CHAPTER XIII
“You Asked for the Sensational”
In fact, the expedition reversed course from potential termination so quickly that Lind was still fighting for his severance pay when Wilson met once again with Stevens of the Rockefeller board in mid-July. Wilson informed Stevens, somewhat defiantly, that they were allocating $28,000 toward a field season at Megiddo for 1936–37. He said that they might even be able to raise more money, if necessary, before they headed for the field again.1 Stevens had no objections; the institute was free to do with their money as they pleased, just as long as they understood that they weren’t going to get any more from the Rockefeller boards beyond what had just been approved for them.
With that, Wilson and Loud began thinking about how to approach the next season in terms of staffing. There weren’t many team members from whom they could choose, actually. Lind would never be hired by the OI again, while Engberg and Lamon were busy with publications in Chicago—Engberg was working on fixing Guy’s tombs manuscript at the same time as finishing up his PhD dissertation on the Hyksos, while Lamon was working on the stratigraphy volume that would become Megiddo I. Even though Shipton was also working on the publications, they were going to need him at the dig; they also needed the Altmans and Parker.
First, though, they had to make certain that they could get permission to dig again. In early September, Loud sent letters to Richmond, in his role as the director of antiquities, and to the chief secretary in Jerusalem. He explained that recent developments had made another season at Megiddo possible after all, and that they would like to postpone the liquidation and instead dig again beginning in November or December.2
Richmond replied positively, so the only thing that Loud had to do now was wait to see whether the general strike would eventually come to an end, allowing them to begin work. He sent cables to Richmond inquiring about the conditions in mid-October and then again in late October, finally receiving a positive reply: “AS AT PRESENT ADVISED WORK RESUMEABLE DECEMBER.”3
Loud told Shipton and Parker to get ready for an imminent departure. He then told Richmond that Parker would show up in late November, and he himself would arrive in mid-December. He also requested a license to excavate for the coming season. Richmond replied positively for a third time and enclosed a license for Loud and the OI to dig, valid through the end of December 1937.4
One of the last things that they did before leaving for Megiddo—and which actually had to be continued from the field—was to hash out some of the archaeological terminology that they had been using, which was now about to be put into print for the rest of the world to see. George Allen, in the Editorial Department at the Oriental Institute, had real problems with some of the terms that Guy was using for the relative dates in his tombs volume—not the absolute chronological dates like 1479 BCE, but his system of archaeological classification that involved overlapping periods, including something called “Middle-Late Bronze” (abbreviated “M-LB”). As Allen put it fairly bluntly, Guy’s classification system “does not seem to agree with the facts nor with the way he has actually used it.” Allen was also insistent that they needed to work their way through this now, so that the new terminology could be used consistently throughout the volumes that were about to appear.
Allen proposed that they should follow a new scheme, which Albright had introduced just four years earlier when publishing his excavations at Tell Beit Mirsim in 1932. The various phases would be labeled as Early Bronze, Middle Bronze, Late Bronze, and Early Iron Age, for instance, with subdivisions in Roman numerals, so that one could talk about the EB I period or the LB II period and other scholars would know exactly what was meant. In the end, after much wrangling, primarily between Shipton and Allen, with Loud stepping in when needed and Guy essentially informed after the fact, they agreed to follow Allen’s suggestion. This ultimately proved to be a wise decision, since Albright’s cultural chronological scheme was subsequently adopted by everyone else as well and is still in use today by all archaeologists working in the ancient Near East.5
Loud sailed from New York on the RMS Queen Mary in early December, arriving at the port of Cherbourg in northern France less than a week later. After spending the night in Paris, he caught the train to Brindisi in Italy and from there took the SS Galilea, reaching Haifa and then going straight on to Megiddo, “arriving in time for a late breakfast” on 14 December. Parker and Shipton had already been there for two weeks by that point, so the house was in order with everything ready to go for the season, though the Altmans wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days.6
And thus, with the Altmans still to come, the dig officially began a few days later, on 19 December, less than six months after it had been scheduled for termination and liquidation.7 It was later in the year than they had ever begun before—in previous years they would have been closing down around this time for the winter break, but now they were just getting started. It was also a very small staff: Loud as field director, and then Shipton and Parker as always, plus Charley and Alice Altman. That was it. The Megiddo expedition was back down to the same small size that it had been during the very first season a decade earlier, in the spring of 1926, when Fisher and Higgins were at each other’s throats, watched by DeLoach, Kellogg, and Fisher’s nephew Stanley. As Loud told Wilson a few weeks later, “The five of us fairly rattle about in this large house.”8
