and they expel the Hyksos. And then they've sort of got this problematic Asiatic population north of them immediately north and it's sort of this threat of people from Palestine having come down in an occupied part of Egypt and I think that is part of why

we really do see the first expansion of the Egyptian empire so the Tutmosis the first is one of the first to go north. He goes and attacks various places. One of the places that gets attacked is a place called Saruhen, which we know is where the Hyksos established themselves. We don't know where Saruhen was. It's been suggested it was a Joul. So there's this sort of really interesting phase of contact and destruction. Teller-le-Joul does survive. There's sort of late Bronze Age activity at Tell-a-Luzul, and there's a couple of later fortified buildings, which Petechukul palaces, which date to this period. But the place which I think is really interesting, am I allowed to go back to El Maraca yet? That's the interesting bit.

We can indeed go to El Maraca now, because what is this really interesting archaeology that has been earthed that dates to this time? Yeah, well, this is why El Maraca absolutely snapped out to us and why we knew we had to go and work there. Associated with late Bronze Age pottery on the surface, the Palestinian authorities found a series of terracotta cones. They weren't complete, so it's just the 10 centimetres from probably a final object would have measured about 30 centimetres. It's just the round flat end of the cone, not the pointy bits. And these cones were all stamped with the throne name of the Egyptian ruler Thutmose III.

So there are two stamps, one on the round face of the cone and one on the upper edge of the cone. And these are unique in the Near East. There's nothing that compares to them. And initially we thought, well, this has to relate to Thutmose III's activity in the area dating to year 22 of his reign where he famously comes and he conquers Gaza. So we thought, yeah, we've got something which actually puts him on the ground there. So that was what we went to look at. And we worked with an American conservator who restored the cones

and sort of preserved them, stabilized them. And we found a couple of cone fragments in survey. And then when we were excavating, when we were excavating the late Bronze Age levels, we found numerous tiny little scraps and fragments of cones. So the ones that, you know, I think there's about 20 that had been found prior to excavation. Those are all the big ones. 20 that had been found prior to excavation. Those are all the big ones. And we just found little fragments of them mixed up in the matrix above the surface. Mixed up also in the same layer was a series of bronze arrowheads, which is sort of quite interesting as well. So that's

quite fun to look at. But when we started really looking at them, we noticed that there were a couple of combs which had the cartouche or the throne name, not of Thutmose III, but of Hatshepsut, who is famously his aunt who had a co-regency. And when she died, he very famously obliterated her name. So the fact that her name wasn't obliterated suggests that this dates to their co-regency rather than year 22 of his reign. So it suggests that the Egyptians are doing something there when Hatshepsut was still around, but there's far more Thutmose III names than Hatshepsut. But the other thing that's really important was when Hatshepsut actually demonstrates that this was contemporary of Thutmose III because his name turns up a lot. He's one of the Egyptian pharaohs whose name can't really be used to date closely because it has a huge cachet in terms of in much, much later context.

But Hebron Hatshepsut says, yeah, this is it. We're in the 15th century of these rulers. And he said these are massive names from ancient Egyptian history that you found here. I'd like to ask a bit more about the cones themselves. Now, are they exactly identical to cones that have been discovered in Egypt, or do they seem to have some local variation adaptations to them? Yeah, these seem to be a local adaptation of something. The closest parallel to them are Egyptian funerary cones. And these are clay cones, which was on the flat circular surface of them. There'd be a bibliography or sort of a mini bio, I suppose, of an important

Egyptian nobleman who would have a key role in the Egyptian royal court. These are very typical of Thebes in the 18th dynasty. And what they did was they actually used these, they set them up around the entrance into the tomb, and they were very much sort of telling us about that nobleman. So in terms of the actual shape of them, it looks the same, but ours are different because all we've got is the royal name and also we've got a slight difference in the hours are being marked differently they've been marked on the round surface but also perpendicular to that on the top surface of the comb and we don't know if they had a funerary function or if they had some other function we think they were

used to mark a building and the interesting thing is that they're all broken off at exactly the same sort of length around about 10 centimeters so it looks like they've all been you know just topped off the front of a building and the theory came up in the end was that these had all been dumped in a certain place because a building had been dismantled or knocked down and they'd be just being dumped in this setting for whatever reason and the most logical thing seems to be that even if you couldn't read hieroglyphs you'd recognize the king's name so it's sort of a very simple way of demonstrating Egyptian royal authority but maybe not more than that so they seem to be drawing upon an Egyptian custom, an Egyptian high status practice, whether it's an Egyptian doing it, but sort of simplifying it for a local audience,

or whether it's a Canaanite who went to Thebes and thought, oh, that's interesting, but couldn't really get anyone to invite anything other than Thutmose III's name and Hatshepsut's. Interestingly, it's another matter. It's absolutely fascinating. We've sort of gone round in circles trying to make sense of why they were doing that. And I think it's just saying Egyptian power. Very much showing Egyptian power and influence, isn't it? And I love that. We still don't know about whether it was an Egyptian official or a Canaanite figure who travelled who owned these cones, but it's still fascinating that you found them in that context. We've got to talk about these coffins and this

cemetery of Deir el-Bala, don't we? Because we've kind of saved it to kind of wrap up this episode because they are absolutely stunning. What is, first of all, this site of Deir el-Bala? This is an amazing site which was first discovered or sort of came to people's notice in the Seven Days War of 1967. And then Trudy Dautan, an Israeli archaeologist, went back in the 80s and she excavated the site. She got on very well with the local Bedouin population. There was a very, very good relationship between them, which I think was very interesting. And she was hoping before her death, I remember talking to her,

that she wanted to return a lot of the material to gaza i don't think that ever happened but that was something that was seen as being an eventual outcome so darhol bala there are two parts of the site one there's a settlement and the settlement is worth mentioning because um there's an important pottery workshop there a massive pit or you know pit or crater dug into the ground to extract clay and a series of kilns. And then the pit got filled up with ash from the kilns and broken pottery and things.

