Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Lecture Series

Many kingdoms of the Iron Age Levant, including Israel and Judah, featured well-fortified royal cities that were centers of administration and religious ritual, but had few inhabitants and were not centers of economic production. This lecture will discuss these cities and what they tell us about the political and economic organization of Iron Age kingdoms, with reference to archaeological and textual evidence from the Aramean kingdom of Sam’al, in the northern Levant, and from the contemporary Israelite kingdoms in the south.