CHAPTER II
“He Must Knock Off or You Will Bury Him”
Fisher and his nephew Stanley sailed on 18 August 1925, having booked passage on the SS Aquitania, an attractive Cunard ocean liner often called “Ship Beautiful.” Two weeks later they arrived in Alexandria. With stops in Cairo, Jerusalem, and Haifa to get supplies and arrange for the workmen, they eventually made it to Megiddo by mid-September.
Higgins and his family, plus DeLoach, arrived in Beirut about ten days afterward, having embarked on 29 August on the SS Canada from New York. After getting his family settled near the American University in Beirut, Higgins and DeLoach reached Megiddo before the end of the month. Fisher, Stanley, and seventeen Egyptian workmen and laborers were waiting.
Sunny skies and mild temperatures had greeted the team members in both Haifa and Beirut, but so did a cacophony of sounds, dust, and, in the case of Haifa, a town that was not yet even fifty years old. It had grown tremendously in the interim, but wandering the streets of Haifa was still a bit like being in the American Wild West back in the day.
Moreover, the road to Megiddo was unpaved. It took hours to get there—it was the type of place that one visited as a deliberate destination, rather than stopping by while en route to somewhere else. Even the tiny Arab village of Lejjun, located nearby, was more likely to be the actual destination than the ancient mound of Tell el-Mutesellim.
Sheep and goats wandered the area, looked after by the occasional herder. Clouds of gnats and mosquitoes hovered above the standing pools of water in the swampy marshland that made up the valley floor. It was bucolic, beautiful, and potentially deadly. The young Americans, and no doubt the older ones as well, were both excited and homesick—some were probably having second thoughts about their grand adventure. DeLoach’s letters home, though, were filled more with descriptions of their new home away from home than with anything else.
In the meantime, the world’s media had caught wind of the search that was about to begin. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran several stories about the expedition, perhaps in part because they were the hometown paper for Stanley Fisher. In mid-July, fully a month before the team had even left, the newspaper published an article with the headline “Armageddon to Be Unearthed by Archeologists.” Subsequently, a longer feature article appeared in the pages of the Sunday Magazine supplement in mid-September, just as the team was arriving at the site.1
In the weeks that followed their arrival at Megiddo, the four intrepid team members began their initial work at the site. They started by surveying the mound, as planned, at the same time as they began the construction of a dig house in which they could live and work during the coming years.2
Soon a representative from the Department of Antiquities arrived, to help them negotiate with the local landowners.3 Fisher had been told there were “some ninety separate owners holding varying amounts of shares,” all living in the nearby village of Umm el-Fahm. In fact, because there were so many, it was not until nearly a month later that they were able to complete the negotiations with Hassan Saad, who claimed to be the largest of these landowners and so was serving as their representative. Fisher paid him in advance, signing a lease for the right to excavate on the eastern half of the mound. They promised to return the land as it had been, ready for cultivation, after three years.4
Finally, Fisher decided that it was time to begin trial excavations. Higgins immediately intervened, however, claiming that he had been told by those back in Chicago—that is, Breasted and Luckenbill—that they were only to survey and construct the house during these first weeks, and to begin excavating later. That was the first argument between the two men, but by no means the last.5
In fact, Fisher and Higgins disagreed on almost everything, including what time they should eat breakfast. Higgins wanted to get up at 5:30 a.m. and eat at 6:00 a.m. sharp, while Fisher wanted breakfast at 7:00 a.m. As a result, they ate separately, with the others joining along the way. Higgins also wanted to hold church services every Sunday morning—remember that he and his wife had previously served as missionaries in Korea—to which Fisher grumbled quite specifically that they were there to do archaeology, not to run a religious mission.6
FIG. 6. Chicago tents at Megiddo, first week of season in 1925 (from the estate of C. Stanley Fisher, courtesy of Barbara A. Keller)
One would think that the living conditions for their team would necessarily have been quite primitive for the first few months, for they had to live in tents while the house was being built.7 However, the six tents were all luxuriously furnished, complete with white bedsheets, finely woven grass carpets on the floors, and a small washstand for each of the Americans. The meals were better than those served at most hotels, young DeLoach told his mother, with five-course lunches and seven-course dinners each day, plus tea every afternoon at four p.m.8
