CHAPTER XII
“The Director Is Gone”
Loud started things off quickly in early August 1935. He wrote to Lind, who had just been with him at Khorsabad, and asked whether he would serve as photographer for the Megiddo expedition once again. He mentioned that Bob and Jean Lamon had been seen around town (i.e., Chicago), as had Charley and Alice Altman. Lamon was about to go under the knife, he said, having put off the operation on his knee for as long as he could.1
Loud also wrote to Breasted, on the very first day of August. This seems to have been preparatory to a face-to-face meeting the next day, for there is a handwritten note scrawled at the bottom of the letter that reads, “oral OK given Aug. 2, ’35 JHB.” Loud wished to start the season on 10 October, with three soundings or trenches, each in different areas of the mound, so that they could figure out quickly which area was “most worthy of intense investigation,” and then plan for the future from there. This must have been music to Breasted’s ears.2
In fact, what they decided, as Loud later wrote in the Megiddo II volume, was to pursue a new strategy of excavation at the site. As he put it, the “original plan of exposing each stratum in its entirety, already partially abandoned, was entirely discarded. While layer-by-layer uncovering of the mound might be most satisfactory in the end, exigencies of time and limitation of funds indicated the need for quicker though less complete examination of the site.” They decided to try to reach bedrock in a smaller area and to recover the entire archaeological sequence at the site, back to its earliest beginnings. This would be better, they thought, “than to work over a large area of upper strata and learn nothing of the mound’s very early occupations.”3
Loud thought that one of the soundings should be in the same area where they had been working in the spring of 1934, that is, at the southern end of the mound where they had found the palace and the stables in two separate compounds. Another sounding, he suggested, could be placed in the northern part of the site, east of the city gate, while the last one should be in the western part of the mound. In addition, he wanted to do a bit of “exploratory work” to the north of the city gate as well as in the southwestern part of the mound, mostly with an eye toward figuring out the nature of the outer fortification wall.4
FIG. 38. Aerial view, looking west, in 1937 (after Loud 1948: frontispiece; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
Of course, it is one thing to sit in an office in Chicago and propose areas to dig at a site thousands of miles away that one has visited only briefly, and quite another to actually put it into practice. Thus when Loud, plus the Lamons and the Linds, arrived in Haifa two months later, just a few days after Parker and Shipton, they all went out on the mound and promptly tweaked the locations of the three areas a bit.
In the 6 October entry in his field diary, Loud noted that the “north dig,” as they called it, would be located to the west of the main city gate, rather than to the east of the gate as he had first envisioned. It was to be an exploratory trench five meters wide and fifty meters long. The “east dig” would also be a trench five meters wide but seventy-five meters long. It would cut across the eastern part of the mound, rather than the western part as he had first suggested—they decided to move it in the hopes of catching “something important which may lie in this choicest part of the mound.” And, finally, within a week of beginning to dig, they decided to make the “south dig” a five-meter-wide trench also, so that it would be five meters wide by sixty meters long. In the end, “north” became Area AA, “east” became Area BB, and “south” remained Area CC; the areas still retain these designations today. Loud noted that day, “These are so spaced that in one of them we should find the important section of the city.”5 As it happened, they were destined to find interesting remains in two of the three during the coming seasons.
As it also turned out, the reorganization at Megiddo was not so much a rude awakening as it was a welcome relief to those who were still on the staff. There were not many survivors by this point. When the excavations finally resumed in October 1935, only four holdovers were still around to experience the change in leadership: Parker, Shipton, Lamon, and Lind. They were now joined by the Altmans, Charley and Alice, who had come over from Khorsabad with Loud, and two spouses: Jean Lamon and Astrid Lind. In all, there were a total of nine people living in the dig house, with Beaumont coming up for occasional weekends.
Gone by now were Guy, Engberg, May, Irwin, DeLoach, Staples, Woolman, and their wives. Gone also were all of the daily teas and the short workdays favored by Guy. All of the personnel problems and the soap operas of the previous years also vanished, replaced by professionalism and real work done without all the interpersonal scuffles. Even Lamon admitted as much to Charles Breasted by late November: “Contrary to my rather gloomy anticipations concerning the peace of the new Megiddo staff,” he wrote, “all has gone smoothly so far, and I now see no reason to think that that condition will alter in the future.… [A]ll’s well at Megiddo.”6 But by the end of this season, Lamon and Lind would be gone as well.
