WHS#55

I visited Tel Megiddo during my travels through the Galilee in April 2019. The tel is quite imposing as I approach, as it's the lone hill on the flat Jezreel Plain. Hill look-alike, at least, because this tel is huge. It towers several meters higher than me, and walking up it really feels like walking up a small natural hill. But natural it is not. This tel is made up of 26 different layers of civilization, stretched between maybe 7 millennia all before the time of Jesus. It's been in ruins longer than San Marino has been a state, and inhabited even longer than that, so it's really a historic treasure. Anyway, a visit to the tel will always start at the gates to the city, dating back from the Late Bronze Age. For their age, the walls surrounding the passageway are surprisingly tall. Some layers of civilization have even been flattened to mere inches of thickness. This can be seen in the dug out portion where the Early Bronze Age temple, the site's most famous ruin, is located. The walls of this manmade depression still show several layers of the different cultures that have settled on this very spot. The site is really an interesting setting, with its palm trees all over the place and a view of the vast plains all around. A walk further brings me to 2 of the most impressive ruins: the grain silo and the water management system. I was actually able to climb down and through the water tunnel. It's an ingenious development made several millennia ago, and its scale is impressive until now. The end of the tunnel brought me outside the other side of the tel, and the path around (and over parts of) the tel brought me back to the parking lot.

Tels are a common accessory with ruins here in Israel, but none I've seen have been as interesting or impressive as Megiddo. Bet Shean actually has a large tel with Egyptian remains, but Megiddo has far more layers to it. Of course, there's Hazor and Beersheba, which I haven't been able to visit. From what I've gathered, these tels are really the best and most historically extensive tels in Israel, since Tel-es-Sultan in Jericho is in Palestine, and the 3 tels really provide an amazing show of the long and diverse history of this part of the world. Tels also don't seem to be common in other parts of the world, so these are indeed the best examples of the wonders of the tel in the world of archaeology.