At first, they pitched their tents near the Ain el-Kubbi spring, on the floor of the Jezreel Valley just to the north of the mound. One of the tents was used as a dining room, office, and sleeping quarters for the staff; another was for the Egyptian workmen; and the smallest was for the cook and the kitchen. They had chosen a picturesque spot; from their camp they could see Nazareth, Mount Gilboa, Mount Tabor, and, on a clear day, Mount Hermon off in the far distance. They could also see across the river Jordan, DeLoach told his mother, though that was a bit of an exaggeration.9
Unfortunately, they were constantly visited by the sheep and goats that they had noticed earlier. There were also too many mosquitoes. Soon thereafter, they decided to change locations and build their headquarters on the lower part of the mound itself. There they also put up another large tent, to be used as the office and dining room, so that the original first tent could be used just as a bedroom. Higgins also got his own tent, which served as his office as well as living quarters, since he was responsible for all the equipment that was to be used in the preliminary survey.10
However, the move did not alleviate the mosquito problem. By mid-December 1925, just three months after arriving at the site, Fisher came down with malaria. Within a month, everyone else on the team had contracted it as well. “Dr. Fisher was down with fever again when we left camp,” DeLoach told Breasted. “He never goes more than two weeks without a spell and seldom that long. The spells usually last about three or four days, and always chills and fever about 102°F.… I have had two spells since I last wrote you, but I am following the quinine treatment given by the government as a result of a recent survey they made and it seems to be working well.”11
Garstang said much the same a few days later, ending with a dire warning: “My dear Breasted. I have just returned from Megiddo after an adventurous ride.… Fisher is ill, & at the time of our call none of his staff was there. Higgins [is] in Beyrout, having had malignant malaria, & the other two in Haifa. All have had malaria: I cannot explain that. Fisher has had malignant malaria on & off with a spell in hospital for about 6 weeks. He is very run down & if he doesn’t stop work he will collapse.… Now he must knock off or you will bury him.”12 In fact, Breasted himself later noted that when Lord Plumer, the British high commissioner, came to visit the site, “every member of the staff was in bed with malaria and there was no one to receive him.”13
It wasn’t until much later that Fisher could be persuaded to go to Jerusalem for convalescence. He spent two weeks there and eventually looked much better than he had upon arriving. However, he returned to Megiddo shortly thereafter and never fully recovered.14
In January, an anonymous note arrived in Chicago. Postmarked from Nazareth, it registered a complaint that Higgins was not yet back from Beirut, even though he had recovered from malaria. It also said that he had been doing geological work up in Lebanon rather than participating in the activities at Megiddo, including helping to oversee construction of the dig house.
FIG. 7. Megiddo dig house (after Fisher 1929: fig. 10; Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
This was causing problems, according to the anonymous writer, not only because of Higgins’s absence, but because he had left orders that they were not to touch any part of the house that had anything to do with his work, nor to put in any electrical wires at all, for some reason. The writer—who could only have been Fisher, Stanley, or DeLoach—noted that this meant the other rooms also could not be completed, because the wiring had to go in before the ceilings could be put into place.15
Soon thereafter Higgins returned to Megiddo and construction of the house resumed. By the latter part of January, it was nearly complete; the team was living in one part, while the rest was being finished. There were bedrooms for the team members, DeLoach said, as well as a kitchen, a dining area, and a common room. There were also areas for drawing architectural plans and for studying and storing the artifacts, and a large interior courtyard for washing and mending the pottery sherds as they were brought down from the mound. DeLoach did note, though, that their fears about tents and high winds had been realized just a few weeks earlier: “Several weeks ago all of our tents were blown down in a very severe rain and wind storm. We were all in bed. We got soaked and many papers and books were damaged, and dishes broken. We have no more of that to fear now that we are in the house.”16
FIG. 8. (a) Breasted at Megiddo, with Sheshonq fragment against wall and DeLoach with a turkey; (b–c) Photograph and drawing of Sheshonq fragment (courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
Undoubtedly alarmed by what he had been hearing, Breasted made arrangements to visit the expedition during his upcoming trip to the Middle East. However, when he arrived at the site in early March, Fisher greeted him with good news. While the workmen were up on the tell gathering stones to use for the foundations of the new dig house, as Fisher had written in an earlier memo that they would be doing, they had found a broken piece of stone upon which were carved Egyptian hieroglyphics, including what looked like a pharaonic name in a cartouche.
