“In his days Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates. King Josiah went to meet him, and Pharaoh Necho killed him at Megiddo, as soon as he saw him.” – (2 Kings 23:29)
This terse biblical verse tells the story of the death of Josiah, the last great king of Judah, at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II. Josiah’s killing at Megiddo in 609 B.C.E. would spell doom for the Kingdom of Judah in the short term. In the long term, it would set off major end-of-the-world traditions in Judaism and Christianity linked to the place where it all went down: the mound of Megiddo – better known as Armageddon.
So far, no hard archaeological evidence of this biblical story had emerged from the ruins of the ancient city of Megiddo, in modern-day northern Israel. But now, archaeologists have unearthed an unusual collection of ceramics which they say may be linked to Necho’s army.
The assemblage, found in a newly-excavated building at Megiddo, includes unexpectedly large amounts of Egyptian and Greek pottery, according to Prof. Israel Finkelstein of Haifa University – the longtime head of the Megiddo dig – and Dr. Assaf Kleiman of Ben-Gurion University.
Kleiman, Finkelstein and colleagues discuss their findings in two papers published in January and February in the Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament. They conclude that the most likely explanation for the presence of this unusual pottery mix is that it represents garbage left over by Necho’s Egyptian forces, possibly accompanied by Greek mercenaries.
Game of empires
Before delving more into the discovery and its interpretation, let’s have a small recap on Megiddo and the broader Levant in the Iron Age, which roughly corresponds to the First Temple Period, if one prefers to reference the biblical chronology.
Megiddo, rising above the fertile Jezreel Valley, started out as a Canaanite city-state in the Early Bronze Age, more than 5,000 years ago. Its popular Greek name, Armageddon, is a corruption of the Hebrew har Megiddo (mount Megiddo) and is in fact a misnomer. The site is not a mountain, but a tell, a hill created by the accumulation of human settlements built one atop the other over thousands of years.
Around the 10th-9th century B.C.E. Megiddo was incorporated into the Kingdom of Israel – the northern Israelite monarchy that for a while ruled over much of the Levant, including its smaller southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah. There is a huge debate over whether Megiddo and other territories were earlier part of the fabled kingdom of David and Solomon and whether the united Israelite monarchy described by the Bible ever existed – but that is very much a different story.
In any case, the northern Kingdom of Israel is historically well attested and Megiddo was one of its major hubs for at least a couple of centuries, until the region was conquered by the leading superpower of the time, the Assyrian Empire.
Megiddo was taken around 732 B.C.E. and the Israelite capital of Samaria fell a few years later. Megiddo, now called Magiddu, became the capital of a new Assyrian province in the Levant. The Kingdom of Israel ceased to exist and large segment of its population was supposedly deported to parts unknown (more about this later), leading to the tradition of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, survived (barely) the onslaught and persisted for a while as an autonomous state, albeit as a vassal of the Assyrians.
About a century after the fall of the northern kingdom, the tides of history turned. Assyria was on the ropes, pressured by rising powers in Mesopotamia and Iran, the Babylonians and the Medes. Around 630 B.C.E. the Assyrians abandoned Megiddo and the surrounding province. In 609 B.C.E. Egypt, which had been previously made into an Assyrian vassal, marched under Necho’s leadership into the Levant to aid its faltering ally – while also trying to reassert its own dominance over Canaan.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, Josiah was on the throne. Described by the Bible as the most pious king of Judah, he is credited with stamping out idolatrous cults, establishing Passover and enacting other religious reforms, all in accordance with the Book of Deuteronomy, which was supposedly miraculously found in the Temple during his reign (2 Kings 22-23). Josiah’s celebrated 31-year reign (640-609 B.C.E.) came to an abrupt and somewhat anticlimactic end when his path collided with Necho’s at Megiddo.
The Book of Kings doesn’t clarify why Necho killed Josiah – or why the Judahite king had gone there to meet the pharaoh on his way to aid Assyria. The Book of Chronicles gives a slightly longer account, claiming that Josiah had attempted to block Necho’s advance and that ensuing battle was a disastrous affair during which the Judahite king was killed (2 Chronicles 35:20-25).
