Tall el-Hammam

[Phillip]

Tall el-Hammam's lead excavator, archaeologist Steve Collins, has been meticulous in his recording of the various layers uncovered on the huge mound. Over 14 excavation seasons a huge repository of pottery, and various other artifacts and fragments, were accumulated and a lot of it was brought back to the US for laboratory analysis. Each shipment out and each season's agenda had to be approved by the Jordanian authorities. As it should be. Collins appears to have struck up a reasonable accord with the officials. After the excavations came to a close the team have concentrated on getting funds to set up a new university laboratory in order to catalogue all the pottery assemblages. It is an important regional archive for the Levant as Tall el-Hammam was occupied without a break from the Chalcolithic period to its total demise in the MB age. Most other cities and major towns were not occupied for varying periods following the Early Bronze Age round of site destructions. Their pottery sequence is broken - unlike Hammam. Not only that, the Kikkar plain displays evidence of contemporary destruction at every city, town or village, coinciding with the fall of Hammam. It lies on not just one trade route but a crossroads of trade routes - to the north and the south, and the east and the west. It was strategically important throughout its existence. It should also be recorded in the Ebla archive. It probably is but not by the name of Sodom. Or a form of that name that has been recognised. Early reports did suggest Sodom might be one of the destinations of trade passing through Ebla [Tell Mardikh in Syria] but it all went quiet for some reason.
Revisionists have tended to completely ignore Hammam. Probably because it contradicts their various models. Bob Porter thought it was another place mentioned briefly in the Bible - yet the whole of the Kikkar seems to have been affected by the blast. I did wonder if the MB destruction level at Jericho, on the opposite side of the Jordan river, may have been affected. It seems it was not in the direct line of blast and the energy pulse released by the explosion. This is not surprising as the story of the walls of Jericho collapsing has all the hallmarks of an earthquake. The Jordan and Rift valley system is prone to earthquakes as it is basically, a geological fault. Hence it may not have been greatly affected as the MB wall probably did not fall until the end of the MB period. Some think it may have remained in place, or partially so, for somewhat longer.
Hammam was totally destroyed around 100 years prior to the end of the MB age, according to Collins. At the point defined by John Bimson as the end of MBIIB, a now defunct classification. The MB itself ended at what Bimson called the MBIIC period. See his book, Redating The Exodus, Sheffield University:1978. He fleshed some of these arguments out in various articles published by SIS, and others. What is interesting is that there were two waves of site destructions - most of which appear to have been earthquake related as suggested by Claude Schaeffer, the French archaeologist, as long ago as 1948. His peers refused to recognise this fact of life and he was ostracised, losing his position and not invited to excavate at any more sites by the French establishment. Schaeffer did however have plenty of writing to do as his long excavation of Ugarit had hardly been touched as far as pen and paper were concerned. He ended up writing it up in several volumes and they remain one of the most important archaeological treasure houses on the Levant. Ugarit lay in what became known as Phoenicia - long after the demise of Hammam.
The air blast, or the explosion in the low atmosphere generated a huge shock wave. It is thought by Collins that this would be towards the NW - and it might be useful to evaluate those MBIIB destruction layers in order to ascertain if the shock wave, or blast phenomena, did go that way - generating earthquakes in its wake. Not necessarily at a single point of time but over weeks, months, even perhaps decades. Amos Nur, a contributor at one of the SIS Cambridge Conferences, explored the idea of multiple earthquakes. However, that was long before anyone knew about the demise of Hammam. He catalogued a host of earthquakes at Jericho, or in its vicinity, over a long period of time. Hence, the Biblical story should not necessarily be pinned down to the end of the MB age.
Bimson of course assigned the MB destructions to the Joshua 'conquest' story. This appears to be a part of the Deuteronomist author's compilation. Presumably in the 7th century BC. It would have been comprised of earlier written material that was possibly not in a chronological format. Only in the Monarchy period was there a sense of the chronology of events. In other words, the Iron Age. Possibly under the influence of the Assyrians in the first half of the 7th century, or even in the early to mid 8th century when Israel was part of the kingdom of Damascus and as such was absorbed temporarily by Assyria.
Another idea favoured by some archaeologists is that the MB destructions were due to the several campaigns by Thutmose III into the Levant. Creating an empire deep into Syria. These campaigns must then have taken place in the LB age strata. We might also ask, was there really a human conquest of what became Israel and Judah - or was the original conquest made by God. In order to explain the natural disasters.
Ginzberg, in one of his volumes of Legends of the Jews, said that Judah became angry and began stomping his feet on the ground in Egypt. This was the background to the Exodus. Stomping on the ground by a larger than life entity seems to smack of earthquake phenomena and this can be verified as various fortifications along the Nile were damaged by earthquake at the end of the M B age. These forts were extremely sturdy and designed to withstand a certain amount of earth shaking and vibration. The same goes for the defences of cities in the Levant during the later MB period. The destructions of sites at the end of EBIII and EBIV must have left an impact on the survivors. Hammam brings catastrophism back into ancient history and we may note that the Bible still has a lot of references to it. Even though it is likely, in later periods, that catastrophism was diluted as Yahweh had evolved into an unseen god operating behind the scenes, rather than one responsible for handing out punishment and retribution for perceived indifference to God. None of this had anything to do with planets on near miss orbits but all to do with big comets such as Encke and Halley. These huge bodies shed material on a regular basis when going round the Sun. These are defined as meteor streams. When freshly made they formed a dense stream with some big chunks that were potentially hazardous to life on Earth if the latter crossed the path, or orbit of the stream. The Taurid complex has numerous streams and Halley too has, over the years, formed similar meteor streams. These ideas were formed by a team of British astronomers, and published in Clube and Napier's two books in the 1990s. SIS published several articles by Clube, and a group of them featured in one of the Cambridge conferences. Probably the most important speaker meeting ever held by SIS. Later, Mike Baillie the Belfast dendrochronologist, adopted some of their ideas and he gave several talks at the Harlequin theatre in Redhill. He has a host of articles published in various journals as well as several books. The most illuminating of these was 'The Celtic Gods: comets in Irish mythology' which he co-authored with Patrick McCafferty, another speaker at a Redhill meeting. Perhaps this is one of the reasons revisionists have shied away from mentioning Hammam, as they had grown used to ignoring catastrophism, much like mainstream. Well, we now have a new synchronism. The Hammam event triggered the Hyksos invasion, or migration into Egypt's delta region. This occurred in response to a 'blast from God'. So, even the Egyptians knew what lay behind the appearance of the Hyksos. After roughly a hundred years, or a little more, the rulers of Upper Egypt were able to repel the Hyksos, driving them out of Lower Egypt and back into the Levant. Presumably this coincided with the end of MBIIC - but what caused that event. What sparked another round of earthquakes? Does the key lie in the Exodus storyline?
As it stands at the moment Clube and Napier did not really engage in the criticism by mainstream. As astronomers, and scientists, including the rest of the team, they decided to leave their ideas out there for a new generation to evaluate. They got on with their careers instead. Perhaps they thought that in the age of space exploration their ideas would eventually be confirmed, but for the moment that has not happened. However, meteors and asteroids are actively a point of interest to NASA and various new telescopes have the ability to find them and record them in a catalogue of near earth objects. The WISE mission was the first serious exploration of meteor streams and meteor origins.