Initially, that had been interpreted as a large pool from a large residential structure. And sadly, it's a clay pit. So it's not so exciting. Actually, no, I think it is exciting it's lovely to think about how people made stuff and where they get in stuff and where they're working but there was a large egyptian or egyptianizing building there and then there's a slightly later in the 13th 12th century there is an egyptianizing fortified building there which looks a bit

like egyptian military structures, not forts, but sort of Egyptian residences that you see elsewhere in places like Megiddo and other places sort of further north. So there seems to be some evidence of Egyptian administration there. And then you've got the cemetery. And the cemetery, as you say, is fabulous. It's got these amazing coffins, which were all made out of local clay. They were fired locally. Some of them look very Egyptian, you know, very Egyptian. You've got the lovely wig and you've got these crossed hands in front. And some of them have a sort of stranger look. It's sort of taken an idea, but maybe not the same skill in making them or maybe trying to present a different type of face. So you've got these two very different types of coffins. And these were buried in shallow pits in the ground. There were sort of storage pots put near the head

of them. But they're fascinating because they look Egyptian, especially the very Egyptian ones. And there are parallels from northern Egypt of these clay coffins. There are also parallels slightly later further north in the Levant from sites with strong Egyptian links of these clay coffins. And they've tended to be accepted as the burial place of Egyptians who were stationed in the Levant and military officials or other officials. There are sort of problems with the Dar al-Balak ones, and I don't quite buy that. I see this as a sort of a mix of populations. I think there's some, when you start teasing out what's buried with them, you get sort of a wonderful thing. So there might be one or two people buried in a coffin, which doesn't sound very Egyptian. We don't have any evidence for mummification you've got

skeletons you don't have any evidence of wrappings of mummies or the sort of things that you'd expect to see little amulets and things sort of which would be wrapped in in the linen or the heart scarab there's only one ushabti from these burials uh whereas in other sites further north you get more ushabti and I think an Egyptian would want a yishabti probably and no canopic jars you know so a lot of stuff that Egyptians would want aren't there but there's definitely knowledge of Egyptian practices and there is a lot of jewellery gold and carnelian jewellery some of which is Egyptian and some of which is Canaanite. And the pottery is a wonderful mix of local pottery, some Egyptian slash Egyptianising pottery, and Cypriot and Mycenaean imports.

So it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in the southern Levant, sort of a mix of pottery, except there's this Egyptian overlay. And you also get some amazing bronze vessels. There's a bronze wine set which is an Egyptian custom so the Egyptians would make wine and they'd strain it through what looks like a giant sieve or a strainer into a bowl and they drink out of a stemmed cup so there are examples of those and there are also lovely lotus jugs and lotus bowls, which again have Egyptian antecedents. So there's a lot of Egyptian elite material culture there.

Or there's a lovely swimming woman cosmetic bowl and lotus vase, you know, chalice and beautiful material. They are absolutely astonishing. And as you say, at the same time, I do like this idea because you see it with other empires as well let's say in late iron age britain you see elites in britain taking stuff from the roman empire across the sea and being buried with it to show their power that they could access those materials perhaps local elite canaanites were very much being influenced by the egyptians as evidenced by the the tomb architecture and the goods that they were buried with. Absolutely. That's exactly the way I look at it. I think

it's too blurry. I think, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a couple of Egyptians there, but I'd also say that, you know, there are probably more Canaanites there, but these are Canaanites who have got access to this material, have knowledge of the way that Egyptians entertain and how they consume wine. And, you know, Canaanites would consume wine in a very different way. They'd have a large jar, they'd drink out of straws on this large jar. And there's some lovely pictures of Canaanites doing that, whereas Egyptians drinking wine in a more sort of refined way. So yes, I think it's a total melting pot, a total hybridity of cultures there,

you know, sort of these different people living together and borrowing things and they do share ideas and they do borrow things and copy them. Absolutely. It's one of the great joys of archaeology when you can see how culturally mixed an area was when you have all these artefacts

from different areas of the world, you know, some 3,000 years ago. Now, this is worthy of a podcast in its own right, but just to kind of wrap up the episode, as we reach the end of the Bronze Age, we get into the Iron Age in the first millennium BC. This area, Gaza, it's already incredibly significant and its importance, it endures down through the next millennium as well. Absolutely. Sadly, the important phase, which, you know, especially for the Philistines and the Palestinians and, you know, sort of what's going on there, is so hidden to us from us.

There was a tiny bit of activity in the 1920s by a guy called Fivian Adams, who excavated on the north side of the tell of Gaza, under the modern city of Gaza. And he found Philistine pottery there and also lower level sort of Bronze Age pottery. But we don't really, we really don't know anything about Gaza in that period. And, you know, Gaza archaeologically goes silent until the 5th, 6th century excavations at Blokia by the French school, the Iron Age port. So there's a huge unknown history there. There's lots of stuff going on being excavated in the

surrounding regions in Israel. We know a lot about Philistines and Canaanites and Israelites and their ways of life and how things change in the early Iron Age. But there's just a huge question mark for Gaza. We just get little hints in written documents that this area is there, that the Assyrians arrived in the 7th century, 8th century. But archaeologically, we don't know. Louise, this has been a brilliant episode.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Professor Louise Steele talking all things the archaeology of Gaza, exploring what we know so far from the excavations that have occurred in the Gaza Strip over the past century and how much we still don't know about this area which has been hotly contested not just in recent history but also back in prehistory and ancient times too.

I hope you enjoyed the episode and found it as eye-opening as I did recording it. That's all from me today and I will see you in the next episode.