On the bright side, they found themselves with a plethora of local labor and were soon overseeing more than two hundred workers each day, in large part because the locals had been driven to the edge of poverty by the general strike, which had only just ended in October.9 Loud said that there were still bitter feelings throughout the country, but their property had suffered no damage while they were away, and the local villagers had been looking after it of their own accord. It was now dangerous to travel at night, for fear of being held up by bandits, and trips to Jerusalem could be done safely only in broad daylight. As it turned out, although Wilson continued to be concerned about the political situation, Loud and the others seem to have had no problems during the entire season—or at least none that they reported.10
They began work immediately in the north and east areas again, leaving the south area untouched. Loud’s goal was to get all of the north area that was lying to the west of the city gate down to Stratum VIII, so that they could finish clearing the “big house”—that is, the palace. They were only in Stratum VI at the moment, however, so it was going to take a while, especially since they knew that Levels VII and VIII were very complicated in that area. Over in the east area, though, they were already down in Stratum IX, which Loud was still confident dated to the Hyksos period, toward the end of the Middle Bronze Age.11
As Christmas approached, they began finding some strange burials in the east area, relating to houses that had been built in Stratum VIII near the temple. One burial, underneath the corner of a room, contained the bones of a man with a metal piece lying across his nose and eyes for some reason and his head lying on the jawbone of an animal.12 Another burial, located neatly under the floor of a nearby house, contained an alabaster jar, a shell, a piece of yellow pigment, and a single human foot. No other bones; just a foot. Loud wrote in his field diary that he wondered about the significance of the yellow pigment, but surely we must wonder (tongue-in-cheek) whether the ancient Canaanites talked, as we do, about “having one foot in the grave.”
Ironically, he also noted that even though they had already found a gold pendant with the goddess Astarte on it, overall “the objects to date cannot be considered sensational. No stela nor tablets have made an appearance, and the burials have so far been without the crown jewels.” Little did he know that they were about to make two separate discoveries that would certainly be considered “sensational” and covered worldwide, but that was still a few months away.13
Just in time for Christmas, on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, Charley and Alice Altman finally arrived. The groceries and other supplies for the season had shown up the day before, so there was plenty of food for Christmas Eve dinner. Unfortunately, Loud’s piano had somehow been damaged “by force and by water” while in storage, so that when they unpacked it along with the groceries, they found that the case was split on both sides and the finish had been ruined. However, the strings and the sounding board were intact, and so there was undoubtedly also music that evening. A week later, having been unable to work because of rains every day since the twenty-fourth, they went to Haifa for a Toscanini concert and the New Year’s celebration at the club, so one could say that the year ended on a high note.14
By early January, they had more than two hundred men working full-time on the tell, and by mid-February they were already clearing Stratum XI in the east area and encountering XII. Loud’s plan was to keep going down in this area, so that they could be certain of the cultural and ceramic sequence all the way back to about 2000 BCE. Eventually, they did exactly that over the course of the season, reaching down to Stratum XVII. Along the way they found a level with “mammoth walls, colossal stairways, [and] a curving enclosure wall (perhaps the parapet wall of a terrace overlooking the plain).” Loud thought these were from what he called “interlocked” Strata XIV and XV, but said that they would have to wait until the next season to figure out where it all fit into the general sequence.15
In the meantime, Wilson had not been having any success in his initial attempts to persuade the Rockefeller boards to give them additional money. In a letter sent in late January, he wrote to Loud that this definitely would be the last season at Megiddo: “A trip to New York last week failed to change our financial picture … it now seems improbable that any future work will be done at Megiddo next season or in the indefinite future.” He closed by saying: “All this is very depressing, but you may have built up an immunity to it by this time. At any rate, you are in the field and I rather envy you that. Make the most of it and have a very successful season.”16
Just four days earlier, Loud had sent a long missive to Wilson, which began with his blatantly stated desire that they would find something sensational soon: “Your desire for the sensational from Megiddo is no greater than mine,” he wrote. “Something startling would certainly be a big help. My greatest desire for the moment, however, is for a break on the weather so that we might dig to the pot of gold, whatever form it may take.”17
Loud wrote again in late January 1937, saying that they had been rained out and prevented from digging for more than a week at that point—the amount of rainfall so far had exceeded the usual average for the entire winter. That did not mean they remained idle, however, for they took the opportunity to record and register the tremendous number of pottery vessels that were coming from all of the burials they had uncovered during the previous weeks. A few days later, he said they had been rained out again—“surely these rains can’t go on forever,” he wrote.18 One can only point out that this is why neither Fisher nor Guy ever excavated during the winter months.
