Archaeologists find perplexing 4,000-year-old Canaanite arch in northern Israel (2024)

Archaeologists excavating the Bronze Age acropolis at Tel Shimron in northern Israel have been digging a massive and extremely enigmatic building this summer. With walls up to four meters thick, the huge mud-brick construction housed no room or other large space within, but only a single tight passageway only wide enough to let one person through at a time.

Eager to discover what it led to, the archaeologists freed the corridor of thousands of years of sediment that had filled it, and progressively followed the passageway deeper and deeper underground.

Last month they hit paydirt. Well, at least some kind of paydirt.

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After a sharp left turn at the rear of this mysterious building, the corridor broadens to a monumental arch, perfectly preserved after nearly 4,000 years despite being made of fragile sun-dried mudbricks.

The joint expedition by Wheaton College and Tel Aviv University is hailing the arch as a rare find, one of few examples of this architectural feature to have survived this long in the Levant.

“I’m going to spend the next few years convincing my students that this is not archaeology,” jokes Prof. Daniel Master, an archaeologist at Wheaton who co-heads the dig. “You just don’t find huge, intact, vaulted passageways you can just walk through.”

“For once, I am speechless,” adds co-director Dr. Mario Martin of Tel Aviv. “It’s an extraordinary discovery in an extraordinary state of preservation.”

But the purpose of the arch and the massive building that houses it remains a mystery for now.

The archway supports the ceiling as the corridor transforms into a stairway seemingly leading deeper underground, beneath the building’s wall and away from it. The archaeologists would love to clear the rocks and soil that jam the stairway ahead but at this point they are afraid the whole shebang would collapse on their heads.

“What we are going to have to do is dig down from the other side to try to reach whatever this passage leads to from above,” says Master. That may take years as the corridor runs beneath other interesting ruins from the Bronze Age including what looks like a cobblestoned plaza and an adjacent building. All of this will need to be documented carefully before being partially cleared to understand what lies beneath.

Whiff of Mesopotamia

Tel Shimron, as the name suggests, is a tel, a hill upon which the stratified remains of ancient cities built over thousands of years can be found one atop the other. Located in the fertile Jezreel Valley, it is perhaps less known than other ancient tels in the area, such as Megiddo and Hazor.

That may be because until the current expedition broke ground in 2017 the site had been barely touched by an archaeologist’s spade. Also, unlike Megiddo, where according to Christian tradition the final battle between good and evil will take place, Shimron doesn’t play an outsize role in the biblical narrative, even though it is mentioned in the Book of Joshua as one of the conquests of the Israelites.

Despite its limited biblical appearance, the evidence shows Shimron was an important town for much of recorded history. It likely peaked nearly 4,000 years ago, in the Middle Bronze Age, when it was a large Canaanite city that occupied the entire hill and was surrounded by massive ramparts and topped by the monumental acropolis now being investigated.

In later periods Shimron changed hands and identities multiple times. In the Iron Age it was an Israelite town, until the Assyrian invasion in the late eighth century B.C.E. destroyed the Kingdom of Israel. Later it became a Hellenistic settlement, then a Jewish village under the Romans, and there are signs of habitation during the Islamic era, the Crusades and under the Mameluk and Ottoman empires.

The newly-discovered building and arch belong to Shimron’s Canaanite heyday in the Middle Bronze Age. Based on the pottery artifacts found inside the building and radiocarbon dating, the structure goes back to 1800-1750 B.C.E., Master says.

The arch is of the “corbelled” type, where lines of bricks are progressively offset in order to create a vault, as opposed to a “true” arch, which creates a circular vault using wedge-shaped stones. Both forms appear already earlier in Egypt’s pyramids and in Mesopotamia, for example in the Sumerian city of Nippur.

Here in the Levant, the closest parallel may be the triple arched gate found at Tel Dan, an ancient settlement near Israel’s border with Lebanon. That structure is also from the Middle Bronze Age, although it’s a true arch and not a corbelled one.

“The Shimron arch is a very special and unique find, for which I’m not aware of parallels in Israel,” says Prof. Aren Maeir, an archaeologist from Bar-Ilan University who did not take part in the dig. “To a certain extent, the massive well-made brick architecture is reminiscent of brick architecture from this period, more or less, in northern Syria and Mesopotamia,” Maeir says. “During the Middle Bronze Age, there is evidence of connections between Canaan and these northern regions, and this might reflect some of these connections.”

Canaanite cult

Interestingly, it seems that the sediments that filled up the corridor and archway at Shimron date to the same period of 1800-1750 B.C.E. as the structure itself, indicating that the building and passageway were purposely sealed not long after they were first constructed, Master says.

This of course helped preserve the building and the rare arch within, but it also deepens the mystery of why the construction was put up in the first place. Why did the Canaanites of Shimron go to the effort of building a massive structure of 9,000 mud bricks, create a corridor and a beautiful arch supporting it – and then fill up the whole thing with soil?

If this were an Indiana Jones movie, the blocked passageway would quite naturally lead to a golden idol, which, once removed, would trigger an elaborate set of deadly traps.

Reality is often more boring (fortunately for the archaeologists), but Master and colleagues do suspect the building and archway may have had some cultic function.

This is suggested by the discovery inside the corridor, just before its sharp left turn into the arch, of a seven-cupped bowl (also called a Nahariya bowl, from its type site in northern Israel), a kind of pottery vessel known to have been used for ritual offerings in the Middle Bronze.

In fact, that entire area of the acropolis may have been connected to cult and religion: outside the mystery building, in an adjacent mudbrick structure, the archaeologists uncovered two staircases leading into a room that contained 30,000 animal bones, likely the remains of sacrifices.

For now, the corridor and arch have been reburied to protect them from erosion, collapse and possible vandalism. Until the archaeologists are able to safely dig from above and reach the end of the enigmatic passageway we can only imagine what ancient relics may be lying there in wait.