Fortress City
Megiddo
meh-GID-oh · Modern Tel Megiddo, Israel · Also called Armageddon · 32.5853° N, 35.1844° E
Megiddo is the site referenced as "Armageddon" (Har Megiddo, "Mount of Megiddo") in Revelation 16:16 as the gathering place for the final apocalyptic battle. For millennia it was a strategic fortress city controlling the trade route between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the Bible credits Solomon with fortifying it (1 Kings 9:15).
Archaeology
Megiddo has been excavated more than almost any site in the land: G. Schumacher for the German Society for the Study of Palestine in 1903-05; the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute from 1925 to 1939 under C. S. Fisher, then P. L. O. Guy, then G. Loud; Y. Yadin for three short seasons between 1960 and 1971; and the Tel Aviv University expedition from 1992, begun by I. Finkelstein and D. Ussishkin and still running today. Roughly twenty occupation strata, monumental gates, palaces, two great pillared complexes and a rock-cut water system have come out of it. The "Solomonic" label came from Y. Yadin: after a six-chambered gate turned up at Hazor in the 1957 season he published the argument in 1958 that the near-identical six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer were the building work of 1 Kings 9:15, which names those three cities and no others. It was an elegant argument and it has not survived. Y. Aharoni showed in 1972, from Chicago's own report, that the Megiddo gate connects to the later Stratum IVA city wall, and D. Ussishkin argued in 1980 that the stratigraphy has to come first and the biblical verse second. Hardly anyone now dates the gate to Solomon. What is still argued, in print and recently, is narrower: the current excavators place its construction in Stratum VA-IVB in the ninth-century Omride period, and Ussishkin places it in the eighth. The pillared buildings have the same history. P. L. O. Guy cabled that he believed he had found Solomon's stables in 1928 and published them as Solomon's; they are now assigned to Stratum IVA, and whether they were stables at all is itself disputed — Y. Yadin, J. Holladay and G. Barkay have defended the identification, while J. B. Pritchard, Y. Aharoni, Z. Herzog, A. F. Rainey and others read them as storehouses or barracks. Ussishkin's own remark on all of it is worth keeping: in his view the date of the Megiddo gate has hardly any bearing on the larger question of what Solomon's kingdom was like.
On a modern map
Further reading
Reflect
More than twenty layers of cities lie stacked beneath Megiddo — which layers of your own history are worth digging into?
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