Overview

Bibliography

Tel Kabri is a large mound in the western Galilee with evidence of settlement from the Neolithic period into the modern period. The shape of the mound was established in the Middle Bronze period and represents the largest extent of the settlement. Sporadic excavations on and off the mound began in the late 1950s, but it was not until several decades later that extensive excavations were carried out between 1986 and 1993 by A. Kempinski, E. Miron, and W.-D. Niemeier for the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

Kempinski's excavations took place in six areas across the mound and uncovered settlements from especially the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze periods, the Iron Age, and the Persian period. In the center of the mound, he uncovered a small part of a Middle Bronze monumental palace. He dated to the palace to the eighteenth-seventeenth centuries BCE and estimated that it covered an area of approximately .5 acres.

In 2005, renewed excavations under the direction of A. Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa and E. H. Cline of George Washington University re-examined the palace. They have re-planned the palace and discovered that the palace was much larger than Kempinski suggested. A significant feature of the palace uncovered by both Kempinski's and the renewed excavations is that the palace was decorated with frescoes painted in an Aegean style, reminiscent of the frescoes discovered at Akrotiri (Crete), Alalakh (Syria), and Tell ed-Dab'a (Egypt).