The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant: From Urban Origins to the Demise of City-States, 3700–1000 BCE

Abstract

During the past century, numerous archaeological surveys and handbooks have been published that include summaries of the Levantine Bronze Age (fourth–second millennia BCE: ca. 3800–1100 BCE). The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant by Raphael Greenberg is the most recent and in-depth of these treatments. The ways in which such archaeological overviews are approached have evolved over time. The first of these summaries, notably by W. F. Albright (1940 and later editions), presents the results of excavations in pre-WWII Palestine. This was followed by K. Kenyon's 1960 (and later editions) publication, which integrates the contributions of post-WWII archaeology in Israel and Jordan, especially her excavations at Jericho and Jerusalem. These two books, as their titles suggest, linked the archaeological evidence to the biblical and historical record, and they had a broad appeal for both the academic community and the general public. Three decades later and following a dramatic increase in archaeological activity in the region, A. Mazar (1990) and A. Ben-Tor (1992) published updated archaeological summaries of the southern Levant. Both volumes, which served as textbooks for a generation of undergraduate students and valuable reference works, prioritize the archaeological data, examined together with the primary textual sources.Other surveys dedicated to the archaeology of this region emphasize anthropological approaches to reconstruct the social archaeology of the southern Levant (see, e.g., Levy 1995 and Yasur-Landau et al. 2019). One publication, J. M. Golden's (2009) Ancient Canaan and Israel: An Introduction, organizes the archaeological data thematically. Margreet Steiner and A. E. Killebrew's 2014 multi-author handbook is the most comprehensive archaeological treatment of this region and includes both the northern and southern Levant and Cyprus. It serves as a general resource and reference work for the broader Levant and its interaction with neighboring regions.Greenberg's 2019 monograph differs from these earlier publications in his prioritization of processes over agency. Additionally, it centers solely on the Bronze Age and focuses primarily on the archaeological data interpreted through the lens of socio-anthropological theory while minimizing the use of textual sources. As a coherent, up-to-date narrative written by a single author, it also avoids the pitfalls of earlier edited handbooks and surveys comprised of chapters of uneven quality and differing approaches.The Archaeology of the Bronze Age Levant appears in the Cambridge World Archaeology series, whose targeted audience comprises students, professional archaeologists, and academics in related disciplines. The aim of this series is to publish up-to-date surveys of the archaeology of a particular region that integrate findings, contemporary theoretical approaches, and intellectual trends with broader cross-cultural interpretations. Greenberg's volume is solidly situated in the socio-anthropological approach to Levantine archaeology and lives up to the goals of this series. It is written as a narrative that traces social and cultural change in the Levantine Bronze Age and how communities there interacted with the broader developments in the Near East and Mediterranean, ranging from emulation to resistance. Major transregional themes addressed include the emergence of states, international trade and elite networks, and external imperial ambitions. The author also considers the impact of landscapes and places of commemoration as reflected in the archaeological record. The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction (Ch. 1) and conclusions that summarize the legacy of the Bronze Age Levant (Ch. 7).Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the Levant and its environment. In this volume, the Levant refers to a section of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, the rift valley and the highlands bordering the valley on either side, today forming the modern entities of coastal Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinian territories, and Jordan. Greenberg outlines his rules of engagement and defines the Bronze Age as a period when key human institutions develop, subdividing these into cities, states, markets, military power, legal codes, and institutionalized religion. The fourth–second millennia BCE also witnessed the human impact on the physical landscape, including the appearance of the layered mound (tell), and the integration of the Levant into a Mediterranean world resulting in the establishment of contact networks and interaction (3). This chapter defines the geographical boundaries of the Levant and characterizes it as “a diverse patchwork of environmental affordances and potentialities” and an “ecological mosaic” with a range of microclimates that serve as a buffer to climatic change (6–7). Contrary to much recent scholarship on the importance of climatic change for settlement patterns, social organization, and economic development, Greenberg downplays its impact on the Bronze Age Levant.Chapter 1 also outlines the principal themes that form the framework for this book. They include the ebb and flow of centralization of power, which the author attributes to the tendency of people in the Levant to both emulate the political ideologies of neighboring regions and resist their practical application (13). In his approach, Greenberg begins with the material culture evidence, privileging excavation results over surveys. As contemporary texts are usually fragmentary and often not directly relevant to the material culture interpretation, he uses these texts sparingly, prioritizing the archaeological over the literary record. In each chapter, chronological parameters and the environmental setting are discussed. Main archaeological categories including settlement patterns, architectural features / built landscape, key artifact types, crafts/industries, and burials / mortuary practices are described in detail.Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to the Early Bronze (EB) I, II, and III, a period of time spanning over a millennium (ca. 3800/3600–2400 BCE) and the focus of much of Greenberg's decades-long excavation and research. Greenberg traces several trends, including the transition from the village-based world of the EB IA, the establishment of more complex mega-villages, and the beginnings of inequality, that appear in the EB IB during the final centuries of the fourth millennium. The latter period also coincides with the first significant interaction between Egypt and the Levant, which Greenberg terms the “first Egyptian intrusion” (13, 57).The following millennium represents the crystallization of fortified population centers and the appearance of “urban ideologies” (13) in the EB II and III. Chapter 3 explores the nature of EB II–III Levantine society. A key question addressed is: Can the EB II fortified cities be considered “urban”? The physical features of these settlements meet some of the criteria usually defined as “urban” (e.g., fortifications and evidence of town planning), as exemplified in contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, other commonly cited features of urbanization, such as large, clustered populations, writing, and administration, are lacking. These characteristics suggest that the EB II and III Levant represents “partial” urbanization (what some have termed “complex villages”) or, as Greenberg proposes, a uniquely local, “Levantine” urbanism.Chapter 4 investigates the Intermediate Bronze Age (IBA), a 500-year period of time that in the southern Levant is marked by changes in settlement patterns including the abandonment of mound settlements, a shift in mortuary practices, and regional ceramic assemblages based on village workshops. The retreat from urbanism during the IBA is often attributed to the well-documented climatic change that occurred between ca. 2200 and 1900 BCE. However, Greenberg challenges this interpretation, noting (140) it is difficult to evaluate the impact of climate change on microregions within the Levant and the nature of human response to it. As he points out, counterintuitively, the number of settlements in drier, more marginal regions increases in the southern Levant during the final centuries of the third millennium, coinciding with a period of a warming climate.In Greenberg's account, the picture that emerges during the IBA is one of regionally diverse cultural assemblages that are difficult to place chronologically due to the dearth of uninterrupted stratified sequences in the archaeological record and insufficient radiocarbon dates. Although the IBA is culturally distinct from the EB III, some material-culture features demonstrate elements of continuity with the EB III and overlap with the MB I. These findings suggest that, chronologically, the IBA may have partially co-existed with the EB III and MB I, a phenomenon that Greenberg (182) terms in Chapter 5 as “archaeologically coeval.”Chapter 5 examines the first half of the second millennium, conventionally termed the Middle Bronze Age (MBA). The MBA is also often understood as a cultural “regeneration” that represents the apex of Bronze Age urban culture in the Levant. Following his goal of disentangling the textual and archaeological evidence, Greenberg constructs what he terms a new “conceptual scaffolding” (184), which is grounded in the archaeological evidence and radiocarbon dates. This approach leads him to decouple the end of the MB II from the documented expulsion of the Hyksos and link it with the eruption of the Thera volcano that occurred ca. 1600 BCE and doubtlessly had a profound short-term effect on the environment in the eastern Mediterranean.The remainder of the chapter presents the archaeological evidence, mainly from the southern Levant, arranged chronologically and