At Loud’s request, a new car was purchased and shipped over for their use. It was a 1933 four-door Ford V-8 and was a welcome addition to the dig, especially for Serge Tchoub, the chauffeur.7 In addition, the team ordered food supplies in bulk, sufficient to keep them going for most of the season. However, when the crates of food were shipped to Haifa, they were lacking detailed invoices itemizing their contents. The customs officials demanded that the crates be opened on the spot and notes taken of their contents, after which the team was required to leave a hefty deposit pending confirmation from the shipping company as to their exact value, so that the proper amount of duty could be determined. Loud sent such an irate letter back to Howard Matthews in Chicago, who was now in charge of financial matters at the Oriental Institute, that all future shipments came fully invoiced and itemized.8
The detailed notes record that, in this single shipment, they received 48 two-pound tins of Scottish Chief Tomatoes; 24 two-pound tins of sweet potatoes; 48 one-pound tins each of asparagus, sweet garden peas, golden bantam corn, lima beans, and extra-small stringless beans; 24 one-pound tins of fancy sliced pineapple; 10 twelve-pound peacock hams; 30 one-pound tins of ground coffee; and fully 384 tins of tomato juice. They also received numerous tins full of chinook salmon, crabmeat, wet shrimp, tuna fish, frankfurters, mincemeat, pimientos, jams, assorted jellies, Santa Clara prunes, yellow cornmeal, cornflakes, bran flakes, shredded wheat, baker’s chocolate, maple syrup, crushed pineapple, pork and beans, codfish cakes, cranberry sauce, Ivory soap, and Brill household cleansers. They may no longer have had numerous daily teas, but they were still eating well under Loud’s leadership!9 He was probably well aware of the dictum that is still in effect at excavations today—if you want your team members to work hard, you must feed them properly.
In the meantime, there was also a distinct change in leadership style. The easy familiarity and comfortable relations that Loud had with the Oriental Institute administration back in Chicago is noticeable even in the tone of his letters. While James Henry Breasted remained “Dr. Breasted,” as was only proper, Loud addressed the others as “Charles” and “John,” rather than as “Mr. Breasted” and “Mr. Wilson.” Such informality had never happened during all the years when Guy was in charge. Perhaps it could simply be chalked up to chummy Americans with their more relaxed ways, but more likely Loud was much more at ease with the Chicago overlords because he had his own graduate degree from Harvard and an undergraduate degree from Michigan. Unlike Guy, Loud did not have an inferiority complex about his educational credentials. Moreover, Loud was confident in his abilities, having admirably led the excavations at Khorsabad for several years by that point.
Loud introduced somewhat different hours for the digging day, from 6:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with a half-hour break for breakfast at 8:00 a.m. and an hour for lunch at 12:00 noon.10 He also began the practice of keeping a field diary, with daily entries on where they were digging, what they had found, and how many men had been working that day.
In addition, Loud initiated a different split in the digging year. This very first season under his direction at Megiddo commenced in October 1935 and went straight through to May 1936, without any sort of break at all. He followed this schedule for each of the next four seasons, though beginning more usually in November or December and then continuing through early May of each year. This meant that they put in six months of active digging followed by six months of working on publications, with a bit of time off for vacation during the summer.
Ironically, this is very similar to what Guy had been begging for during his last few years as field director—less time digging and more time for recording and publishing. However, this is not to say that Guy had “loosened the cap on the bottle” for Loud. Instead, unexpected circumstances drove the modifications, especially changes in the financial outlook and expenditures of the Oriental Institute itself.
They finally began digging on 12 October, with their Egyptian workmen and sixty local laborers. The very next day they were honored by a visit from Breasted himself, accompanied by his wife and daughter, but not Charles, who had remained behind in Chicago.11 They passed through en route to Syria and then again less than a week later while making their way back to Jerusalem and thence to Egypt. For once, Breasted’s visit did not culminate in someone being fired; the only other time that someone hadn’t been let go as a result of a Breasted stopover was during the “Great Royal Visit” back in 1929. Instead, now he seemed very pleased with what he saw, even though the team was only in the first days of their season. John and Mary Wilson also came through at about the same time, staying for ten days or so.12
What was probably unknown to anyone at the excavation at the time is the underlying reason for the visits by both Breasted and Wilson. They had been sent by Robert M. Hutchins, who was now the president of the University of Chicago, at the request of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and General Education Board (GEB). As mentioned in a previous chapter, these were two of the philanthropic entities associated with the Rockefellers that, among many other duties, were responsible for approving funding for the Oriental Institute and all of its archaeological activities. The trip to the Near East, to check on the various expeditions and determine how efficiently they were being run, had been requested by the two boards and had been planned by Breasted and Wilson for more than a year at that point.13
