Abraham Rabinovich
Sitting comfortably beneath the canvas shade on the hilltop, it is easy to imagine Napoleon standing on this very spot, ordering his cannon to open fire on the walled city of Acre lying placidly a kilometer to the northwest like a bumpy tree-stump waiting for a boy to throw a stone at it.
Napoleon, his eye fixed on his place in history as he carried French arms and culture to the Levant, was unaware of the history curled up beneath his very feet — 4, 000 years of it screaming to be let out.
Prof. Moshe Dotan of Haifa University’s Department of Maritime Civilizations has been letting it out for the past six years in his dig on Napoleon’s Hill or Tel Akko. (The name Acre was bestowed by the Crusaders, who confused the town with the biblical city of Ekron.)
The cannon balls left behind by Napoleon’s army near the top of the 30 meter-high mound were not what he was looking for. It was the evidence that lay below of cultures ranging from Assyrian tyrannies to Aegean democracies, whose peoples had stood atop these same packed-earth ramparts and revelled in the same superb view.
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Akko’s Strategic Location
“This layer is just industry and workshops from 1300 to 1150 B.C.,” said Dotan, pointing into one of the excavation pits. “Pottery making, metalworking, purple dye manufacturers. This continued to be industrial until a new element arrived.”
The new element, which is represented in the cleansed excavation area only by some grey ash, was sea peoples bearing artifacts and pottery stemming from the Aegean cultures to the northwest. Basing himself on Egyptian sources, Dotan believes these were not the Philistines, who landed further south on the coast, but Sardinians or, as the sources call them, the Shardan.
Why should industry be such a major factor in this and other civilization layers at Acre?
Dotan nodded at the large Koor industrial complex to the south of the tel and at the rest of the Acre industrial area.
“Proximity to the sea, the availability of clay, sand and other raw materials.” A major factor, he said, was Acre’s position at the crossroads between the coastal road (Via Maris) and the inland road to Damascus.
It was probably not the sea that attracted the first Canaanite settlers 4, 000 years ago, but the narrow stream a few hundred meters to the south of the tel that goes by the name of the Naaman River (the Belos River in antiquity). A handful of fishermen on its banks indicate that the river is still alive today. For the first settlers, the river was a luxuriant source of water. The first port at Acre was probably the river itself, small boats anchoring in its mouth or being hauled upstream.
Canaanite Akko
That first Canaanite city was the largest on the site for some 2, 000 years. It was surrounded by earthen ramparts some 25 meters high and angled at 35–40 degrees. Why sloping ramparts and not vertical walls? Perhaps, suggest some scholars, because besiegers had developed the battering ram, which walls of that period could not resist. Perhaps, suggest others, atop the ramparts were walls of sorts, which have not been preserved.
Two years ago, Dotan unearthed the 3 meter-high remains of a gate of stone and mud brick from this Canaanite period, facing towards the sea about 800 meters to the west. During this season’s dig, his team finished clearing most of the Seagate, as Dotan calls it,
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Tel Akko and the Old City of Acre, on the Mediterranean coast.
and also exposed part of a stone staircase leading up to it.
Like the Canaanite gate recently uncovered at Dan, this too was filled in some 200 years after its construction, when the city’s defenses were replanned. Projecting from one wall of the gate entrance are the remains of a bench, on which the elders and judges of the city may have sat.
Before he could uncover ancient cultures in this section of the tel, Dotan had to deal with contemporary culture. The fence surrounding a sports stadium at the foot of the tel covered the area above the ancient Seagate. Dotan managed, after lengthy negotiations, to persuade the local authorities to move the fence.
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However, young sports fans found that an asbestos roof put up by the archeologists above the gateway to spare its mud brick from the winter’s rains made an admirable platform from which to watch football games from outside the stadium. Their weight caused a hole in the roofing and some water damage to the gate.
Acco in the Bible
The Canaanite city is mentioned in the Egyptian Execration Texts (about 1800 BC) and in subsequent Egyptian documents of the Second Millennium. When the Israelite tribes arrived in the land in about 1200 BC, Acre was part of the territory assigned to Asher. Although the Asherites could not conquer it, they apparently settled peacefully in the area. “Asher drove not out the inhabitants of Akko… but the Asherites dwelt among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land” (Judges 1:31).
However, the Bible indicates that David’s empire 200 years later embraced Acre and a strip of coastal territory as far as Tyre in modern Lebanon. King Solomon apparently handed it to Hiram, King of Tyre, among the score of northern cities given to the Phoenecian king for his assistance to Solomon in the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem.
After this it was never to be a Jewish city until 1948, although Jews were almost always a part of the population, enjoying periods of distinguished scholarship.
Persian and Hellenistic Periods
It was during the Persian period, beginning in the sixth century BC, that Acre began to be developed as a major port, Persian fleets using it as a base for attacks on Egypt. It would retain its preeminence as a port until Herod built his port at Caesarea further down the coast in the first century.
The first written find from the Persian period in Acre was uncovered this summer — a bowl inscribed in Phoenician script, despite the fact that Aramaic was the official language of the Persian Empire. The inscription has not yet been deciphered, but apparently deals with goods and wages.
A major landmark in Acre’s history was its peaceful conquest by Alexander the Great in 332. Already in Persian times, new quarters were being built on the open ground between the tel and the sea. This was greatly accelerated in the Hellenic period. Dotan estimates that the population of the city, renamed Ptolemais by its new rulers,
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An isometric reconstruction of the Tel Akko Sea Gate.
was some 60,000, almost twice the population of Acre today.
Ptolemais was the largest polis or autonomous city-state in Hellenistic Palestine, the political and material culture of the Aegean flowing bountifully into the city through its new port. An example of this culture, so different from Jerusalem’s, is an Attic jar unearthed by Dotan showing a naked Hercules, two satyrs and two women. Large quantities of luxurious Attic ware have been found near the northwest area of the tel overlooking the sea.
“These finds point to the existence of a city quarter occupied by rich merchants, probably Greeks, who chose the finest spot on the city’s acropolis,” says Dotan.
During the Maccabean revolt, the city was hostile to the Jewish cause and it was there that Jonathan of the Hasmonean ruling family was taken prisoner. Two hundred years later, with the
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outbreak of the great Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 66, Acre’s gentiles massacred 2,000 of the Jewish population.
The Search for History
Although some Crusader ruins are still visible in the Old City, most remains date from the Ottoman period. Prof. Dotan is searching for neither Ottoman nor Crusader remains. He is probing the tel and some isolated locations around it to find what he can about the first, and least known, half of Acre’s history, from the Hellenistic back to the Canaanite period.
Most of this history lies inside the tel, but there is much from the Hellenistic period between the tel and the sea, an area covered in good part by industry and residential quarters. In a dig near the Tambour paint plant, Dotan has uncovered remains of a defense tower with a 20 meter radius, the largest ever found in this country.
The tel once measured 50 acres, but 12 acres were whittled away during the Turkish and British periods. Nevertheless, Dotan has no fear of running out of material. After seven seasons of digging with the assistance each summer of scores of volunteers, mostly from the U.S., and professionals, he has excavated, he estimates, about five per cent of the existing mound.
“There’s enough here for my grandchildren and theirs too,” he says.
(Reprinted from the October 12-18, 1980 issue of The Jerusalem Post International Edition.)
Bible and Spade 10:2 (Spring 1981)