regionally. Greenberg (264–65) concludes, somewhat controversially, that the end of the MB II is marked by societal collapse, coinciding with the period of the Thera eruption but unrelated to disruptions that may have resulted from New Kingdom Eighteenth Dynasty accounts of a “Hyksos expulsion” from Egypt. In his view, this “collapse” is best exemplified by two phenomena: first, what he considers to be a marked discontinuity between MBA and Late Bronze Age (LBA) material culture (a statement that not all archaeologists would agree with); second, a contraction in population that led to a decrease of settlements, both in size and in number, during the LB I.The LBA is featured in Chapter 6. Greenberg outlines the two main themes that serve as the framework for his narrative interpretation of this period: the expansion of Egyptian imperialism in western Asia and the impact of interconnected regional economic networks. Several dozen pages are devoted to the concept that the Levant was “under Egypt's heel.” This view is puzzling since archaeological evidence for Egyptian interaction during the LB I and LB IIA is scant, as Greenberg himself (299–300, 309) points out. Rather, our knowledge of Egyptian engagement in Canaan during this period depends largely on textual evidence: Eighteenth Dynasty annals, which describe periodic Egyptian campaigns to Canaan, and the mid-fourteenth-century BCE Amarna letters. Except for Jaffa, there is little archaeological evidence for an Egyptian occupation during the LB I and IIA. This changes in the thirteenth century BCE, when Egyptian intervention is archaeologically visible but confined to a number of sites that served as Egyptian strongholds, as summarized by Greenberg (291–99, 302–10). Outside of these strongholds, Egyptian artifacts in Canaan are not abundant and, when they do appear, are usually imported prestige objects. Based on the archaeological evidence, there is little support for the view that New Kingdom Egypt “annexed” the southern Levant as Greenberg maintains (287). Rather, the archaeological evidence suggests Egypt appears to have exercised varying degrees of informal to administrative imperialism during the course of the LBA. Though Greenberg emphasizes the role of Egyptian imperialism in the region, when considered in its larger eastern Mediterranean political context, one may question how much Egyptian imperialistic ambitions affected daily life or controlled socioeconomic, political, and cultural developments in the LBA Levant.The second part of this chapter discusses the LB II prestige economy, exemplified by discoveries from Hazor, Megiddo, and other small towns and nodes of ritual power. In this section, Greenberg justifiably highlights the role of interconnected networks in shaping the LBA Levant. The archaeological evidence is unequivocal. The large number of imported Cypriot and Mycenaean objects at Levantine sites and elsewhere reach their apex during the LB IIA and testify to the Levant's integration in LBA global networks. This coincides with a period during which direct Egyptian imperialistic control seems to have been minimal. Not discussed is the central role of copper from Cyprus and long-distance trade in tin in this imperial and elite-controlled exchange system. Unlike many scholars of this period, Greenberg (341–42) does not consider the end of the LBA and transition to the Iron I period, or what he terms the Terminal Bronze Age (ca. 1200–1100 BCE), to represent a period of societal collapse or significant disruption.In his final, seventh chapter, Greenberg considers the legacy of the Bronze Age Levant, asking “what changed, what stayed the same, and what was passed on to the following eras” (354). The first signs of early state formation can be discerned in the EBA. EB II and III polities, which can be described as “just short” of being towns and states, are, in Greenberg's view, the foundations for MBA, LBA, and later Levantine political entities. Another development is the Levant's unique ability to adopt innovations from neighboring cultures and its willingness to absorb technologies, peoples, and ideas. One of Greenberg's more interesting observations is the linear rise in the “capacity for violence” (355) over time, best evidenced by the increase in weapons and human-induced destructions during the course of the Bronze Age. As Greenberg concludes, ultimately it is the geographic characteristics of this region that shaped the Levant and its cultures, creating a uniquely Levantine idiom. Its diverse landscapes, microregions and climates, and lack of unifying geographic features tended to suppress the ability to accumulate great amounts of surplus or wealth (which, in turn, would have required the development of large bureaucracies). These tendencies also encouraged exploitation of the region by imperial powers. The result is the resilience, creativity, and flexibility to adapt to new situations as narrated in Greenberg's masterly, nuanced, and engaging account of the Bronze Age Levant.