Why had the request been made? It seems that the devaluation of the dollar and the Gold Reserve Act that had been signed into law the previous year caused sufficient problems that the Rockefeller boards were taking a closer look at some of their expenditures. As a result, just at the time that Breasted was writing to everyone at Megiddo in early 1934 to supplement their salaries because of the damage being done to the dollar, he was called in to meet with a representative from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The meeting was with David Stevens, a former professor of English and associate dean of faculties at the University of Chicago. He had left to join the Rockefeller General Education Board in 1930 and was then appointed the first director of the Humanities Division for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1932. He served in that capacity for the next seventeen years. Stevens and Breasted were quite familiar with each other from the days when Stevens was still teaching at the university, but that did not help matters—according to the Rockefeller Archive Center’s own biography of Stevens, he “moved the RF away from its funding of classical studies and archaeology, refocusing the Foundation’s efforts on creative fields and international cultural exchanges.”14
At that meeting, back in mid-February 1934, Stevens asked Breasted about the Oriental Institute’s overseas expeditions, since Breasted had asked for fully $370,000 for fieldwork at the various excavations during the 1934–35 season. Later that spring and then in the early fall, Stevens met with Hutchins and then again with Breasted in Chicago. The upshot was that Hutchins agreed to send Wilson and a companion on a foreign tour in order “to gather a detailed record of operations abroad.” Not surprisingly, Breasted designated himself as the “companion,” and so they set off in the fall of 1935 to tour all of the Oriental Institute’s overseas projects, including Megiddo. Far from simply trying to accumulate data that would help him defend their expenditures, Breasted planned to use this tour to collect new facts that he could use in requesting another round of multiyear financial support from the Rockefeller boards.15
Immediately after both the Breasteds and the Wilsons had come and gone in October, the dig was hit with torrential rains as well as a labor strike—the local workmen were demanding a seven-hour workday, instead of the current nine hours (including breaks), as well as higher pay. The combination of rain and strike slowed down work considerably for a number of days, but eventually the rain ended and the labor strike was peacefully resolved.16
By early November, they had already done a tremendous amount of work. Starting in Stratum III for the most part, they had plunged down through IV, V, VI, and even VII in all three areas—north, south, and east. They were now deep into the Late Bronze Age remains of Strata VIII and IX, with the ulterior motive of searching for evidence of Thutmose III.17
However, Loud was unsure which layer would have housed the city that Thutmose attacked in 1479 BCE. He eventually told Breasted that he thought it was likely to have been Stratum VIII, even though it did not impress him as a wealthy city—it “seems a poor show,” he said. That meant Stratum IX was “pre-Thutmose,” dating to the sixteenth century BCE. He privately confided his doubts to Wilson, writing: “But where oh where is Thutmose III? Was he a liar, or is this not Megiddo?”18
The digging proceeded without incident for another month, with between one hundred and two hundred local laborers working each day. They were now down through Stratum IX and into X, moving back into the Middle Bronze Age in all three trenches. However, they had also done some horizontal expansion in places, so they were removing earlier remains as well, from VI and VII, in some areas.19
And then the team working in Area BB, the “east dig,” made a spectacular discovery. It was a bronze statuette of a seated Canaanite deity, about ten inches tall and covered in gold foil. Loud promptly labeled it “the find of the season.” He described the statuette to Wilson, writing: “It is of bronze covered with gold leaf and measures 26 cms from foot to top of crown. It’s about as fine a specimen as one could wish for. In the photographs, you see it far from clean, but I don’t dare remove any more of the dirt for fear of scratching the gold leaf. It does, of course, suggest north Syria.” The workmen had found it within debris from Level VIA, the burnt mudbrick stratum, inside a building that Loud had taken to calling the “big house.” Loud thought this might have been a temple, a hypothesis that was now strengthened by the discovery of this object, which he suggested could have served as a cult figure.20
In fact, Loud was correct. The “big house” is now known as Temple 2048, or sometimes the “Migdal Temple.” It is the largest religious structure dating to the Bronze Age found in Area BB. It also turned out to have several phases, beginning in the Middle Bronze and lasting through the Late Bronze Age. It was just one of many such religious structures that the team discovered as they worked their way down and back through time, for this part of the tell was revealed to have served as the sacred area in city after city, all the way back to the Early Bronze Age. As for the statuette, there is no inscription on its base, or anywhere else for that matter, but it is usually interpreted as a representation of the god El, primarily because of the cap that he is wearing.21
FIG. 39. Canaanite bronze statuette, covered with gold foil (OIM A18316; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
FIG. 40. Temple 2048 in Area BB (after Loud 1948: fig. 126; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
Unfortunately, Breasted never got to hear about any of this, for he died one week before the statuette was discovered, while returning from this latest voyage to the Near East. According to his biographer, Jeffrey Abt, Breasted caught a cold on board the ship home, which turned into strep throat complicated by “a latent malarial condition.” Doctors in New York City were able to contain the malaria, but not the strep infection. Breasted died five days later, on 2 December 1935. He was just seventy years old.22