This story may be the seed of what would, much later, become the prophesy of the end-of-times battle at Armageddon, but it seems improbable that the tiny army of Judah would choose to face the might of Egypt in an open battle. Besides, most scholars agree that the Book of Chronicles was written centuries after the facts and it is unlikely that Necho and Josiah joined battle, since the Book of Kings, written much closer to the events, doesn’t mention it.
Battle or no, Necho’s subsequent attempts to help the Assyrians didn’t go very well. He campaigned in the northern Levant twice, in 609 and 604 B.C.E., before being decisively defeated by the Babylonians at the battle of Carchemish (today on the Turkish-Syrian border), and being forced to withdraw. The Babylonians then rolled into the region, setting the stage for eventual destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.
Area X marks the spot
With this whirlwind of imperial clashes in mind we can go back to the recent dig at Megiddo, conducted between 2016 and 2022 specifically to unearth evidence of the period that followed the Assyrian conquest in 732 B.C.E.
Most of ancient Megiddo was excavated in the 1920s by a University of Chicago expedition, which unearthed and removed most of the tell’s upper layers to get to the older incarnations of the city below, the Israeli archaeologists explain. There was however one largely untouched area in the northwest corner of the site that was ripe for exploration. The zone was named ‘Area X’ and it was here that the team quickly hit pay dirt, in the form of a large building located just beneath the surface that included five or six rooms opening onto a paved courtyard.
Based on the pottery finds, the building was constructed in the mid-seventh century B.C.E. – at the tail end of Assyrian rule – and continued to be used after the Assyrians abandoned the site and the Egyptians took over, Kleiman, Finkelstein and colleagues report.
The complex geopolitics of the region at the time are reflected in the ceramics that the building’s occupiers used over the decades. Firstly, the finds included sherds from local pottery vessels, such as traditional cooking pots, mixed in with serving vessels influenced by Mesopotamian styles.
This contradicts the conventional thinking that Megiddo, and the rest of the former northern kingdom, were almost completely depopulated after the Assyrian conquest and resettled by deportees from Mesopotamia.
While it is often said that pots and pans don’t equal people, it also makes little sense to think that a forcibly displaced foreign population would somehow start making traditional Levantine cooking ware without strong and persistent contact with the locals, Kleiman notes. It is more likely that large parts of the Israelite population remained in place under the Assyrians, and the crisscross of deportations involved only elites and specialized groups, he says.
“Scholars believed Megiddo completely changed socially, that the ratio of the local population was very low or non-existent, but we show it must have been higher than what was previously believed,” Kleiman says. “There must have been a significant component of Levantine population in Megiddo at the time, and we see this, for example, in the cooking pots, which are very important cultural and social indicators. The pots we found tell us the population at the site cooked like their parents and grandparents, in the same local traditions.”
The pottery found in the building of Area X also contained many sherds that came from imported vessels. By far, the most represented was Egyptian pottery, with vessels of all form and function.
“When we opened the boxes of finds from the dig at my lab in Ben-Gurion University, I told my students to put the Egyptian pottery on the tables, and table after table got filled,” Kleiman tells Haaretz by phone. “The number of Egyptian vessels is double of even triple the amount found in the entire Levant for that period.”
Petrographic studies have confirmed the pottery came from the Nile Valley or the Delta, so these were not locally produced imitations, he notes. It is also unlikely that the Egyptian ceramics were imported because they were crudely made and poorly fired.
“This is not decorated fine tableware, so it’s very hard to argue that someone at Megiddo, a deportee or a surviving Israelite, all of a sudden acquired a taste for sub-par Egyptian pottery and decided to import it into his house,” Kleiman says. The finds point instead to a steady stream of supplies from Egypt, most likely for Necho’s army, Finkelstein says.
The Greek connection
Additionally, the building in Area X produced a significant amount of Eastern Greek pottery sherds also datable to the end of the seventh century B.C.E. Petrography as well as analysis by Prof. Alexander Fantalkin of Tel Aviv University determined that their shapes and simple line decorations most resemble the ceramics that at the time were made in Miletus, one of the main port cities of the Greek Kingdom of Lydia – in today’s western Turkey.
