The Ancients - The Real Armageddon

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

Armageddon is more than just a biblical prophecy hailing the end of days. It is a real place: Megiddo, an ancient city that for thousands of years stood at the crossroads of empires, trade routes and wars in the ancient Near East.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by friend of the show Eric Cline to uncover the true story of the real Armageddon. Why did Megiddo become associated with the world’s final battle? What made this city so strategically important for millennia? From Bronze Age kingdoms to biblical tradition and modern archaeology, discover the remarkable history behind one of the most famous names in history and myth.MOREBronze Age Collapse:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify The Sea Peoples:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hey all, welcome to the ancient. Spring is here. Summer is just around the corner in the UK. The weather is turning up and we are turning on the ancients today to Armageddon. Now, why do you ask? Well, it is no secret. We know how much you love it when we do episodes on ancient catastrophes and collapses. We've seen the stats. You're Pompeys, your Maya collapses, your Sodom and Gomorres. Your or what else is that? Bronze Age collapses, prehistoric plagues, etc. Look, I get it. I am equally fascinated by those topics. But the team and I realised a few weeks back now, we realised that we haven't ever covered one of the biggest carnage words in our dictionary, Armageddon, which has its own fascinating ancient story, the story of a biblical event,

but more importantly, of an actual place. And that is what we're delving into today with a guest who certainly fits into the category of family. Man favourite on the ancients. He is none other than Professor Eric Klein. Let's go. Armageddon. Today, the word immediately conjures images of the end of the world of apocalyptic catastrophes of God's final judgment and Bruce Willis in an astronaut suit. But Armageddon isn't just a concept or a prophesized event. It's a place. An ancient city called Megito. situated in modern-day Israel.

Megito is to be the setting of the final cataclysmic battle between good and evil, where the armies of the world shall gather, at least according to the Book of Revelation. But Magidot's story, it extends far further than its biblical significance. Occupied for thousands of years from the Neolithic period right through the Bronze Age and Iron Age before its final abandonment just over 2,000 years ago, this site was a key centre for trade, politics and military affairs in the ancient Levant, owing to its position on a crossroads that linked Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. If that wasn't enough, in more recent times,

Megito has achieved iconic status as an archaeological site, playing a key role in the birth of the modern discipline and is still being excavated today. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the real Armageddon with Professor Eric Klein from the George Washington University. Eric is the author of Digging Up Armageddon, The Search for the Lost City. Eric, welcome back to the show. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

As always now, it is now a tradition. What tie are you wearing? In honor of today's topic, today is an Egyptian-themed Thai, because we will, I presume, at one point be talking about the Egyptian battle fought at Magido. So I thought an Egyptian tie might be appropriate for today. Absolutely. And so first things first, Eric, Armageddon, it's not just a thing, it's a place. It is an actual place. Most people do not realize it. But yes, it is Magidio, the site of Megito. In fact, that's where the name comes from. Armageddon is Har Megito. In Hebrew, that's the mound or mountain of Magidot.

And Armageddon originally had an H. It was Harmageddon originally. But, you know, in Greek, the way you do an H, it's a rough breathing. And it looks like an apostrophe. So at some point when, you know, the various manuscripts were being copied, some monk left the apostrophe off. and Armageddon became Armageddon, and that's what we have today. It's only mentioned one place in the Bible.

It's in the book of Revelation 16, 16. But so when people say to me, you know, where are you excavating from 1994 to 2014? I'm like, I was digging in Armageddon. They're like, that's not a real place. I'm like, actually it is. Come on. I'll show you it. So Magito is Armageddon, and our T-shirts from each season on the back, they said,

I survived Armageddon. Love it. And so basically, this is a site now from archaeology that we're learning, we're continuing to learn more about. So it isn't just that it is a place. It's a place that actually there is extensive information coming out of the ground about. Yes, even today still. I mean, the renewed excavations, as they're called, which are a consortium headed by Tel Aviv

University, they started in 1992. They really got started in 94, and that's when I joined. and then after 20 years, I left the project in 2014, but it's still going today. So they are still excavating every other summer, usually odd-numbered summers, but there is still lots of information coming out of the ground. And indeed, more so now than ever before, because they're using remote sensing, exact life sciences, radio carbon, DNA, I mean, you name it, they're throwing all the new high-tech stuff out it.

So the excavations of Meggito are getting more and more and more interesting, in part because there's so much there. I mean, there are 20 cities, one on top of another, covering 5,000 years of history. Because we just done the Trojan War as well, and that's many different layers of city settlements there. That's only nine. Only nine. Only nine. This is at least 20. Yeah.

