Zone 2: Area B Ancient City Wall (Phase 2)

Overview

Exploring Zone 2, one can see the remains of the ancient city wall and its postern gate. Although a debris pile obstructs the view to the structures on the acropolis, the gate is almost directly in line with the postern gate at the entrance to the acropolis complex. The entrance inside the gate was cobbled, but the outside was plastered. The visible outermost wall, established on bedrock and filled where needed, surrounds the entire site. It stood nearly 4 meters tall is equally wide at its outset. Parallel to this was another wall measuring nearly 3.25 meters wide and showing evidence of having been plastered.

A casemate walls averaging 3.4 meters thick runs parallel along the inside of the city wall and is not tied to it. The fortified casemate wall is traceable on the surface and extends all along the perimeter of the site. Excavations reveal several intersecting and parallel walls forming rooms which were filled with debris looted from the acropolis, almost certainly by the Babylonian armies. The fine quality of the ceramics found in the debris, in contrast to the relative lack of pottery found on the acropolis, suggest to excavators that it had been dumped here by the city’s sackers. This pottery is described as very fine, mostly painted, with alternating bands of black, red, white, and yellow, and other fine ware adorned with elaborate animal figures. According to excavations reports, Area B yielded “some of the most beautiful painted pottery of Iron Age II ever to be discovered in eastern Jordan.”

Inside the earlier inner wall excavators uncovered some unbroken areas of floor that provided sealed loci allowing them to establish three successive phases spanning both major periods of occupation. The latest period just below the thick layer of ash and broken pottery left by the neo-Babylonian destruction of the early sixth century BCE, revealed three rooms with clay floors and mud-plastered stone walls, with some traces of lime. Excavators suggest that a street ran through the earlier gateway in the vicinity of these structures, over which other structures had been built when the earlier gate went out of use. Also nearby, tunnels leading in the direction of the upper city were found, but not fully excavated.

A bit further on, residential structures representing the late-eighth, early-seventh century BCE, typical Iron Age II houses, rise steeply above the irregular bedrock of the city gate area. Among the ceramics found here was a small piece of a rim of an Egyptian faience vessel, identified by a characteristic bluish glaze. The only other Egyptian artifact found previously at the site was half a scaraboid object, found in Area A and probably dating to the 26th Dynasty, which roughly spanned the late-seventh to early-sixth centuries BCE.