A Hill People Built Without Noticing

A tel is a raised area of ground that was formed as a result of the building of settlements. That is, a hill people built — without anyone intending to build a hill.

And this is how it happens. A settlement stands in a certain place. It is destroyed — in a war, in an earthquake, or simply because it was abandoned and the houses collapsed. After years other people come, level the ruins, and build on top of them. And that is the usual way of building in the ancient world: not to clear everything and start from the rock, but to level and to build on top.

Every layer was built above the ruins of the previous settlement, and with such a way of building the height of the surface rises. Layer upon layer, thousands of years, and so a hill piles up.

And that gives archaeologists a gift. The tel is made of layers one on top of the other, and when you dig it you dig from the later layer at the top of the tel to the earlier layer beneath it. The order in the ground is the order in time, and you cannot confuse the two.

How many layers can accumulate? At Tel Megiddo more than twenty settlement layers have been identified, and its summit is about forty to sixty meters high. It has a settlement sequence from the fourth millennium BCE to the Persian period.

And why build again in the same place at all? The case of Megiddo gives a hint: the tel lies at a strategic point that commands the pass of Wadi Ara and a central junction of the Way of the Sea. That is, what was good the first time stays good — a source of water, a road, fields, defense. And whoever came afterwards found exactly the same advantages, and in addition a pile of ready stones.

And at Tel Be'er Sheva the story is different, and no less interesting. The earliest remains found in it are from the fourth millennium BCE. Afterwards it was left for about two thousand years. And then, in the 11th century BCE, it was resettled — and the fortified city of the Kingdom of Judah that arose in it was rebuilt three times until it was destroyed.

That is, a tel is not just a pile. It is a list of decisions: when people came, when they left, and when someone looked at a hill of ruins and decided that here it is worth starting again.

And the word itself traveled. 'Tel' is used today in many languages as a professional archaeological term.