20. It starts back in the Neolithic and goes right up. through, well, it goes almost until Alexander the Great, when he marched by it was probably abandoned. But then the Romans, the Romans established one of their legionnaires camps right at the base of Magito, right, which is being excavated even today. So, in essence, on the site and just off of it, it's from Neolithic right through Roman. So it's like Jericho, one of those sites that's just continually used again and again and again in that area of the world. Exactly. I mean, I always tell my students that to have a successful site in antiquity, you need food,

you need water, and you need defense. And Megito has all three, very much like Jericho. And actually, as it grew over the years, it became even better for defense because you could see farther and farther away. So when excavations started at the mound in 1903, it was 110 feet tall. It's now about 70 feet tall because, as we'll talk about, Chicago took off the top couple of 20 feet or so. But still, in order to get to the top of the mound to excavate, you have to walk up a 70-foot-tall mound. First thing, five in the morning.

You know, let's get that heart racing and get those steps in. Gosh. Eric, the majority of this chat, we will focus on the archaeology and what's actually been discovered at the Gido. but we have to start off with biblical Armageddon. And so we have to go to everyone's favorite yet strangest book in the whole of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. Yes, yes. Basically, John, and it's not quite clear which John.

It's not the Apostle John, it's another John, and he goes into a cave and basically has a dream. And this is what is told to us in the book of, Revelation. By the way, it is singular. There's no S. I notice you were good with that. Many people say, the book of revelations. No, it's revelation. Yes. And in there, it says that the penultimate battle between good and evil, not the final battle. That's going to be fought in Jerusalem, like a thousand years later, but the penultimate battle between good and evil is going to be fought at a place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon. That's the way it reads, and that is Magidot. And we've got

all kinds of imagery that we can go into, but basically it is good versus evil, and hopefully good is going to win, but they were never quite sure when it was going to happen. And there are still people today that have said it already happened, and the vast majority, though, are waiting for it to happen. So one of the reasons I think they picked this site for Armageddon for the penultimate battle, and I wrote about this, I had a book that came out in 2000 called The Battles of Armageddon, and I don't know if you'll remember, you're probably too young, but in the run-up to 2000, we had the whole Y2K scare. Everybody thought the world was going to end because of the of the computers and all that.

I had already been digging at Megito since 94 every other year, so 94, 96, 98. And I thought, let me write a book about all the battles that have been fought at Magito and publish it before Y2K, and I'll make a fortune and I can

retire. But as it turned out, I found out that there were 34 battles that have been fought there. And so it took me too long to write the book, and I missed the Y2K, Okay, it came out after that, so as a result, I couldn't retire. I'm still working, but, you know, so it goes. But what I figured is by the time that John would have had his revelation, there were already

something like at least a dozen, if not more, battles that had already been fought, including a number of ones that are mentioned in the Bible. For instance, when Deborah fights Barak, it is by the river right by Magito. Saul and Jonathan are killed on Mount Gilboa, which is just down the valley from Magito. We've also got one of the earliest night battles is fought there. So by the time of John in the early centuries AD, they would have already known this to be a place with a huge history for battles.

And when you're looking around, where do you put, like, the final couple of battles? Well, Jerusalem is saved for the final battle. And I think next to that, that Megita would have been the bloodiest place on earth that they knew of. And so I think they very deliberately picked it because of its history. But then, of course, after that, you continue to have battles. Saladin comes there and fights the Crusaders. The Mamelukes and the Mongols fight there. Napoleon fights at Mount Tabor just down the road, and of course, Lord Allenby fights in World War I there,

and actually mimics the tactics of Tumosis III from more than 3,000 years earlier. So at one point, I thought that I agreed with Napoleon, who supposedly said that the Jesreal Valley and Magidot is the most perfect battlefield on the face of the earth. But, you know, I looked through everything, I think, that Napoleon wrote, and I can't find him having said that. I think he was actually talking about Belgium, but, you know, I can't prove that. So anyway, this is why I think Armageddon made its way into the New Testament, because they already knew that so many battles have been fought there, and they thought that one of the final ones would also take place there. So it makes a lot of sense to me to explain it. that way. I love the fact there's a Basil of Thermopylai in World War II, I believe, and a

Basil of Magida in World War I. That's so interesting, Battle of Armageddon. You mentioned the valley there, so can you give us a good sense of the location and just why it was such an important, such a strategic site for so many thousands of years back in bronze, iron, and even in Stone Age times? Yes, absolutely. So, Magyto today is in what would be considered northern. Israel, but it's not very far into the north. The Jesreal Valley, the valley of Estrelaan, cuts across all of modern-day Israel. It's shaped like a triangle on its side. So the tip is over in modern-day Haifa, and the base of the triangle is over at the Jordan River. So that's about, what, 30 or 40 miles east-west across modern Israel. But north-south, it is only three miles wide

at its narrowest and seven miles wide at its widest. So if you're cutting across, it's actually, like Napoleon supposedly said, it's a perfect battleground there. But more importantly, for our purposes, there was a highway that led from, well, from each, Egypt up to Turkey, if you want to go in one direction, or from Turkey down to Egypt, the other. In other words, if you're an Egyptian and you want to go visit a Hittite, you take the Viamaris, the way of the sea, and that goes right here. If you're a Canaanite and you want to go to Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylonia, you want to go east-west, you have to go right through the Jesreal Valley.