The following day, the New York Times devoted three full columns—the entire left half of the page—to Breasted’s obituary, complete with a large photograph. Lauding him as “one of the foremost archaeologists in the world,” the obituary noted that he had assisted in the exploration of Tutankhamen’s tomb and that he had “discovered the site of Armageddon,” among numerous other achievements. It also mentioned that the physicians had conducted a postmortem exam, in order to eliminate the possibility that his death might be attributed by “superstitious persons to the widely circulated and oft-discredited story of the ‘curse of Tut-ankh-Amen’ ”—though Breasted himself had described the supposed curse as “tommy-rot.”23
Charles sent cables to the various dig directors as well as to the high commissioner in British Mandate Palestine and to Wilson, who was still traveling in the Middle East and was in Baghdad at the time. The reaction was immediate. “Gloom cast over camp by the arrival of the news announcing the death of the Director in New York yesterday,” Loud wrote in his field diary the next morning.24
Charles subsequently followed up with personal letters, still in shock several weeks later. “Now he is gone. We simply cannot believe it,” he wrote to Lamon in mid-December. He said much the same to Loud the next day: “None of us here can realize that the Director is gone. In meeting the immediate duties and responsibilities which have momentarily devolved upon me, I feel myself merely an automaton moving in a strange new darkness.” He did, however, reassure everyone that there would be no changes in their immediate plans. They were to proceed as scheduled for the remainder of the current excavation season. And, said Charles, he would be staying on during the coming year even though he had originally been planning to leave to pursue other opportunities before this sudden development.25
However, despite his reassurances, there were large changes already looming that would drastically affect Megiddo. Several weeks before his death, Breasted had sent a letter to Rockefeller, presenting in detail the current financial straits of the institute. The response was unexpected. Rockefeller stated in no uncertain terms that he was not prepared to continue giving money to the Oriental Institute or to Breasted as a constant stream of new revenue. “I have been as enthusiastic as you yourself about the great central purpose of your work,” he said. However, he continued, “I cannot but feel, much as I regret to say so, that in your enthusiasm you have been led to expand the scope of your operations far beyond what was prudent or permanently possible to maintain.”
Rockefeller made it quite clear that he had never intended to become the sole patron “of the vast enterprise that has since developed,” as he described the Oriental Institute. Moreover, he said, there should be “a complete review of the work of the Oriental Institute at an early date having in mind its future,” for “the situation which you described … is both unsound and precarious.”26 Fortunately, Breasted never saw this letter before he died. As Charles later said to Rockefeller, “the implications … would have grieved him deeply.”27
Thus just two weeks after Breasted died, and during the very same week that Charles Breasted was writing to the dig directors, David Stevens was back in Chicago, like a vulture eying fresh roadkill. He asked Wilson, who would be appointed acting director a few weeks later, to present the Rockefeller boards with a plan in which the overall $700,000 budget of the Oriental Institute was drastically reduced by 50 percent or more and the field projects similarly cut to the bone or shut down completely. With Breasted no longer around to personally defend the various overseas undertakings, Wilson had no choice but to comply.28
Meanwhile, unaware of what was happening back in Chicago in the aftermath of Breasted’s sudden death, Loud and the others continued to dig through December. More remains of walls and buildings appeared from Levels VI–X, as well as a lot of pottery and a few small bronze figurines of Syrian style, plus one made of black serpentine that appeared to be Egyptian. The “north dig” by the city gate seemed particularly promising, for some of the remains from Stratum VII were beginning to look more and more as if they belonged to a palace such as Breasted had long been hoping they would find in that area.29
Since this hypothesized Stratum VII palace would date to the fourteenth century BCE, they also expected to find an archive of clay tablets here. This era was a high point in the ancient Near East and a time when all of the great powers were in contact. Canaan, though, was ruled by a series of small kingdoms or city-states, all of which were vassal to New Kingdom Egypt. In the capital city that the pharaoh Akhenaten built at the site of Amarna, midway between what is today Cairo and Luxor, archaeologists in 1887 found a trove of nearly four hundred clay tablets—the remains of a royal archive of letters belonging to Akhenaten and his father, Amenhotep III. Included among these were six letters sent by Biridiya, the ruler of Megiddo, concerned with various matters.30 Loud had every right to expect that the Egyptian responses to these letters would be stored in the palace that he hoped to uncover in the northern area at Megiddo.
Loud summarized what they had done so far in a letter sent to Wilson on 21 December. With his letter, Loud included a plan and several photographs, to help Wilson visualize what they were doing. Since Wilson had been at the dig just two months earlier, Loud was able to simply launch right in.31
In the southern trench, Area CC, they had found only private houses in each level. Apart from “a good pottery sequence,” they hadn’t retrieved much that was helpful, so they had stopped once they reached the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. They were now shutting down the area for the time being, since the other two areas were in the process of being enlarged and thus needed more workmen, whom Loud was planning to take from this area.32
In the north trench and the east trench—Areas AA and BB, respectively—they were now enlarging the original trench in each area. In the east, they had excavated down to the same Middle Bronze Age level that they had reached in the south, and had retrieved a good pottery sequence here as well.
