GREEK - City of Ashkelon in Palestine - Bronze 12mm (1.8
grams) Struck
150-104 B.C.
Reference: Sear 6079 var.
Turreted and veiled bust of Tyche right.
Galley left.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured,
provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of
Authenticity.
Ashkelon was the oldest and largest seaport in
Canaan, one of
the "five
cities" of the
Philistines, north of
Gaza and south of
Jaffa (Yafa).
Archaeological excavations begun in 1985 led by
Lawrence Stager of
Harvard University are revealing the site with about 50 feet (15 m) of
accumulated rubble from successive
Canaanite,
Philistine,
Phoenician,
Iranian,
Hellenistic,
Roman,
Byzantine,
Islamic, and
Crusader
occupation.
In the oldest layers are shaft graves of pre-Phoenician
Canaanites. The city was originally built on a
sandstone
outcropping and has a good underground
water
supply. It was relatively large as an ancient city with as many as 15,000
people living inside walls a mile and a half (2.4 km) long, 50 feet (15 m) high
and 150 feet (50 m) thick. Ashkelon was a thriving Middle
Bronze Age
(2000-1550 BCE) city of more than 150 acres (607,000 m²), with commanding
ramparts including the oldest
arched city gate in
the world, eight feet wide, and even as a ruin still standing two stories high.
The thickness of the walls was so great that the mudbrick Bronze Age gate had a
stone-lined tunnel-like
barrel
vault, coated with white plaster, to support the superstructure: it is the
oldest such
vault ever found.
The Bronze Age ramparts were so capacious that later Roman
and Islamic fortifications, faced with stone, followed the same footprint, a
vast semi-circle protecting Ashkelon on the landward side. On the sea it was
defended by a high natural bluff.
Within the huge ramparts, in the ruins of a sanctuary, a
votive silver calf was found in 1991. During the Canaanite period, a roadway
more than 20 feet (6.1 m) in width ascended the rampart from the harbor and
entered a gate at the top. Nearby, in the ruins of a small ceramic tabernacle
was found a finely cast bronze statuette of a bull calf, originally silvered,
4 inches (100 mm) long. Images of calves and bulls were associated with the
worship of the Canaanite gods
El
and Baal.
The
Amarna letters
correspondence of Ashkelon/(Aqaluna), of
1350 BC,
contains seven letters to the
Egyptian
pharaoh, from its 'King'/mayor:
Yidya. Yidya was
the only ruler of Aqaluna during the 15-20 year
time period. One letter from the pharaoh to Yidya, was subsequently
discovered in the early 1900s.
The Philistines conquered Canaanite Ashkelon about
1150 BCE.
Their earliest pottery, types of structures and inscriptions are similar to the
early Greek urbanised centre at
Mycenae in
mainland Greece,
adding weight to the hypothesis that the Philistines were possibly one of the
populations among the "Sea
Peoples" that upset cultures throughout the eastern
Mediterranean at that time. Ashkelon became one of the five Philistine
cities that were constantly warring with the
Israelites
and the
kingdom of Judah. According to Herodotus, its temple of Venus was the oldest
of its kind, imitated even in Cyprus, and he mentions that this temple was
pillaged by marauding "Scythians" during the time of their sway over the Medes
(653-625 BCE). When this vast seaport, the last of the Philistine cities to hold
out against
Nebuchadnezzar finally fell in 604 BCe, burnt and destroyed and its people
taken into exile, the Philistine era was over.[citation
needed]
Ashkelon was soon rebuilt. It was an important
Hellenistic seaport. In the period of the
Hasmonean
Kingdom, Rabbi
Simeon ben Shetach -
Pharisee
scholar and Nasi of
the Sanhedrin
in the
First Century BCE - is reported to have on a single day
sentenced to death eighty Ashkelon women who had been charged with
witchcraft. Later, the women's relatives took revenge by bringing false
witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn[6].
Ashkelon may have been the birthplace of
Herod the Great.
Josephus
makes it clear that Ashkelon was not ceded to Herod the Great in 30 BCE (War
1.396; Ant. 15.217), yet he built monumental buildings there: bath houses,
elaborate fountains and large colonnades.[7]
The city remained loyal to Rome during the First Revolt, AD
66-70, and in the following centuries it grew to be an important centre. It
appears on a fragment of the 6th century AD
Madaba Map.[8]
During the period of the
Crusades,
Ashkelon (which was known to the Crusaders as Ascalon) was an important
city due to its location near the coast and between the
Crusader States and
Egypt. In 1099,
shortly after the
Siege of Jerusalem (1099) an Egyptian
Fatimid army which had been sent to relieve
Jerusalem
was defeated by a Crusader force at the
Battle of Ascalon. The city itself was not captured by the Crusaders because
of internal disputes amongst their leaders. This battle is widely considered to
have signified the end of the
First
Crusade. Until 1153, the Fatimids were able to launch raids into the
Kingdom of Jerusalem from Ashkelon which meant that the southern border of
the
Crusader States was constantly unstable. In response to these incursions
into Outremer,
King
Fulk of Jerusalem constructed a number of Christian settlements around the
city during the 1130s, in order to neutralise the threat of the Muslim garrison.
In 1148, during the
Second Crusade, the city was unsuccessfully besieged for eight days by a
small Crusader army which was not fully supported by the Crusader States. In
1150 the Fatimids fortified the city with fifty-three towers as it was their
most important frontier fortress. Three years later, after a
five month siege, the city was captured by a Crusader army lead by King
Baldwin III of Jerusalem. It was then added to the
County of Jaffa to form the
County of Jaffa and Ascalon which became one of the four major seigneuries
of the
Kingdom of Jerusalem.
After the
Crusader conquest of Jerusalem the six elders of the
Karaite Jewish community in Ashkelon contributed to the ransoming of
captured Jews and holy relics from Jerusalem's new rulers. The
Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon, which was sent to the Jewish elders
of Alexandria, describes their participation in the ransom effort and the
ordeals suffered by many of the freed captives.
Around 1163 Rabbi
Benjamin of Tudela visited Ashkelon and found 'about two hundred rabbanite
Jews' living there.[9]
In 1187
Saladin took
Ashkelon as part of his conquest of the
Crusader States following the
Battle of Hattin. In 1191, during the
Third
Crusade, Saladin demolished the city because of its potential strategic
importance to the Christians, but the leader of the Crusade, King
Richard I of England, constructed a citadel upon the ruins. Ashkelon
subsequently remained part of the diminished territores of Outremer throughout
most of the 13th century and
Richard, Earl of Cornwall reconstructed and refortified the citadel during
1240-41, as part of the Crusader policy of improving the defences of coastal
sites. The Egyptians regained Ashkelon in 1247 during
As-Salih
Ayyub's conflict with the Crusader States and the city was returned to
Muslim rule. The
Mamluk dynasty came into power in Egypt in 1250 and the ancient and
medieval
history of Ashkelon was brought to an end in 1270, when the Mamluk sultan
Baybars
ordered the citadel and harbour at the site to be destroyed. As a result of this
destruction, the site was abandoned by its inhabitants and fell into disuse.
According to
Shiite tradition, the head of
Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Mohammad, was buried in Ashkelon. In the late
11th century it was moved to a new shrine named Mashad Nabi Hussein (or Sabni
Hussein) built for the purpose. In 1153, at the time of the Crusader's conquest
of Ashkelon, the head was moved to
Fustat (Egypt).
The shrine remained and was described as the most magnificent building in
Ashkelon.[10]
In July 1950, it was totally destroyed at the instructions of
Moshe
Dayan.[11]
|