So basically, all the highways met right there. Megito is at the junction. So at one point, Tupmosis III, the Egyptian pharaoh that fights a battle there in 1479 BC, he said in his inscription, the capturing of Megito is like the capturing of a thousand cities. And he wasn't exaggerating. So basically, every invader that has come through that region has a lot of. fought a battle at Magito, unless the area simply gave in to them without a fight. So we've got battles all the way, probably even back in the Neolithic already, but certainly

by the beginning of the second millennium, we've got Canaanites fighting there, and then all the way through, I think the last battle per se that I documented was 1967 or maybe even 1973. There were some air skirmishes because one of the airfields is right there in the valley. So they've been fighting there for 4,000 years. The geography is what dictates it, and that hasn't changed. Just the people and the weapons have changed. But the fighting and the geography, that hasn't changed. It's amazing to think that even in Iron Age times, more than 2,000 years ago, around that time,

it was already well known as a battle site, hence the beach. biblical link. So thank you for explaining that, Eric. But let's focus in on that battle of Firmus, the third, the Egyptian pharaoh. So, Eric, is it correct to say that this is the earliest recorded battle in history? Yes, it is. Next question? Okay, fine. No, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yes, it is. But it depends on how you say it. It is the earliest recorded battle in history, yes. It's not the earliest battle in history. That's when one Neolithic thug picked up a rock and bashed another one over the head, but it is the earliest one that is written down. Because what it seems to have happened is that Tupmosis III, when he came to the throne,

in his first year, we think it's about 1479 BC. The Canaanite rulers rise up in rebellion, and he has to march up to Canaan to put down the rebellion. Well, he took along scribes with him. They kept a daybook, if you will, a diary, a campaign journal. And then when they got back, they put up a concise version on the walls of one or more of the temples down in Egypt. So he says things like, we began marching after 10 days. We got to the site of Yechem, and we stopped and held a council. And this is what it says on the wall.

So it is recording what happened. So we know precisely what happened, but it's from the Egyptian point of view. So do you believe it or not? So if you want, I can tell very quickly what he says. Please do. And also, so the enemy, because my mind immediately goes also to the Basel of Kadesh, where you do have the Hittite version of it as well, but that's Egyptians versus Hittites. With Meghido, is it Egyptians versus local Canaanites? Is that what was you thinking?

It is, and yet, yes, it's Egyptians versus, we're told about 30 local Canaanite princes, but among them, and led by them, is the prince or king of Kadesh. The same place that 200 years later, the Egyptians and the Hittites are going to fight, right? And Kadesh is in what is today Syria. The ruler of Kadesh is supposed to be one of the leaders of this rebellion by local Canaanites. All right. Okay. So what happens is that Tupmosis III has come to the throne.

He's really young, like eight years old or so. And so his stepmother, also his aunt, Hatshepsut, Hatshepsut, one of the famous female pharaohs, she rules on his behalf for 20 years. So then she disappears. When he's about 28, Tupmosis III comes to the throne finally, and there must have been a suppressed libido or whatever, but there's also a rebellion. So he takes off and fights this major battle in his first year. He also then fights almost every year for like the next.

17 years. So there's something going on there with him. He probably needed to see a therapist, but we won't go into that. At any rate, that first battle, he, I mean, and that's the best time to rebel is the first year when there was a new king on the throne. I don't know if you're planning to do that, but just in case you had that in mind. That's the best time. Yeah, the first year. Watch out, Dan. Yeah. Right. So they march up, he says, in like 10 days, they march up to Yechem, and they stop and they have a war council because it seems that there are three ways to get to Megito from where they are. There is the central way, which is the fastest, but also the most narrow and therefore susceptible to ambush. And that comes right out of Megito, right? It's known as

the Wadiara, the Nahal-Iron. It's still used today to get up there. The other two ways are more roundabout. One goes around to the north and comes out by Yok Niam, and the other comes around to the south and comes out by Tanak. Well, his generals said, please don't go up the middle route. It's suicide, basically. Take either the northern route or the southern route. And Tomposes III tells us that he said to the generals, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's exactly what the Canaanites will be expecting, because they know that I'm not that stupid that I would go up the central route, you know, that would be, you know, committing suicide. And he said, but you know what?