They were also continuing to uncover what he would later call Temple 2048, which we have already encountered; it was in this building that the statuette of the seated god had been found. Loud described it as “a building of a type entirely new to Megiddo,” with a broad entrance featuring two flanking towers and column bases. He was now certain that it had been built during Stratum X, in the Middle Bronze Age (sixteenth century BCE), but had continued in use through the entire Late Bronze Age, right up until the destruction of Stratum VIA in the early Iron Age (tenth century BCE).33
As for the north area, Loud said, there they were running into massive walls, which were up to two meters thick. These he thought were to be dated to Stratum VIII; there was excellent material from the burnt mudbrick VIA level directly above them, with very poor walls from VII in between. In fact, they would later decide to redate these and assign the massive walls to Stratum VII, with the poor walls belonging to Level VIB, which makes much more sense. They were also beginning to think that the walls belonged to a palace—as it turned out, they did.34
Summing everything up for Wilson, Loud said that the massive constructions in the east and north trenches probably dated to a single period during the Late Bronze Age, “in which must fall the occupation involved in the battle of Megiddo.” He thought that the poorest citizens of the city lived in the southern area, where they had been finding modest houses in each level. He still planned to dig straight down in one area, all the way to bedrock, but this would have to wait until the spring, he said, since the rains were now making it impossible to work in the trenches. However, he was also at pains to remind Wilson that “most of the information comes only from five-meter trenches and cannot be considered conclusive.” He concluded by saying, “I may therefore be forced to change my ideas before the end of the season,” adding, “I trust then that you will not let any of this get into print.”35
FIG. 41. (a) Northern Trench (Area AA); (b) Eastern Trench (Area BB); (c) Southern Trench (Area CC) (after Loud 1948: figs. 1–3; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
The small group at Megiddo then took a brief break for Christmas 1935. They celebrated by going to a dance in Haifa on the evening of the twenty-fourth and opening presents on the morning of the twenty-fifth—“bakshish for the servants and silly presents for staff members,” as Loud put it.36
A few days later, Albright stopped by, on his way home to Baltimore for a year and a half. Loud was very pleased by the visit, writing in his field diary that Albright “seemed greatly impressed with the dig and our objects, and had nothing to offer in the line of contradicting our current theories concerning them.… He confirms my theory that the east building is a Temple beyond a doubt, and thinks, as we hope, that the north building is a palace.”37
They continued working right into the new year. Then, in mid-January, Loud and Shipton headed up to Iraq and Syria for two weeks, in order to dispose of the Khorsabad property since the Oriental Institute was no longer working there. While they were gone, Lamon and Altman were left in charge of the work, both on the mound and in the dig house.38
However, unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Loud received a cable from Wilson just before leaving for Iraq, informing him that the entire Oriental Institute was facing “drastic retrenchment.” The impact on Megiddo seemed minimal at that point, though, for Wilson said only that the budget for next season “must unavoidably be somewhat reduced.”39
In a follow-up letter, Wilson explained that the ten years of funding they had received from the Rockefeller boards back in 1928 for the entire Oriental Institute was due to run out soon. Obviously, given the stock market crash in 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, the world was a different place from what it had been when they received the original grant, and so they had been expecting for some time that they would need to reorganize things. That was why, Wilson now said, he and Breasted had toured the Near East back in the fall; it was, as he put it, “largely for the purpose of collecting information which would be useful in an intensive campaign in New York for refinancing.”40
Such an intensive campaign was now out of the question, since it had been Breasted’s personal relationship with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., that had made all of this possible. With Breasted’s unexpected death, the policy of “retrenchment”—a word that Wilson used continually throughout his communications this spring—“has been made virtually a condition of future support.” Moreover, that retrenchment was to begin immediately. Some of the Oriental Institute’s overseas projects would be marked for an “early and graceful” termination, as Wilson put it, meaning that they would be allowed to continue for a short period, during which they were to wrap up their work.41
Megiddo was not yet in this category, however. Instead, Wilson said that their budget for 1936–37 would be reduced somewhat. He also asked Loud to give him an estimate of how many more seasons he would need to complete the excavation, if he were given an annual budget of $40,000. Having worked at the site several years earlier and visited it just recently, Wilson was confident that they could “complete” (his quotes) their work there “without stripping every meter of earth on the tell,” adding that “the essential facts can be gleaned through work on certain sections of the mound.”42
Loud’s response was fairly succinct. At an absolute minimum, he would need three more seasons, he said; as a maximum, he would wish for six more. As for the reduced budget for the coming year, it was a blow, as he put it, but understandable under the circumstances. They would make do with whatever they could get. Wilson thanked him for being so understanding, and, with that, the digging continued uninterrupted by such matters for another two months.43
In early February, following his return from Iraq, Loud reported that things were going well at Megiddo.44 The rain was holding off and additional workmen kept showing up; they now had 225 local laborers on their payroll, of whom about 200 came to work each day.45 In addition, his piano had finally arrived and had been installed in the house. He had also adopted a new dog, an Irish setter.46
