Eric H. Cline - Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon

Each day throughout the year, the tour buses begin arriving at Megiddo soon after 9:00 a.m., disgorging fifty tourists at a time. By the time the site closes at 5:00 p.m., several dozen buses will have deposited hundreds of visitors. Welcome to Armageddon, the tour guides say, as they march their flocks up the steep incline and through the ancient city gate. Reciting their practiced patter as they go, they reach the first stopping point. The group members catch their breath and, frequently, burst into hymns or prayers, especially if they are on their way to Nazareth, located almost directly across the valley.

Our small group of archaeologists smile tolerantly, having been at the site since before dawn. Wielding pickaxes, trowels, and dustpans, filling buckets and wheelbarrows full of freshly excavated dirt, we play our game of guessing the nationality of each group from fifty yards away, as they come around the last corner of the incline before heading past our excavation area. From the nearby Northern Observation Platform, they gaze up the length of the Jezreel Valley on one side and down into the depths of the Chicago excavation trench on the other. Attached to the chain-link fence, which only rarely deters tourists from coming into the excavation area, is our sign that jokingly reads, Please do not feed the archaeologists. We may not get their nationalities right, but that doesnt stop us from hoping that they might have some extra cookies.

Megiddo is mentioned a dozen times in the Hebrew Bible, and in a multitude of other ancient texts, but it is especially well-known as the setting in the New Testament for the penultimate battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. We are told in Revelation 16:16 that the two opposing armies will assemble at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.

F IG. 1. Early view of Megiddo (courtesy of the Oberlin College archives)

In fact, the very word Armageddon comes from Har MegiddoHebrew for the mound or mountain (har) of Megiddo. By the Middle Ages, multiple nationalities, languages, and centuries had added an n and dropped the h, transforming Har Megiddo to Harmageddon and thence to Armageddon.

There have actually been numerous Armageddons at the ancient site of Megiddo already, as one civilization, group, or political entity gave way to another over the millenniaone world ending and another beginningfrom the Canaanites to the Israelites, and then the Neo-Assyrians, Neo-Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, followed in turn by the Muslims, crusaders, Mongols, Mamlukes, Ottomans, and, most recently, World War I and the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. However, it is the New Testaments Armageddon that is the most famous and which is responsible for attracting the tourists.

The ancient mound once stood more than one hundred feet (thirty-six meters) above the surrounding fields, at its highest point in the north. A visitor to the site in 1904 was surprised at just how high it was. Instead of the low mound that he expected to see, he found instead a proper hill that dominates the plain. The Chicago archaeologists reduced its height by removing the topmost occupation layers, but even so it still towers over the Jezreel Valley today, easily more than seventy feet high and readily visible from a great distance.

Early photographs show the mound in its pristine state, as yet untouched by the excavators shovels and picks and without all of the huge spoil heaps of excavated earth that now litter the area. Taken from the north, they show the mound rising majestically in the distance. From this side, two distinct levels can be discerned: a lower level with a perfectly horizontal terrace about halfway up the mound, upon which Gottlieb Schumacher, the first excavator, said he found the remains of a fortification wall protecting the city; and a slightly smaller upper level that sits directly on top of this lower level, like a second story on a house or the upper layer of a cake.

Within the mound itself, we now know, are the remains of at least twenty ancient cities, built one on top of another over the course of nearly five thousand years, from about 5000 BCE to just before 300 BCE. The various excavators have given a Roman numeral to each one, IXX, numbering them sequentially. Stratum I, at the very top, is the most recent, dating to the Persian period. Stratum XX, located just above the native bedrock, is the oldest settlement, dating to the Neolithic period. The strata in between date to the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, including the time of the Canaanites and the Israelites (see ).

It isnt easy for us to get to the site by 5:00 a.m. every day. We need to, though, in order to get in an eight-hour workday before it gets too hot. The alarm clocks are set to go off very early at the kibbutz where we are staying; by the ungodly hour of 4:35 a.m., we are packed into several large buses and a small fleet of carsthough a fleet of small cars is perhaps a more apt description. There are nearly 120 of us, counting both the professional archaeologists and graduate students who make up the staff plus the volunteer team members who have come from all walks of lifedoctors, lawyers, nurses, accountants, schoolteachers, students, and othersfor a once in a lifetime experience.