I am that stupid. I'm going to go right up there because they're not going to be expecting it. And we're told in the inscription that they went. One guy after the next, and it took like 12 hours, and they came out at Magidot, and sure enough, it was unguarded. The Canaanites were at the northern and the southern entrances to the Jazeeraal Valley. They were not at the central part because they hadn't expected him. It was a surprise attack, and that was it.

He captured Magidot. There is a battle when the Canaanites come too late, and he beats them. But he did make a major mistake, which he admits he let his men stop to loot the camps of the Canaanite rebels, which were all around Magito. That allowed the people inside the city time to close the city gates, including hauling people up using ropes made of cloth and linen and all that. And it then took them at least three months, if not eight months, to actually capture the city.

So I tell my students the lesson is that if you're going to do this, capture the city first, then loot and plunder. Don't do it the other way around because it will cost you. Right. So the end result is that he wins the battle. He puts down the rebellion. He captures all kinds of things. He tells us the sheep, the goat, the cattle, the chariots that he takes back.

And that's it. He puts down the rebellion. So it is not only a victory for him, but it's, like we said, the earliest recorded battle. And the Egyptians then really never relinquish control until about 1140 BC, which is, you know, 300 years later when the late Bronze Age collapse takes place. So the battle at Megito is by Tumosis III is one of the famous battles from antiquity, right? It's up there along with all the other battles that one learns like Thermopy and Salamis and Oralmus and, all of that, but it's because this is the earliest one. It's not the only one. Like I said, there's like 34 battles that are fought there, but it is the first one that's recorded.

And does Megito continue to be occupied from then on until into Greek and Roman times? Or should we be thinking, I've got on my notes, obviously, you have the United Kingdom of Israel, then the divided kingdom as well? They're all there. They're all there. Megito functions. Yeah, it's under Egyptian control. It's, first, but then, yes, one by one, they each rule in turn. The problem is trying to find them. So, for instance, we know after the late Bronze Age collapse, we know that there is immediately a city built on the ruins, Iron Age Magidot, and that's probably the time of David and Solomon in the United Monarchy. I'm always careful not to call it the United Kingdom, because that's

another entity, you know, like where you are right now. So the United Monarchy, but then when Solomon dies, that splits into the divided kingdoms with the Northern Kingdom of Israel up north and southern kingdom of Judah down south. Magito is part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And there are Iron Age remains there, probably something of David, probably something of Solomon. Very hard to identify, though. The Chicago excavators, as we'll talk about, thought they had found Solomon's stables. They're now no longer thought to be Solomon's. They're probably Ahab or Omri from like a hundred years later. But people have been looking for Solomon at Megito since the earliest excavations, you know, 1903, 1905, and certainly when Chicago got there in

1925. And Eric, why is that? So is there a particular mention of Magido and Solomon in the Old Testament? There is, in fact, yes. There is at one point in the book of First Kings. It says the cities that Solomon fortified, and it mentions Jerusalem and Magidot and Hotsor and Gezer. alongside, it also says, and there were chariot cities of Solomon. And so from the days of Yagall Yadine in the 1950s and 60s, he dug at Hotsore and at Magito, and then he was in correspondence with the people digging at Gezer. And they were trying to find Solomon at all of those places because the Bible said he had fortified them. Right.

So, in fact, Yadine did find the entry. gates to the cities, and it looked to him as if they were all built on the same, either six-chamber or eight-chamber, sometimes four-chambered entry gate to the city. And he actually published articles about having found Solomon at Magito and Hotsor and Gezer. Nowadays, they've been redated. Israel Finklstein has redated the ceramics and said, no, even those are about a century later. They're probably Ahab or Omri rather than Solomon. But the discussion continues. There are people who don't agree with that. But again, the search for Solomon has been around for a very long time at Magidot, which is actually why I think the book that I wrote on the Chicago excavations,

I think the subtitle is something like The Search for Solomon City, something like that. Because when Chicago went, they were looking for Tupmosis III and Solomon. Because it is that classic of archaeology in the early 20th century, isn't it, Eric, that it's almost that people went out there, trowel in one hand and Bible in the other, and just wanting to find something, even if the information is not there, and just to label it. We talked about Schleiman as well in our Trojan War Chad, and him labeling it as Priam's treasure or the mask of Agamemnon, Just that because you're so invested in it, that desire to label something you find is linked to what you know in the Bible.

Absolutely. And the Chicago excavators who were at McGito from 1925 to 1939 were really, in some ways, no different from Schleeman. In fact, I mean, Sleeman is at Troy 1870 and then on and off. He dies in 1890. The first excavations at McGito are 1903 by a German-American named Schumacher. and then Chicago comes in 1925. And Schumacher, when he was at Megito, 1903 to 1905, guess how he digs at Megito?