In the east area, they were leaving the temple alone for the moment, after finding fragments from three Egyptian statuettes there, at least two of which were from the Middle Kingdom period. One of them, portraying a man sitting in a chair, had an inscription that states he is “Thuthotep” (recently rendered as “Djehutihotep”), an Egyptian official known to have been a district governor in Upper Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty. The other two were of women, each with only the head and upper body preserved. These were definitely heirlooms, since they were too early for the level in which they had been found, but were interesting additional proof that Megiddo had been in contact with Egypt, or under Egyptian influence, during the mid-second millennium BCE.47
They had also found the first “liver omen” ever discovered in the region, Loud said, just outside the temple. These were more often found up in Mesopotamia—they were model livers usually made of clay and used by priests to help interpret omens or predict the future.48
When they finally began digging in this area later in February, Loud noted that there were two parts to Stratum VII, separated by a burnt layer. This matched what they had earlier noticed in the south area and would be important later in the north area, when it came time to decipher the remains of the palace there.49
In the meantime, speaking of the northern area, they were concentrating on the gate area in the north dig. Loud was quite confident that they could see three different phases to the “Solomonic Gate” there, which Guy had first uncovered back in 1928, and hoped to have more data available soon.50 However, while he was unexpectedly off in Beirut having an emergency appendectomy in March,51 the team discovered that it wasn’t Solomon’s gate after all; instead, it belonged to Stratum III and the Neo-Assyrian period of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.52 The “true Stratum IV gate exists below,” Loud said later, noting that in order to get at this gate they would have to shift their digging area slightly.53
He also said that they were still dating the palace in this north area to Stratum VIII and the fifteenth century BCE, but they were beginning to suspect that portions of it might actually date to Stratum VII and the fourteenth century BCE, and that there were two phases to this level here too. In any event, it was turning out to be “colossal,” as he put it. There was no way that they would be able to finish excavating the palace this season. They were also finding some fragments of painted plaster in what they thought might be the courtyard of the palace. The plaster was mostly painted blue, but there was also some red and green. In addition, one of the more interesting developments, perhaps related to the palace, was the discovery of a set of huge stairs made of black basalt stone that may have led to the city gate during that period.54
FIG. 42. Stratum IV gate, viewed from the north after clearing and before removal of right side (after Loud 1948: fig. 110; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
These basalt stones can still be seen today, just inside the reconstructed Late Bronze Age city gate. Nearby are the remains of the Stratum IV city gate that Loud now thought was the one that dated to the Solomonic period. Unfortunately, once they had the gate all cleared, they removed half of it in order to continue exposing more of Strata VII and VIII (though this project would not be completed until the following year, in March 1937).55
This has created a number of problems for more recent excavators, including both Yigael Yadin and Israel Finkelstein, each of whom have discussed the date of this gate. Yadin, for instance, thought he could link the gate with those built at Hazor and Gezer, and document the existence of a “Solomonic building program” dating to the tenth century BCE.56
Finkelstein, on the other hand, as mentioned at the beginning of this book, has been arguing since the 1990s for a lowering of the chronology for the early first millennium BCE across ancient Israel. His arguments for this “Low Chronology,” as it is called, are many and varied, based in part on traditional ceramic chronology and in part on cutting-edge scientific research including radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis. His suggested redating has a potentially huge impact, including the suggestion that this gate should more likely be dated to the ninth century BCE, perhaps to the reign of Ahab or Omri. The debate continues to the present day.57
By the time Loud wrote again to Wilson, in mid-April, he didn’t have much to add to his previous report, except to say that they were continuing to work in both the north and east areas, and that they had found some jewelry and the lower part of another Egyptian statue with an inscription within the back chamber of the temple in the east area. They had also been digging a few small trenches to double-check their stratigraphy and dating, so he was pretty confident now that Stratum IX could be dated to the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries BCE—that is, the time of the Hyksos rule in Egypt—and that Levels VIII and VII “fill up the 15th, 14th, and 13th centuries,” as he put it.58
Loud later filed a mandatory report with the Department of Antiquities on their activities during the season. In it, he mentions that they had also been digging in Levels X, XI, XII, and XIII, which had taken them back to about 2000 BCE and the very beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. He noted further that they now thought the temple in the east area had first been built in Stratum IX, but completely rebuilt in VIII and VII. They now also thought that it was dedicated to the worship of the Canaanite god Resheph, to judge from the number of small bronze “Resheph figurines”—showing the god with one arm upraised and about to “smite” an enemy—that had been found in and around the temple.59
Loud also told the department that they had found various “ramps”—probably better described as “roadways”—dating to Levels III, IV, and V in the area by the city gate, all representing approaches to the city over the centuries. In addition to the gates of III and IV, which had caused such stratigraphic problems during the season, they now also had a four-chambered gate dating to Stratum VIII (and continuing in use through Stratum VII) lying just to the west of all the later gates—this is the Late Bronze Age gate that tourists now walk through, mentioned just above. There was also a bit of the ramp from the Stratum XI gate lying even farther to the west. In other words, the main entrance to the city had always been in this northern area but was slowly moving to the east in successive levels.60
By mid-April, Loud began to make plans to close up the dig for the season. He sent a cable to Wilson, telling him that their final day of digging would be two weeks thence, on the last day of the month.61 The digging had been going so well and the stratigraphy and dating were so straightforward that one wonders how things might have been different if Loud had been in charge since the very beginning, instead of Fisher and then Guy. We shall never know.