As it turned out, Loud’s letter wishing for the “sensational” was prophetic. The clouds eventually parted, the sun came out, birds started singing, and so forth, and toward the end of February, Loud was able to write to Wilson saying that the north area, which he had previously perceived as dull and troublesome, “now takes its full share of interest.” As he described it, the palace was proving to be both extensive and magnificent, with walls standing as high as four meters in some places and covered with painted mud plaster. There was also a “floor of shells which gives the appearance of a mosaic pavement.” Further, the team began finding pieces of carved ivory, some with incised Egyptian hieroglyphics and others decorated with elaborate designs. Soon these initial pieces would be joined by a host of additional artifacts, in the form of a hoard of gold objects followed immediately by a treasure trove of ivory objects. All were found within just a few rooms of the palace in the north area and made this “a most successful season,” as Wilson later put it.19 In early March, Loud wrote, “There can no longer be any doubt of the importance of this mound.”20
They found the first pieces on the first day of March. In his field diary entry the next day, Loud wrote: “Full work the past three days, but so many extras to attend to that non-essentials must slide. All this largely due to what is probably the find of the season—a hoard of gold jewelry, vessels, etc in 3100—an outer room of the north palace. So rich, so varied, and so fragile are the finds that there is infinite work in removing and cleaning them. It began yesterday morning when a shell-shaped dish in which was a green stone jar capped with gold first appeared.”21
Four days later, he sent a coded cable to Chicago, announcing the find. When decoded on the other end, the message read:22
FIG. 44. Stratum VIII gold hoard under floor of Room 3100 (after Loud 1939: fig. 58; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
STRATUM EIGHT PALACE PRODUCES MAGNIFICENT EGYPTIAN GOLD HOARD:—FLUTED SHELL-SHAPED BOWL, PERFUME JARS, JEWELRY, ETC. 18TH DYNASTY CONTEXT [BUT] STYLE SUGGESTS PARTLY MIDDLE KINGDOM ORIGIN. UNPARALLELED THIS COUNTRY.
Just as with Guy’s discovery of the stables almost a decade earlier, the cable sent back in reply consisted of a single word. “CONGRATULATIONS.”23
Loud also sent a much longer letter later that same day, with all of the details. It began: “Dear John: In one of your letters, you asked for the sensational. If I’m not very much mistaken, I think this is now a fait accompli.” What they had been calling for some time the “big house” in the northern area by the city gate was now, beyond all doubt, “a grand palace full of no mean treasure.” Specifically, they had found a hoard of gold and ivory treasure deliberately buried under the floor in the southwest corner of a small room (3100) located at the northern end of the palace. The pieces were amazing, “a magnificent collection, absolutely unique in Palestine.”24
Neither Loud nor the other members of the team were clear on the function of some of the objects they were finding, or to when they dated. Other archaeologists who came to see them, including Iliffe and the revered Petrie, were similarly “stumped,” as Loud put it. Although most of the objects were made of gold, there were also items of ivory, lapis lazuli, serpentine, and other materials.
According to Loud, they were found in two layers. The pieces in the top layer included what he called an ivory “wand,” but which looks more like a horn of some sort, with three bands of incised gold around it and a woman’s head on the narrow end. There was also a fluted shell-shaped gold bowl in which was lying a perfume bottle made of serpentine with a gold rim; fifteen gold granular beads and a number of round lapis lazuli beads; a Mitannian lapis lazuli cylinder seal from North Syria; three conical paste medallions in gold mountings; a possible whetstone; and burnt bones—possibly human—“scattered all over the place.”