This mix of Egyptian ceramics and Greek pottery from the Aegean region is known in Israel, albeit in much smaller quantities, at sites like Ashkelon, at the fortress of Metzad Hashavyahu, which is near the city of Yavne, and other coastal locations, Finkelstein and Kleiman say.
Scholars have generally attributed this strange mix to the presence of Egyptian forces accompanied by Eastern Greek mercenaries at these coastal sites as part of the pharaoh’s short-lived attempt to reassert dominance over Canaan in the interval between the fall of the Assyrians and the rise of the Babylonians, the archaeologists say. Researchers have both historical and archeological evidence of this Egyptian-Greek military cooperation, they add.
At Ashkelon, for example, an Egyptian soldier conveniently inscribed a storage jar as “Belonging to Kanupi, the man-at-arms.” As for the involvement of troops from the Aegean, the Greek historian Herodotus and Assyrian records both recount that King Gyges of Lydia, who first established Lydia as a major power in the first half of the seventh century B.C.E., supplied the Egyptians with mercenaries.
So the best interpretation of the imported ceramics found at Megiddo is that these are linked to the Egyptian-Greek forces of Necho, the pharaoh who killed Josiah during his campaign in the Levant, Finkelstein says. Of course this does not mean necessarily that Egyptian and Greek soldiers were stationed specifically in the building found in Area X, the archaeologists note. Still, the structure did stand close to the Assyrian-era palace of Megiddo. The archaeologists also found a single armor scale in the building as well as a stone roughly inscribed with a senet board, an ancient Egyptian game.
In any case, at the very least, the pottery assemblage does offer us a clue on the population composition of Megiddo at the time and gives us a first glimpse into the archaeological context of Josiah’s demise, Finkelstein says.
The evidence does make a “compelling argument to recreate the ethnic and cultural makeup at Megiddo at the time” of Josiah’s death, agrees Prof. Aren Maeir, a leading Iron-Age archaeologist from Bar-Ilan University.
“Based on comparisons to other sites in the Levant at the time, the finds from Megiddo do seem to argue for the presence of Egyptian and Greek soldiers, along with locals and exiles from the Mesopotamian region,” Maeir, who did not take part in the research, tells Haaretz. “They seem to provide very nice material evidence of the background of Josiah’s untimely death.”
Josiah and the Messiah
Echoes of the Egyptian-Greek role in Judah’s defeat may also be present in the Bible. The Lydians, for example, are singled out by Jeremiah in a prophecy against Necho and the Egyptians (Jer. 46:9). Some scholars also identify the aforementioned Gygas of Lydia as the King Gog in the apocalyptic battle prophesized in Ezekiel 38-39. In Christian tradition, this same character later morphed into the monstrous “Gog and Magog” (Rev. 20:8) foreseen to take part in the final battle between good and evil at Armageddon (Rev. 16:16).
As mentioned, we can only speculate about why Necho had Josiah killed. Perhaps Josiah refused to pay tribute to the pharaoh, or he simply backed the wrong side, misreading the complex Game-of-Thrones-style conflicts that saw three empires swapping domination over the Levant during just a couple of decades, Finkelstein says.
But we do know that Josiah’s death in 609 B.C.E. is a key moment in history, playing a pivotal role in sparking major traditions of messianism and eschatology in Judaism and Christianity, he adds.
This didn’t occur overnight, he notes, but the fate of the last great and righteous king of Judah eventually became inexorably linked to what happened 25 years after his death, with the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. and the start of the Babylonian Exile. This opened up the hope that one day a righteous king from the line of David would return to deliver the people of Israel, Finkelstein says.
In Christianity, of course, the role of savior is taken up by Jesus Christ, who upon his second coming is prophesized to finally defeat evil at the end of times. And yet again, the apocalyptic traditions born of that fatal encounter more than 2,600 years ago became so pervasive that this final battle too was set to take place where Josiah fell: at Armageddon.
Original Article – Archaeologists Find Evidence of Egyptian Army That Felled Biblical King at Megiddo – Archaeology – Haaretz.com