Loud also arranged for a division of antiquities to be made at the beginning of May, right after they stopped digging, so that they could divide up this season’s finds promptly. They had already conducted another division back in February, of items previously excavated from Strata I–V. The Oriental Institute received a fair share both times, and in mid-May Loud shipped back to Chicago seven cases packed full of antiquities plus another case filled with their excavation records.62
However, it was at this point, just at the conclusion of the season, from the end of April until mid-May, that cables began to fly back and forth between Megiddo and Chicago once again. Less than a week before they were scheduled to close for the season, Wilson sent Loud the first of these, written in code. When he decoded it, Loud was astonished at the message:63
ACTION BOARDS TERMINATES ALL ORINST EXPEDITIONS NOW OR NEXT SEASON STOP MEGIDDO MUST TERMINATE INCLUDING LIQUIDATION NEXT SEASON
Wilson offered more details in a long letter that he sent the next day. Back in March, he and the others from the Oriental Institute had submitted a budget to the Rockefeller boards that called for a 50 percent cut, as mentioned. That wasn’t enough for the boards, however. In mid-April, they simply “appropriated a sum of money for the Oriental Institute, thus closing out their relation to the Institute.”64 In other words, perhaps tired of dealing with the institute and also taking advantage of the fact that Breasted was now gone, the boards had opted to effectively give the Oriental Institute what we would now call a “golden parachute,” and terminated their relationship.
We possess the actual details, for the Rockefeller Foundation included them in their Annual Report for 1936, as follows:
The Foundation has made two grants to the University of Chicago in termination of assistance to the Oriental Institute. The first of these, totaling $1,169,766.01, is for current support of the Institute or for its endowment. The second appropriation, amounting to $1,000,000, has been made with the understanding that this fund shall be held for ten years as endowment for the Institute. These grants are intended to conclude the Foundation’s participation in the work of the Oriental Institute.65
While these two amounts, totaling more than two million dollars, sound like—and are—a lot of money, Wilson told Loud that the sum would enable only the running of the Oriental Institute on a skeletal basis, without providing for any teaching, fellowships, publications, or fieldwork. In his words, “The Oriental Institute, as it has been established … is terminated, even though we may prefer to think of it as suspended.” Therefore, he said, they were going to close out most of the projects and expeditions as quickly as possible and concentrate on publishing the material that they had found in Egypt and the Near East during the past decade. After that, they would continue modestly, with less than half their present budget, and eventually hope “to put one small expedition into the field.” The Syrian expedition was being closed immediately; the Iranian expedition would close within the calendar year; and Megiddo, Iraq, and Luxor would be terminated before the end of June 1937, with Megiddo allotted only $38,000 for its final season. “By July 1937, the ‘Oriental Institute’ will not have an expedition in the field,” Wilson wrote. “This blow which has hit us is far too great for any wringing of hands and shaking of heads. It is numbing in its violence.”66
And yet, catastrophic as that all seemed, worse was still to come for the folks at Megiddo. At the end of the first week in May, Wilson sent a second cable, this time in plain English.67
REGRET ANOTHER MEGIDDO SEASON IMPOSSIBLE EXPEDITION TERMINATING NOW STOP CAN YOU REMAIN TO LIQUIDATE HOUSE AND EQUIPMENT WITH HELP PARKER LIND STOP ADVISE ANTIQUITIES DEPARTMENT OF TERMINATION
There would be no final season in 1936–37; instead, they were to immediately close up shop, terminate the dig, and sell the dig house and all its contents. The cable went on to say that Altman, Lamon, and Shipton would remain on the payroll, but would be working on publications back in Chicago. Parker and Lind were not being renewed and would be let go at the end of June. A longer letter, sent the same day, explained that the institute administration had been trying for three weeks to figure a way out of the financial dilemma, but had finally concluded that they had to close down all of the excavations immediately, rather than allow them to continue for another year.68 For the small team at Megiddo, this was the end of the world as they knew it; it was their own personal Armageddon.