Underneath this group was another layer of objects, which included a large gold scarab ring, with the scarab so disintegrated that they were not able to read the hieroglyphics on it. There was also a second perfume jar, this one probably made of hematite and with gold on its rim and base; two ivory disks and several “disk crowns”; a gold mesh chain with two unidentified objects attached to it; and a double item of gold that Loud labeled “Egyptian Siamese twins, beautifully modeled of thin gold filled with paste.” These are now thought to be representations of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, joined at the ear, with a spoon for cosmetics or ointment attached at the top of each of the heads.
Finally, there was also part of a face from an ivory figurine, a second Mitannian cylinder seal of lapis lazuli with gold caps on the ends, and a gold headpiece, as well as a number of additional beads. These last few pieces, Loud said, were found two weeks after the other objects and were slightly apart from them—underneath the northern wall rather than next to it.25
Loud noted in his field diary that there was no evidence to suggest that this was a burial, despite the presence of what seemed to be burnt human bones. Instead, at first he thought it seemed more like a “robbers cache,” but by the time he actually published everything more than a decade later, in the Megiddo II volume, he suggested that it was simply a hoard dating to the time of the original Stratum VIII palace, “buried beneath the floor apparently in the hope that it would escape detection by threatening attackers.”26
Most recently, David Ussishkin has suggested that the hoard was actually hidden in a pit that was dug into the floor of the later Stratum VIIA palace, which went all the way down into the Stratum VIII level, and that Loud’s workmen had failed to detect this pit. If so, all of these objects will most likely have been hidden at the time of the destruction of the VIIA palace, sometime in the twelfth century BCE. This does make more sense, since there is no indication that the Stratum VIII palace was destroyed, or that there was a significant episode involving “threatening attackers” back in the later fifteenth or early fourteenth century BCE. Regardless, whenever it was buried, the hoard evaded detection until 1937, a span of well more than three thousand years.27
A similar type of gold hoard, consisting primarily of golden earrings and numerous beads, was found in 2010 by the Tel Aviv Expedition to Megiddo, in their Area H, which is located just to the west of this palace. That hoard had been hidden inside a jar, which had then been buried beneath a floor of the building.28 It probably dates to about the time of the final destruction of the palace or a bit later, which means, if Ussishkin is correct about redating the hoard that Loud found, the two treasure troves would have been buried at about the same time and for the same reason—the very real threat to the VIIA city that resulted in the destruction of the palace and the rest of the level.
Loud joyfully described Megiddo as becoming “the Tut’s tomb of Palestine,” because of the quantity of gold and the fact that the majority of these objects dated to the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty. He cautioned, though, that some might be heirlooms dating back to the Middle Kingdom. On this he was quoting both Iliffe and Petrie; the latter said that the perfume jars were definitely “middle 18th dynasty,” but Loud also noted that Petrie had never seen anything like the shell-shaped gold bowl: Petrie “thinks it more Asiatic than Egyptian.”29
Loud later sent photographs of the gold objects to Wilson and asked whether he should request a loan of the entire group, so that they could put it on exhibit in either Chicago or New York, or both places.30 Wilson was in favor of such an exhibit, of course, in part because of the potential for attracting future donors to both Megiddo and the Oriental Institute as a whole. However, he noted that although newspapers “are waiting with tongues hanging out for feature pictures of the gold objects and an imaginative story to go with,” they would have to postpone such an exhibit until after the division of objects had been made at the end of the season, and then put in a loan request for any that had been taken by Iliffe for the museum.31
In the meantime, though, Wilson put out a press release, and articles about the discovery soon appeared in papers around the country. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for instance, breathlessly reported that “Egyptian Gold of 1400 B.C.” had been dug up in Palestine, and quoting Wilson as saying that it had been found “in the palace of the Prince of Megiddo.” It appeared on the front page, right next to an article about Adolf Hitler, who had floated a promise not to go to war against France, though the proposal (Hitler’s, not Wilson’s) was being seen as an effort to “scuttle” the League of Nations, as the newspaper phrased it.32
Later, in early August, the gold treasures did finally go on display, after Iliffe took only a few pieces for the museum (the fluted gold bowl, the serpentine perfume jar, and three gold beads). The same St. Louis paper then ran a full-page article on them, complete with pictures of the gold objects as well as some of the other artifacts.33
However, all of that was just the appetizer. The main course was yet to come, for it subsequently turned out that there was more than just the gold hoard in this palace. In fact, what they found next eclipsed the hoard almost entirely, at least in terms of discoveries that are today most frequently cited and discussed when it comes to Megiddo.
