the profile of an israelite city

The Profile of an Israelite CityAuthor(s): Cornelis de GeusSource: The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 224-227Published by: The American Schools of Oriental ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3210016 .

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The

Profile of an Israelite

city BY CORNELIS DE GEUS

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ith few exceptions, all that remains of Israelite cities of biblical times are their

tells (the mounds formed by the accumulated debris of successive settlements built on the same place over the centuries). When these tells have been excavated, we have found in most cases only the foundations of the buildings;1 sometimes only the traces of the trenches dug for the foundations are visible, because the original foundation-walls were used by later builders who needed the stones elsewhere. The archaeologist measures and draws the foundations, and so plans are produced.2 A con- sequence of this is that when speak- ing of biblical cities we generally discuss their plans, thus tending to think exclusively of their horizontal aspects.

When writing a book on the Israelite city (de Geus 1984), I began to appreciate this more and more. At the same time it struck me that the biblical descriptions of cities often stress the vertical aspects, especially the high city-walls. To foreigners the walls could look so high that they could have given the impression that

The famous ceramic incense-burner or cult stand from Taanach, which dates to the tenth century B.C.E. It is in the shape of a four-story building.

224 BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/DECEMBER 1986



the inhabitants were giants: Yet the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are forti- fied and very large; and besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. (Numbers 13:28)

Or consider Isaiah 26:1: We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks.

The only contemporary depictions we have of ancient Near Eastern cities from the Iron Age, the Assyrian palace-reliefs, also stress the vertical aspect.

This emphasis in the ancient sources on the vertical aspects of cities led me to wonder what can be said about the profile of a biblical city. To put this another way, what did an ancient Israelite (or Judean) city look like from a distance? The answer is: high. Several features con- tributed to this effect. First, their positions on tells or on ridges in mountainous areas would have en- hanced the feeling of height. Then there were the city-walls-although these were often less high than they might have appeared from a distance because they had houses built on top of them. In such cases only the lower half is a real city-wall. It is hard to tell from the foundations of such walls what their original height would have been. Based on the depictions on Assyrian reliefs, we might estimate heights of twelve meters at the maximum. Eight to ten meters is perhaps average, taking into ac- count that the upper one-third was occupied by houses.

Yet other features contributing to the sense of height would be towers and revetment-walls. Rising above the city-walls, towers were built next to the city-gates, at the corners of the city, and at especially threatened stretches of the walls. Revetment walls were built to prevent the city- wall from sagging (sometimes they developed into a second line of de- fense). From a distance it might ap- pear as if there were two walls, one above and behind the other. Assyrian reliefs often show very clearly the

N-

The profile of a Palestinian city was depicted on an Assyrian relief at Nimrud, dating to the eighth century B.C E. The city, Astoreth in Gilead, is shown built on a tell; there is a revetment wall, above which is the actual city-wall with bastions and a gate. Behind the city-wall, the acropolis or citadel rises above the rest of the town. The citadel has its own gate. Drawing is by Linda Huff.

city-wall with bastions and towers, below which is a revetment-wall. The reliefs also often show still another wall above the city-wall.

There is an increasing consensus among scholars that these "upper" walls are the walls of a citadel or acropolis inside the city. The vertical effect of the citadel would be increased by the fact that it was of course preferably constructed on the highest spot of the tell or hill on which the city stood. It was also set apart by other means. At Lachish, for instance, there is a huge platform, on which a palace (or palaces) for the governor of the city probably stood. A similar platform was dis- covered on the highest point of Tel Dan. The citadels thus would have towered above the town and domi- nated the surroundings, unmistak- able symbols of the political power

of the states of Judah and Israel. Also at Lachish, the platform for the palace was situated in a part of the town that was strictly separated from the rest: To the east was a large square; to the north and south of this square were rows of storehouses. The entry to this complex was by a gate that was of the Solomonic type, like the official city-gate (Ussishkin 1983: 28-29). This division of the city in two parts-a public part and a residential quarter-was visible not only in the layout-the plan-but also in its vertical silhouette.

As I answered for myself the question of what the profile of a biblical city looked like, I realized that I had also answered another question. When studying the plans of biblical cities one cannot but wonder with Professor AhlstrPm (1982), "Where did the Israelites live?" A heavy city-

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/DECEMBER 1986 225



An imaginary Israelite city is depicted in this drawing based on reconstructions of biblical Lachish. Several houses in the town are given a second floor, and some houses (on the left) are built on the city-wall. The large building on the right is the main building of the acropolis on its platform. Drawing is by Margaret Reid.

wall with towers and gates commonly occupied a considerable part of the restricted area available on a tell- sometimes as much as 15 percent of the surface on top of the tell. With so much space occupied by defensive structures, and by public buildings, the remaining areas for residential quarters are often not more than 25 to 40 percent of the city's surface.

In my opinion something more can be said on this problem if we consider the profiles of the cities. First, as I have already pointed out, in many cases houses were built on (parts of) the city-walls. These walls could also be integrated in the circle of houses that ran immediately behind them, especially if they were of the so-called casemate type. In the Bible we read of people fleeing from cities by means of ropes that were let down from windows in houses that apparently stood on the city- walls (Joshua 2:15; 1 Samuel 19:12). The Assyrian reliefs also show such windows in city-walls. These houses never show on any plan.

Second, there are a number of arguments in favor of a serious recon- sideration of the almost-traditional reconstruction of the Israelite four- room house as having just one story.

