Observations on the Stratigraphic Attribution of the Early Bronze Age Pillared Building in Area D at Tel ʿErani, Israel

Abstract

Tel ʿErani is a large Early Bronze Age site within the municipal bounds of modern Qiryat Gat, Israel, at the northeastern edge of the Negev, adjacent to the Judean Shephelah (piedmont). It includes a high mound and several lower terraces, ca. 25 ha in area. The site gained notoriety when an imported potsherd bearing an Egyptian royal symbol (a serekh) incised with the hieroglyph of an early ruler, Narmer, was found in Excavation Area D. Large-scale exposure there in the 1950s and 1960s, under the direction of Shmuel Yeivin, unearthed a rather lengthy and complicated stratigraphic sequence that has prompted numerous attempts at correlating its Early Bronze Age strata with Dynasty 0 and the early 1st Dynasty in Egypt. Yeivin’s cursorily published results illustrate only partial and rudimentary plans of the Early Bronze Age strata in Area D, most of which lack elevations. One exceptionally large building boasting seven substantial mudbrick pillars has attracted researchers’ attention, as it likely had a public function. This essay, based on Yeivin’s original, unpublished plans that include elevations, as well as information derived from recent excavations in Area D, offers a detailed reconstruction of the plan of that building, which suggests its likely chrono-stratigraphic ascription to late phases of the Early Bronze I. It further notes its importance for understanding the relationship between Egypt and the southern Levant in this late prehistoric period, and especially the place of Tel ʿErani as one of a growing number of sites in the southern Levant known to yield definitive evidence for the onset of its earliest complex, hierarchical societies in the first centuries of the 4th millennium b.c.e.