FIG. 43. Coded cable sent from Loud to Wilson on 11 May 1936 (courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
More cables flew back and forth across the Atlantic in the next several days—three from Loud to Wilson alone. In them, Loud tersely told Wilson that he, Parker, and Shipton would remain at the site as long as necessary to liquidate everything. He also asked, plaintively, whether they might excavate for one more season after all, on a shoestring budget of $20,000, but Wilson replied that was impossible. And, in one cable, Loud told Wilson that the local conditions were so unsettled that liquidation of the house and all their equipment would be difficult. He followed up almost immediately with another cable, this time in code, stating that the growing disturbances actually made liquidation impossible, and that the government thought the situation could last for weeks. He recommended that they postpone the liquidation until the fall, if things had calmed down by then.69
What was Loud talking about? As it turned out, the “disturbances” lasted for a full six months; they marked the beginning of what is now known as the 1936–39 Arab Revolt in British Mandate Palestine. Loud recorded some of the events in his field diary. On 19 April, he noted: “The Garstangs drop in for five minutes after tea … but all are whisked away in a hurry by police. Riots are under way in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and the police are taking precautions in keeping people off the roads here. So far Haifa remains quiet.” The next day he wrote that it remained to be seen what effect the riots would have on them locally. By 22 April, he noted that the riots were quieting down and had not affected their local work situation.70
What Loud and the others were experiencing at the time was just the opening stage, which soon morphed into a general strike that lasted from May to October 1936. A second, more violent and deadlier, phase would begin a year later, in the fall of 1937, after the Peel Commission released its findings in July of that year, concluding that British control of the area could not be sustained, and proposing a partition—dividing the land between the Arabs, who would receive 80 percent, and the Jews, who would receive 20 percent. The Peel report led to an escalation of the protests, which lasted until 1939 and resulted in an eventual death toll estimated at 150 British soldiers, 500 Jews, and more than 3,000 Arabs. However, that still lay a bit in the future at this point.71
On 12 May, having exhausted all avenues with Chicago, Loud made his way down to Jerusalem, accompanied by Parker. The next morning he went to see Richmond, the director of the Department of Antiquities. Since Richmond was unavailable, Loud met with Hamilton instead and told him that they were finished, not just for the season, but forever. The message certainly resonated with Hamilton—remember that he had once been a member of the Megiddo team for a few weeks back in 1929. A handwritten note that Hamilton penned to Richmond later that same day captures Loud’s reluctant message: “The Oriental Institute has officially closed down the expedition to Megiddo. They are packing up everything except pictures, plants, etc. Mr. Parker will return in the autumn to wind up their affairs.… Mr. Loud wishes to keep the matter of the closing of the dig confidential for the present.”72
And then Loud broke the news to the rest of the team, who had been—seemingly—blissfully unaware until this point. Reaction was immediate—Shipton wrote expressing his “sense of shock and great disappointment” at hearing the sad news that “Megiddo must go the way of all field expeditions.” He was especially disappointed since he felt sure that the next season was destined to have spectacular results. On that point he was remarkably prescient, as we shall see.73
Olof Lind took it hardest of all. Loud recorded in his field diary that Olof and Astrid stormed off on 15 April, just after the Altmans and Lamons had departed a bit more ceremoniously for Haifa.74 The next day, from Jenin, Lind sent a handwritten letter to Wilson in Chicago, commencing a series of increasingly bitter exchanges that continued throughout much of the summer. “We are stranded in Jenin with all our worldly possessions,” he began in this first letter. “I shall join the escorted convoy to Jerusalem, but am obliged to leave everything here. It does seem ridiculous to be ordered out on so short a notice and I should be glad to hear what you intend to do with me after these ten years of services.”75
In the end, after much back-and-forth, including veiled threats of a lawsuit and a plaintive handwritten line, “I was promised a future with the Institute,” at the bottom of one letter, Lind was paid for the months of July and August as a severance package and shown the door.76 Had he played his cards differently, Lind could probably have remained a part of the expedition, but as it was, he proved so aggressive and obnoxious in his interactions with Wilson that when the team regrouped and returned to the field after all, in December 1936, Lind was no longer welcome.