Most reconstruction-drawings of the residental quarters in biblical cities show a sea of low, flat-roofed houses. Only occasionally does one see a so-called upper-chamber or a

domed roof. If one takes the average height of a flat-roofed house to be about 3 meters, with sometimes an additional 2.5 meters for an upper- chamber, this means that practically no houses reached the height of the city-wall. Most of the population would not have been able to view their fields from their roofs and would not have fully profited from the fresh evening winds. If some houses were built on the city-walls, the rest of the city was very much closed in. Also, one might wonder why in such a low-profile city it would be necessary to elevate the palace to such a degree (by putting it on a platform). Was it because of the need of the palace to see outside the city or to especially impress the inhabitants? After all, the palace would already have been on the highest ground of the tell.

This would not be a question, however, if most of the houses had had at least two stories. The well- known plan of the four-room house gives us two details that suggest that more than one floor can be supposed. The first is the presence of stone roof supports, which were sometimes even monolithic. If we assume an open courtyard, with an open but covered veranda or porch along one side, as most reconstructions do, wooden poles would have been suffi- cient. Finding stone supports, however, suggests to me that these pillars

had to carry at least one more story. The same goes for the famous storehouses with their double rows of stone pillars. This, of course, has been suggested before and was, for instance, the opinion of William F. Albright (1974: 115-16) and Yigael Yadin (1964: 196), but I think it is time to take it up again.

The second detail is that in a majority of cases where a staircase was found, this staircase was situated outside the house, along the outer wall. If we find a staircase inside we are dealing in most cases with houses that have communal outer walls. There is clearly a preference for an outside staircase. Why? Perhaps the ground floors of such houses were used for all kinds of productive work. In the "courtyards" we find hearths and ovens, and under the porch, loom- weights. Other rooms on the ground floor could have served the servants and slaves or have been used as stables. The owner of the house and his fam- ily would then have lived on the second floor. Maybe there was even a third and a fourth. Not being an ar- chitect myself I only point here to Braemer's recent attempt to achieve a different reconstruction of some subtypes of four-room houses; he leaves open possibilities for upper stories (Braemer 1982: 145-53, fig- ures 40-44).

It should be noted that an im- portant reason for the traditional re-

226 BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST/DECEMBER 1986



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7two possible reconstructions by Frank Braemer of the roof over a large four-room house (house 379 at Tell en-Nasbeh). If the reconstruction on the right is accurate, it is easy to imagine the structure having several stories. Drawing is by Margaret Reid.

construction of the one-story house is that most archaeologists formerly believed that the carrying capacity of mudbrick walls was too low for upper floors. This is no longer ac- cepted. We know, for instance, from Mesopotamia that walls of considerable height - sometimes even tens of meters-were constructed with mud- bricks, in most cases unbaked. And the walls were often deeper than necessary as well (Heinrich and Seidl 1968). Today, multiple-story mudbrick houses are still being built and lived in in Yemen. If constructed in the right way, there are no architectural objections against reconstructing some of the four-room houses with at least two stories. One may wonder whether the central "courtyard" in such a case would be partly or completely covered. Perhaps there was a kind of wooden balcony along the inner side of the upper floors, above the courtyard.

As support for the idea that multiple-story structures were well known in biblical times I might point to the American excavations of Taanach, where a beautiful pottery incense-burner was found that repre- sents a building (palace?) with four stories.

In conclusion, by assuming that a number of private dwellings in an Israelite city had more than one floor, we can resolve two problems. First, we can understand why the palaces were elevated so much high- er than the surrounding urban area; the urban area was originally at least two stories high. Second, the additional stories on private dwellings would have allowed for greater population densities within city walls, explaining how it was possible for such large numbers of people to re- side within an Israelite city? These insights reinforce the necessity of considering the vertical profile as well as the horizontal configuration of an ancient Israelite city.

Notes 'An exception to this is the Israeli

excavation of Tell esh-Sharic ah (biblical Ziklag?), where walls have been found standing up to two meters. Still a greater exception is the discovery of a complete city-gate from the Middle Bronze Age at Tel Dan. This find is exceptional in the whole of Near Eastern archaeology. The rare instances in which some of the superstructure is preserved are of great help in reconstructing building tech- niques and identifying architectural forms.

2This is not an easy job, because all kinds of stratigraphical problems com- plicate matters. Also, most buildings in ancient Near Eastern cities were not free- standing. The many communal walls make it difficult to distinguish plans of individual houses.

3There is a related point that I have not discussed in this article because of the small amount of evidence connected to it. On many Assyrian reliefs that de- pict cities one can see houses outside the towns, before the walls. Sometimes they were constructed so near the walls that in times of siege Assyrian archers could take positions on their roofs. We must therefore reckon with houses outside the towns between the fields. At greater distances from the towns some of these houses were perhaps built together in small clusters. Maybe this is what the Bible calls "daughters" (bnwt). Hardly anything is known archaeologically of such habitation because excavation has nearly always been restricted to tells.

Bibliography Albright, W. F.

1974 The Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible, third edition. Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Oriental Research.

Ahlstrim, G. W 1982 Where did the Israelites Live? Journal

of Near Eastern Studies 41: 133-38. Braemer, E

1982 LeArchitecture Domestique du Levant iz lAge du Fer. editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, Cahier 8. Paris: editions Recherche sur les Civilisa- tions.

de Geus, C. 1984 De Israelitische Stad. Kampen: Kok.

Heinrich, E., and Seidl, U. 1968 Mass und Uebermass in der Dimen-

sionierung von Bauwerken im alten Zweistromenland. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft 99: 5-55.

Shiloh, Y. 1978 Elements in the Development of

Town Planning in the Israelite City. Israel Exploration Journal 28: 36-51.

Ussishkin, D. 1983 The Conquest ofLachish by Sen-

nacherib. Series: Institute of Archae- ology Publication 6. Tel Aviv: Insti- tute of Archaeology.

Yadin, Y. 1964 Excavations at Hazor (1955-1958).

Pp. 196-224 in The Biblical Archae- ologist Reader, volume 2. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.

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the profile of an israelite city

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