Puts down a whacking great trench right through the middle of the mound, just like Sleeman had done at Troy. And they were only digging 30, 35 years apart. So, you know, it kind of makes sense. The Chicago excavators were much more careful and much better, but they too, I mean, right away, as they were digging, when they found these buildings, they identified as stables. They didn't just say, hey, we found stables. No, they announced to the world they had found Solomon Stables, and that made headlines around the world, just like the headlines

that Sleiman had made at Troy. So, Eric, is it the beginning then of the 20th century that excavations I don't even want to say proper excavations, but official excavations begin at the site of Megito. They know where Megito is already. Then that's when excavations begin. Well, let's start with the first one. Let's start with 1903 then. Okay. And I will put in at the beginning here, just like we have at Troy, there is nothing at

Megito that says it's Magido, right? We have a little bit of writing, not much. There's a fragment from the epic Gigumish. found. We still haven't found the archives that I know, I know are there, right? In the late Bronze Age, Biri Dia, the king of Megito, writes to the Egyptian pharaohs, Hamanhotepa Thir, and Akanatun. And we've got six letters from him. There must be, there must be returned correspondence. And it's in the late Bronze Age Palace, the half that Chicago did not excavate and throw away. But we don't know that Megito is actually Magido. And in the late 1800s,

other people were identifying other sites in the Jesro Valley as potentially Maggiito. But again, just like Hissolik has to be Troy. So Armound, which the actual official name in Arabic is Tel el Moutisselim. Tel-El-Mutisaelum is Magido. It has to be. There's nothing else that fits the description over time. So in 1903, when Gottlieb Schumacher went there, he was originally from Zanesville, Ohio, German extraction. His father was a Templar, not the Knights Templar, but the German movement that thought that the Second Coming was imminent and that you should move to the Holy Land. His father, Jacob, was hired. to be, I believe his title was actually city planner for Haifa, and he's the one, among others,

who planned the modern city of Haifa. So young Gottlie moved to the region when he was about nine years old. And in fact, some of the surveyors, Condor and Kitchener, who did the famous survey of Western Palestine, and actually the boundary between Israel and Lebanon today is where Condor and Kitchener stopped their survey. We know for a fact that they stayed overnight or for a couple of days with Schumacher's family in Haifa. And they actually went up on top of Megito as part of their survey. And then later Schumacher goes, he gets his Ph.D. in archaeology and opens up the excavations at Magidot, 1903. At that time, it's Ottoman controlled. So he had to get permission from the sultan to dig there. And he's there 1903 to 1905 with this huge trench,

like I said, that goes right through. He makes some discoveries, but misses others. So one of the things he finds is a little tiny Jasper seal about one and a half inches across, a couple of centimeters. And on it, it says, servant of Shema, I think is what it says, or Shema, servant of Jeroboam. And that was probably Jeroboam the second. Well, that seal is now missing because Schumacher sent it up to Istanbul to the Sultan. We know it made it to Istanbul, and then it disappears. So he did find that, but it's gone. He also found a large boulder piece of stone, which has a cartouche of Sheeshank, biblical Shishak, that came from an inscription or something sort of building that Sheeshonk put up at Magito. This would be about 925 BC after Solomon dies.

And indeed, in his inscription down in Egypt, it's very much like Tupmosis III, but 400, 500 years later, Shechonk says he captured Magidot. And lo and behold, here is this fragment with his cartouche at McGito, but Schumacher and his men missed it, and they threw it out on their backdirt pile. They never knew they had found it. So we're not sure what level it comes from. The only reason we know even that it exists, when Chicago showed up in 1925, the first thing that they did was run around the site, collecting rocks and stones from Schumacher's backdirt pile to build their dig house. And one of the Egyptian workmen carrying this stone down the hill

said, hey, you know, there are cartouches on here. And they're like, oh, my word. And so when James Henry Brested came over from what was then the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, he said, wait, that's Sheshon. That's biblical Shishak, right? So Schumacher found great stuff, but he also missed great stuff. If we knew which level he had found that inscription in, we would know which level Sheshank had captured, and therefore, since we know Shashonk was just after Solomon, we would know what level at Maggiot is Solomon's.

But we don't know any of that, so we're still searching for Solomon. So anyway, Schumacher did a pretty good job, better than Shleiman at Troy. Let's put it that way. But then when he ended in 1905, the site just lay there for 20 years until Chicago came and started excavating in 1925. Brested had just started the Oriental Institute at Chicago. Now it's the Institute for the study of either ancient cultures or ancient civilizations.