The Chicago workmen found the fragment in a dump of dirt and stones that had been left during Gottlieb Schumacher’s excavations twenty years earlier.17 It was not surprising that Schumacher’s team had missed it—although it was nine and a half inches (24 cm) tall and quite thick, the hieroglyphs were very worn and nearly unreadable at first, so that it looked like just another stone among many.18
As mentioned, Schumacher had excavated at Megiddo from 1903 to 1905. He had hired as many as two hundred workmen at a time, who dug a huge trench from north to south across the entire mound, as well as several smaller secondary trenches. Later dubbed the “Great Trench,” it wound up being more than 20 meters wide, expanding to 30 meters in at least one area, more than 250 meters long, and 12 meters deep in places.19
In employing this strategy, Schumacher was following that used by Heinrich Schliemann at the site of Troy just a few decades earlier. There were problems, of course, including workmen not noticing and then throwing out many smaller objects, such as this stone fragment, and Schumacher may have done as much damage at Megiddo as Schliemann did at Troy. However, like Schliemann, Schumacher did publish the stratigraphic results of his excavations promptly, in 1908, although it took another twenty years—and another scholar (Carl Watzinger)—to publish the artifacts, which he did in 1929, four years after Schumacher’s death.20
Breasted immediately translated the royal cartouche as belonging to Pharaoh Sheshonq, the Libyan pharaoh who founded the Twenty-Second Dynasty of Egypt and ruled from about 945 to 920 BCE.21 He also realized that the fragment was obviously part of a much larger inscription, possibly a stele standing close to ten feet tall originally, and that they might yet find additional pieces that belonged to it.22 Breasted took this to be a most auspicious sign, an omen foretelling that levels dating to the Egyptian New Kingdom period did indeed lie within the mound, waiting to be revealed.
All of the later reports published by the Chicago team implied that they had discovered the Sheshonq fragment just before Breasted’s visit in March 1926. However, Higgins noted in private that it had actually been found four months earlier. As he wrote to Luckenbill, “Breasted did not seem too pleased that it had been resting here since last November without his hearing about it!”23
Nevertheless, as mentioned, Breasted felt that this was a good sign, especially coming before the excavation had even officially begun. He subsequently penned a quick note to Fisher from his hotel in Haifa, asking him to keep news of the discovery quiet until a cable could be sent to Mr. Rockefeller. Only then would they alert the press.24 Such a concern is noteworthy in reflecting the financial needs of an excavation beholden to its sponsor even back then, just as is frequently the case today.
Four days later, having moved on to Cairo in the meantime, Breasted wrote to Luckenbill, noting rather gleefully that Schumacher’s team had missed the fragment.25 Alerting Garstang in Jerusalem as well, he said that Fisher would be sending a report about the fragment, and asked him to “keep the matter confidential for a short time.” He claimed that he hadn’t yet sent the news to Rockefeller, “whose interest in Biblical history is such that he will at once appreciate the value of this find, and a first account of it to him will, I have no doubt, stimulate his interest in such researches in Palestine.”26
In actuality, Breasted had already written to Rockefeller about the discovery. “This is a first greeting from the great mound covering the fortress of Armageddon,” he began. “Our great task of clearing the huge mound is just beginning.” He went on to tell the tale of how one of the Egyptian workmen had noticed the hieroglyphs on the stone fragment, which they then set aside until his arrival, and how reading it had transported him back to “a Sunday school in a little church on the far-off prairies of Illinois.”27
However, news always spreads fast in the archaeological world, even back then, especially when a momentous discovery has been made. Garstang had already heard about the discovery of the fragment and told Breasted that, in the future, Fisher should keep him informed about “anything he wishes to keep quiet, so that I may know how to reply when ‘rumours’ reach me.”28
The Department of Antiquities also realized the significance of the discovery. They took possession of the fragment when the finds from the season were divided between them and the expedition, as was supposed to be done just before the dig shut down each year, and transported it to Jerusalem, where it is now in the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum (formerly the Palestine Archaeological Museum) in East Jerusalem.29
