Milton C. Fisher<\/b><\/p>\n
One bright day in the autumn of 1927 University of Liverpool\u2019s Professor of Archaeology, John Garstang, set out on a proposed three-day trek north from the Sea of Galilee in search of a lost Biblical site, the major Canaanite city of Hazor. By noon the expedition was over, and he was back on the shores of the Galilee rejoicing in his \u201clucky hit\u201d of the morning. He was confident that all conditions for identification of what Kitchener\u2019s map marked as a natural feature was indeed the location he sought, and subsequent excavations proved him right.<\/p>\n
What sort of explorer of the ancient world was this, and why is his name less known and his achievements less heralded than those of many other archaeological greats? The second question is quickest to answer. His dating of major destruction levels at both Hazor and Jericho have been questioned and \u201ccorrected\u201d by more recent excavators and \u201cexperts,\u201d so his reputation has been reduced in proportion to his weakened credibility.<\/p>\n
Did John Garstang deserve such a slight? Hardly! Just take a glance over his career. By age 23 he published the Roman site of Ribchester in England, having developed an interest in Romano-British archaeology while a mathematics scholar at Oxford. Three years later he became a reader (lecturer) in Egyptian archaeology at the University of Liverpool, then from 1907 till 1941 held a post there as Professor of Archaeological Methods and Practice.<\/p>\n
As early as 1899 John Garstang had gone to Egypt to learn under the best of mentors, W. M. Flinders Petrie, and for the following 15 years he excavated in Egypt, Nubia, and Asia Minor. As an authority on Hittite civilization he published a standard work in 1910, with its revision as The Hittite Empire<\/i> appearing in 1927. Garstang found evidence of Roman occupation at Meroe, capital of the ancient \u201cEthiopian\u201d (Nubian) kingdom, during excavations in 1910\u201314.<\/p>\n
So when, at the close of World War I (he served with the Red Cross), Garstang was made the first director of the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem and the next year placed in charge of the Palestinian Department <\/p>\n
John Garstang examines an interesting find at Jericho<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n
BSP<\/i> 5:4 (Autumn 1992) p. 129<\/p>\n
of Antiquities, he was far from inexperienced. He retired from both these posts in 1926, but returned to Palestine the following year to conduct the expedition described at the beginning of this account. He obviously knew what he was about, and how to go about it.<\/p>\n
Subsequently, John Garstang pursued his important exploration of the famous site of Jericho, location of which was already without question. His seven-year campaign, 1930\u201336, indicated for the first time the extreme antiquity of that city. The major discoveries of his excavations involved the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods.<\/p>\n
At age 70, Garstang was not ready to slow down. In 1947\u201348 he accepted the post of founding director of the British School of Archaeology at Ankara, Turkey, and became president from 1949 until his death, at Beirut, Lebanon, in September of 1956. As late as 1953 he published his Anatolian excavations at Mersin, where the dig had been interrupted during World War II.<\/p>\n
To return to the Holy Land itself, why was it that Garstang\u2019s conclusions as to identification and date of the traces of Joshua\u2019s conquest of both Jericho and Hazor were later called into question? Kathleen Kenyon, in 1951, reanalyzed Garstang\u2019s pottery finds of the \u201cJoshua era\u201d and redated them to the mid-16th century BC. Then Kenyon\u2019s extensive excavation of Jericho (1952\u201358) resulted in redating the double wall which Garstang identified as Joshua\u2019s, to the third millennium BC. No real trace remains, scholars have concluded, of a strong walled city to be conquered by the Israelites around 1400 BC.<\/p>\n
It was Yigael Yadin\u2019s dating of pottery finds (especially distinctive Mycenaean ware) in his four-season dig at Hazor (1955\u201358) that caused Yadin to take exception to Garstang\u2019s 1400 BC date. Instead, he dated the Conquest of Hazor to between 1250 and 1230.<\/p>\n
John Garstang was a Wellhausian critical scholar of the Old Testament (much talk of J, E, JE, D, and P in The Foundations of Bible History<\/i>: JOSHUA JUDGES he wrote in 1930), yet his discoveries led him to support the early date for the Exodus-Conquest, as implied in 1 Kings 6:1 and elsewhere. Has he truly been discredited? The staff of Associates for Biblical Research has done much research on this issue, and thinks not. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Milton C. Fisher One bright day in the autumn of 1927 University of Liverpool\u2019s Professor of Archaeology, John Garstang, set out on a proposed three-day trek north from the Sea of Galilee in search of a lost Biblical site, the major Canaanite city of Hazor. By noon the expedition was over, and he was back … Continue reading “JOHN
\nGARSTANG (1876\u20131956)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}