It's ISAC. Brested started it in 1920, and he immediately started looking around. for an excavation. And in fact, he went to Lord Allenby and asked Allenby where he should dig. Why did Brested and Allenby have a relationship? Because when Allenby fought his battle at McGito in 2018, he had gotten explicit instructions from London as to how to conduct the campaign. But Allenby looked at the geography and realized that he was camped, and there were three ways to get to Megita. There was the central way, which was narrow but most susceptible to ambush. There was the northern route.

There was the southern route. And so, Allenby read his history, realized what Tutmosis III had done, and did it himself with the same results. the Turks and Germans were not expecting him to come up that way. He captured Magito in 1918 with nobody killed at all. A couple of horses died. They ran them into the ground, but very successful battle. And later, after he had been, I guess, given a title, and he became Lord Allenby of Megito and Felix Stowe, they actually asked him, do you want to be Allenby of Armageddon?

And he kind of laughed and said, no, all the cranks and chrism done will come out of the walls for that one. So Alenby of Magito and Felixstow. And he met up with Brested in Cairo in 1919. And Brested asked Allenby, how did you know to repeat what Tumosis III had done? And Alenby looked at Brested and said, well, I had read your book. because in 1906, Brested had translated into English that record that Tumosis III had left on the wall in Egypt. And so, Alibi had been able to read it and therefore redo the same tactics, which leads me to, you know, George Santayana says, you know, those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. I would say those who do study history can repeat it if you want to.

So when Brested was looking around for a site to excavate, he met up with Allenby, and Allenby said, well, why don't you dig McGito? You've got the Battle of Tupmosis III. Why don't you find evidence for the battle? And you've also got Solomon. And Brested said, great, he was a showman also, all about PR. There was an exhibit at the University of Chicago right now on the Chicago excavations, and it shows how Brested used the media back then. So that's where it came from.

That's why they started digging at McGito was because of Allenby having won the battle there in 1918, and that was because Brested had published Tupmosis III. So you see, it's all one big happy family, one big circle. It's really interesting. And you're also mentioning there, about Schumacher, so finding like Jerobo, mention of Jerobo, so he's a king of the northern kingdom, just to clarify. But the Shoshank, that Egyptian pharaoh, I think he's at the 22nd dynasty. Yes. Or something like that, isn't he, with the silver coffin, which survives, beautiful silver coffin. You've got Pusennes a little bit, yeah, 21st and 22nd dynasty.

But, yeah, but Shoshank is a Libyan who founds the 22nd dynasty. Right. But we're all there in the third intermediate period and all that. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got those things and obviously breasted, that Egyptian link only comes to light when they are making their dig house, the link to Allen B, the British General as well. Right. So yeah, it's taken away. So that excavation begins looking for, yes, the Solomon Link is there. But what do we know about these excavations? How long do they go on? So the Chicago excavations go on for 14 or 15 seasons, if you want to call it that. They dug almost all year round, but they first get there in 1925.

It's a small group of about five people. And they grow and shrink and grow and shrink over the years. I mean, at one point, there's probably 14 or 15 staff members there because they were able to bring their spouses. And so they had, you know, one big, happy family in the dig house. It wasn't always so happy. There were soap operas galore. I mean, oh, my word.

But they're there until 1939, and they end because of World War II, mostly because a couple of the key members went off and got other jobs. But most of them went into the war effort and went to work for them. And so 1939, they dissipate. there is actually a letter that gives permission that they could, Chicago could have started up the excavations again, and it said as long as they start within two years after the war has ended. But they never did get their act together because, again, the group had dispersed. And so they held on to it with a caretaker until 1955. And then Chicago sold the site of Magito and the dig house and all of its possessions to the state of Israel for one dollar. Wow. And yeah, in 1955. So they got there in 1925 and they give up possession in 1955.

So all told, it's 30 years that they're there, but they're actively digging only for about 15 years. And in those 15 years, they have three different directors because Restead, micromanaging from far off Chicago, though coming to the dig every couple of years, fired them one after the other. So it was trials and tribulations. Clarence Fisher was the first director. He gets fired after two years. And then PLO Guy, British, he runs the dig from about 1927 to 1934.

Then he gets fired by breasted. and then Gordon Loud comes in and he runs the dig from 1935 to 1939. And each of those directors found something substantial that they could, you know, hang their hat on. So Fisher is when they figured out that they had that Cheshonk Cartoucheon. Then Guy is the one that claimed they had found Solomon Stables, which they are stables, I think, but they're probably Ahab or Omri. They're probably, you know, 9th century rather than 10th century. And then Gordon Loud is the one that found the famous ivories and the gold horde that Megito

was also known for. So each of them has something that they can claim. And overall, the excavations were among the most scientific of the time. They were cutting edge. They were one of the first to use balloon photography. They were the first to use Munsell color charts to describe the color of the soil, which Brested had learned about when he went to a dinner party, and somebody from the art department said, hey, we've got these new things called Munsell color. And Brested's like, we could use that on the dig. And then they eventually used a code book because they were sending telegrams back and forth, and Brested didn't want the telegram operators to know what they had found. So he issued them Bentley's code book. And so when they found the ivories and the gold, the telegrams were sent in code.