Why they wanted it, and its significance, can be stated fairly simply. According to a very lengthy inscription that Pharaoh Sheshonq ordered to be carved onto a wall in a temple in Egypt, he had attacked and captured Megiddo, among many other cities in the area. We know that this took place a few years before the end of his reign, about 930 BCE. Thus the fragment overlooked by Schumacher’s workmen at Megiddo may corroborate Sheshonq’s boast that he had captured the city. In addition, to a number of scholars and members of the public it was even more important because of its biblical implications, for many today equate Sheshonq with Pharaoh Shishak, who the Bible says attacked Jerusalem and other cities soon after the death of King Solomon—that is, also approximately 930 BCE.30
Breasted eventually wrote at length about the stone fragment, using almost the same words that he had written to Rockefeller:
On my first arrival at the mound after work had begun in the spring of 1926, Dr. Fisher informed me that a fragment inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs had been brought down from the top of the mound as a building block during the construction of the house. It was with considerable satisfaction on the first sunny day after the rains had diminished that I was able to make out the name of Shishak or Sheshonk I, in hieroglyphs very dimly glimmering from a badly weather-worn and almost illegible inscribed stone surface. As a lad in a country Sunday school, I had so often read the familiar words of the Old Testament historian in I Kings 14:25–26, that they came back to me very vividly as this record of the ancient conqueror’s name, found in the midst of ruins of one of his captured cities, slowly became legible.31
Eventually word got out to the wider world. In late June 1926, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a feature story about the find on page 2 of its Sunday Magazine supplement, complete with pictures of the fragment and of Megiddo, as well as Sheshonq’s inscription on the wall in Luxor down in Egypt, and a fine photo of Breasted himself looking very elegant and sophisticated. Although the article itself is full of erroneous information, the best part is a quote from Breasted, in which he states: “It was by mere chance that we came upon this stone. Already it had been thrown into the dump heap by a former expedition which I do not care to name.”32
Breasted also tried to explain how they were digging and ventured to describe the makeup of the ancient mound in terms that the newspaper’s readers might understand. “Certainly, a priceless find was thrown away when the Shishak stone was discarded. That goes to show how careful the excavator must be in throwing aside this or that as worthless,” he said. “We are trying to avoid such pitfalls by removing the soil from the mound a thin layer at a time and sifting every square inch of it. You may or may not know that the Mound of Megiddo, or Armageddon, is made up of layers something like a huge layer cake. Each layer represents the ruins of a city or an age.… Nobody knows how many cities have flourished and died on the site of Megiddo. That is one of the many things this Armageddon expedition of the Oriental Institute hopes to determine. As yet our work is only in its beginning.”33
Momentous as the discovery of the Sheshonq fragment was, it would have been even more meaningful had the Chicago team found the inscribed piece of stone still in situ, or if Schumacher’s workmen had noticed it, whether built into a later wall or in its original context. As both Fisher and then Guy noted in their subsequent reports on their excavations at Megiddo, it might then have been possible to tell which city at Megiddo dated to the time of Sheshonq. By extrapolation, we would then also know which city at Megiddo was the one that Solomon built.
However, since Schumacher’s workmen had simply thrown the inscribed fragment into a spoil heap of dirt and other stones by the side of one of their trenches, there was no record of the level or stratum in which it was actually found. Therefore, in his 1929 preliminary report, Fisher was able to say only, “The fragment of the Shishak stela … came from one of the old surface dump heaps near the eastern edge [of the mound].” Guy mentions it again in the 1931 second preliminary report, but he was able to add only the following: “From somewhere in a minor trench of Schumacher’s (No. 409 in Square M14 on our plan …) which penetrates barely below Stratum IV came the stela fragment of Shishak which was found by Fisher’s foreman in the rubbish heap beside it.”34
In his 2004 book on Megiddo, Tim Harrison noted that this findspot was most likely close to what is now the Northern Observation Platform at the site.35 In 2014, the Tel Aviv team conducted excavations in this area, but no further fragments of the original inscription were found. Despite Breasted’s optimistic statement to Luckenbill—“It is not impossible, indeed probable, that the remnant containing a narrative of his [Sheshonq’s] Palestinian campaign may still be lying in the mound awaiting our excavations”—no other piece from this monument has ever been found.36