And they're in the archives at Chicago. I've seen them. I've got pictures of them. It's really cool. So they were at the forefront of scientific expeditions. And McGito was still like, Among the backbone of what I would call biblical archaeology, everything else in the country, not everything, but a lot of it from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, they would refer to the levels at Maggiito, the pottery at Maggiito, and say, you know, here we are in relation to it. So Chicago's excavations for those 15 years were extremely important, but it was a revolving door of staff and some of the most important work was done by the most junior people that you wouldn't expect. I'll give you just one example. The very first volume, what's called Megito I, which is

the 1925 excavations up to about 1935, is authored by two guys, Lamon and Shipton. Lamon was a Chicago undergrad when he started out, eventually got his degree by correspondence. Shepton, Shepton was a high school dropout, and he was from Wales, and he went on to become one of the most important people, because he and and LeMond learned at the site, and they became experts on the pottery, on the architecture, on everything, and their books are, to some degree, more important than anything published. by the first two directors. Absolutely amazing. So the stories behind it,

I went to write up the archaeology of Megito, and I went into the archives at Chicago and found all of their personal letters and archives, journals, diaries, sometimes saying, make sure this doesn't see the light of day. You know, this is personal. I'm like, yeah, too late. And David Yoshishkin, one of the co-directors at Maggiot.

When I was there, he was, I then learned, writing a book on the archaeology, the stratigraphy of Magito, which has come out since it's really good. And so I thought, we don't need two books that do the same thing. Let me tell the story behind the story. Let me tell you about the archaeologists who excavated. And that, I thought, is really interesting. It's not for everyone, but if you're interested in learning how archaeology worked, especially in colonial British mandate Palestine and what life was like for them,

this is the book for you because I've got all, pardon the pun, I have all the dirt on what happened at that excavation. So lots of fun. But the thing I wanted to ask there is that, you know, late Bronze Age before the collapse, if you think about the Mycenaeans and the kind of the palatial centers, it seems also with Magidot as well like there seems to have been someone at the top in the late Bronze Age living in a palace probably with archives. They haven't been discovered as you've mentioned. But should we be imagining before these two destructions that you hinted at,

you know, this is a thriving, dare I say, some sort of city state, thousands of people with some sort of ruler monarch at the top? Yes. I'm not sure I would say thousands, maybe thousands, certainly hundreds. Yes. But one thing that we've got in Canaan during the Bronze Age, which would probably be similar to the Mycenaeans, there is no one great king of Canaan. There are a series of city-states, each with their own ruler, who, the actual name for him in Acadian, it's either mayor or ruler or governor or king, whatever. But they're vassals. They're vassals to the Egyptians. They each have control of their city and the area around it, so a city-state. And we know, in part from the Amarna letters, that some of them are places that are still today. I'm actually doing an upper-level seminar on the Amarna archives this semester, because I have, wait for it, another new book out,

love war and diplomacy on the Amarna archives. And we have city states at Magido, at Hotsore, at Akko, at Jerusalem, at Gaza, at Gezer, at Damascus, Biblos, Beirut, Tyre, Cydid, right? These names still resonate today. They're still in the news today. They are in the news back then, and they are each writing letters to the Egyptian pharaoh, complaining about each other, right? There are just under 400 letters in the Amarna Archive written to or from Amunhotep III and Akhenaten. About 50 are letters from the great kings that we've mentioned, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, and so on. but there are about 300 that are from these Canaanite vassal kings, including one guy, one of my favorites, the king of Biblos, by the name of Ribhada, he writes 60 letters, 60, to the Pharaoh. They must have been coming two and three a day, and the Egyptian pharaoh, oh my God, from Rebhada again, who's he complaining about now?

Right. So we actually can get a pretty good idea of what life was like. But that's in the 14th century. Tomosis III would have been 100 years, 120 years earlier in the 15th century. But those same city states, they were already there. So we can figure out what life was like at that time. So there is no one great king in Canaan, just like I don't think there was any one great king over in Meissen and Greece. But we are talking the same time period. Right? Everybody is communicating with everybody. In fact, there is quite a lot of Mycenaean pottery found at these Canaanites. They are trading either directly or indirectly with the Mycenaeans. We find Mycenaean pottery at Megito at Hotsore and elsewhere. So it's rather interesting, but it all comes to a screeching halt temporarily when the palace in Stratom's. 7 at Megito is burnt to the ground. And that's where we get the gold hoard, which is actually stratum 8, and then the ivory horde, which is stratum 7. And that's what made Gordon Loud famous, though they almost didn't find it. They almost closed down the dig in 1936 because they had run out of money. but then they suddenly found an extra $50,000 that was part of a grant that they had semi-forgotten about.

And so they said, okay, one more year, one more year, which turned out to be two more years. And during those two years, they found the gold hoard and the ivory horde. So they almost didn't find it, but they did. And these two hordes, well, clues in the name. So one's a lot of gold and one's a lot of ivory from... Yes.

India or No, no, local probably. The gold hoard, which is stratumate, that actually might be closer to the time of Topmosis III. And that seems to be exactly what it sounds like. Somebody buried a horde intending to come back for it and did not.

So we don't know. A king, a prince, a princess, a queen, not sure. It's very near and partially under a wall in the palace. The ivories are, I think, almost more interesting. They were found in a separate area that Gordon Loud dubbed the treasury. It's a room with three chambers, and the ivories are found scattered in those three,

actually broken up, so that a piece from the back chamber will match up with a piece from the front chamber. Obviously, something happened, and they all got scattered. And what Loud and others, and Loud actually published a book called the Megito Ivories, he thought that in the destruction of the palace, a couple of boys and a camel got into the treasury and created havoc. Because when they excavated, they found what Loud said was the skeleton of a camel and a couple skulls. and ribbones from young boys. And he thought, they wandered down or they got, you know, locked in. And then when the palace was destroyed around about, you know, 1177 or 1140, they died in there.

Now, I think Loud was incorrect. There is a parallel from another site from the same time period up not so far away, up in Syria. and that one is obviously a tomb, a royal tomb. And I think that this is not a treasury, but is a burial of, who knows, somebody from the palace who died, and those two boys, I don't think they got trapped in there during the collapse. I think they're buried in there. It's a multi-person burial, maybe multi-generational. And we've got other tombs from Megito now that have been found recently where you can see there's, you know, eight, ten bodies in there.

So I think this is a family tomb, if you will, and that is not a camel that is on top of the ivories. It is a donkey or something related, that kind of a species. And we know, even in the early Bronze Age, that in the Levant, in Cane, that in Canada, they are doing equid donkey burials where you put a guy or a woman in the burial and then you sacrifice a donkey or some sort of equid in there. I think that is what we've got here. And indeed, I showed a picture of the so-called camel to a couple of friends who do archaeo-zoology. And they're like, that's not a camel. Yeah, that's a donkey or something related. So I think that Loud misinterpreted it, and he was digging a tomb that was connected to the palace,

and you've got an animal burial in there. I don't know, maybe a favorite donkey that the boys used to ride, and I don't know how the boys died or whatever, but I think that's what we've got there. So the gold hoard and the ivory horde are very different in terms of how they got there, because I think the gold hoard really is hidden by somebody when the palace. was being attacked, but the ivory hoard, I think, is from a tomb. And then the last thing I'll say, and then I'll shut up for a while, is Gordon Loud announced this to the world. It was put on display in New York and Chicago, the ivory and the gold, and then he excavated beneath, took out that

palace, threw it away, and went to see what was underneath. There was stuff underneath from stratum 9 and 10 and 11 and 12, but nothing like what he had found. So there is now just this gaping hole in the side of the mound. I mean, you're actually, he took away that side of the mound. So it's almost like a cliff face, but he only took away half of the palace. The other half is still there in the mound. and if you look at the bulk, the side that he left, which goes up about 50 feet, you can see the walls of the palace. Still, they're not jutting out, but you can see them, and that's where

the archive is. That's where Biri is archive. But there's a good 20 feet of stratified remains above, including the Neo-Assyrian palaces that Chicago excavated from Stratum 3 from the 8th and 7th centuries BC, and they are directly on top, like right vertically on top of the late Bronze Age Palace. So we would have to pull a Chicago and pick up and throw away the Neo-Assyrian palaces in order to get down to the other half of the late Bronze Age palace, and that will almost likely never happen. We could do like what Yudin did at Hotsore, where he moved an Iron Age building from where it had been

to a new location and carefully reconstructed it, and then dug underneath where it had been. If we could move some of the parts of the Neo-Assyrian palace, we could get down. And I bet you there's more to be found, not just an archive, but all kinds of other goodies in that palace. I mean, Eric, what a story and really interesting to see that there's still much more to discover from Megito in years ahead. But that is the truth about Armageddon, as mentioned right at the start. It's not just a thing from the Bible, not just an event at the end times.

It is also a place. Yes, absolutely. And if things get more peaceful over there, they will be excavating. and anybody listening to this could volunteer to go dig in Armageddon yourselves. Eric, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me back on. Well, there you go. There was the one and only fan favorite of the show, Professor Eric Klein, talking you through the real story of Armageddon. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening.

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