FIG. 45. The Treasury (3073) viewed from the south (after Loud 1939: fig. 3; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
In the same letter that he sent to Wilson in early March, Loud reported that they were clearing three other rooms, which were turning out to be “veritable mines” of ivory objects. In just one corner of one room, they found “combs, spoons, plaques, medallions, etc. all helter skelter with skeletons of a child and a young camel plus another human skull, and more camel skull!” One of the nicest pieces was still half-buried, he said, but seemed to be part of a cup or goblet with an exquisitely carved design of pomegranates and scrolls.34
Loud rarely used exclamation marks in his letters, so he must have been truly excited when he wrote all of this. He later explained to Wilson that he had been tempted to send a cable about the discovery of the ivories as well but had refrained “less the shock of so much from Megiddo might be too much for you.”35 He also told Howard Matthews that since sending his cable about the gold, which Matthews had been the one to decode back in Chicago, the ivories “have so far surpassed the original find that they, rather than the gold, now take first place.”36
FIG. 46. Complete animal skeleton and ivories in the western half of the northern room of the Treasury, looking east (after Feldman 2009: fig 3; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
On that same day, Loud wrote in his field diary that “in N=3073 whence so many ivory fragments have come, in the NW corner, is a strange burial [—] a camel’s head (?), probably a complete camel—head, neck, and forelegs now cleared—, two human skulls and some human ribs, etc. Mixed in with this strange assortment of bones are quantities of ivory … the entire burial must be cleared for photographing before we can remove any of the objects.”37
On the next day, he wrote, “The amount of ivories appearing in N=3073 becomes alarming.” He also noted again the two skeletons and two additional skulls that they were uncovering: “Skeletons number two, one child and one young camel, with two additional skulls, one human and one camel. What a strange assortment it all is.” And, two days after that, he wrote again: “Ivories of every size, shape, and description coming forth in both N=3073 and 3073 itself. They will make a fine varied collection after proper treatment which will take months.”38
In fact, it took them more than a month of work, from 6 March until 7 April, just to carefully excavate and remove all of the ivories, all the while entertaining visitors who came to see their finds, including some of the best-known archaeologists working in the area, from Petrie to Nelson Glueck (later president of Hebrew Union College), Eliezer Sukenik (later renowned for purchasing and translating the first three Dead Sea Scrolls), Olga Tufnell (who was excavating at Lachish with James Starkey), and Gerald Lankester Harding (director of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan at the time). Removing the ivories was an elaborate and time-consuming process that involved using celluloid to harden or piece together the fragments; applying solvent to soften the dirt that remained attached; and occasionally sticking paper to the fragments, again using copious amounts of celluloid, which could later be easily peeled off.39
The ivories were all definitely from the palace of Stratum VIIA. They were found in the destruction layer of the three rooms, dating to the twelfth century BCE. Together these three interconnected rooms formed what Loud later termed the “Treasury,” which was semisubterranean and thus situated a few feet lower than the rest of the rooms. It was a new addition that had not been present in the earlier phase(s) of the palace. There was also no obvious access to it from the rest of the palace; Loud hypothesized that there had originally been a ramp or a staircase leading down to the rooms, but as he noted, there was no actual evidence for this.40
Loud gave the center room the number 3073. The room to the north—which had almost all of the ivories—became N=3073, while the room to the south became S=3073, according to the terminology that they were using at the time. Later, in the Megiddo II volume, Loud renamed these 3073 A, B, and C, with A being the southern room, B the middle room, and C the northern room.
Loud also noted that there were fragments from broken items that were found in the separate rooms and yet went together when mended—as he put it, “Often, however, fragments from one room fit those from another room.” This was a clear indication that the rooms were all related, but it was still not at all clear how or why such trauma to the items could have occurred.41
Loud later sent a brief report to Iliffe, reporting on the findspots of the various ivory pieces. As noted, the vast majority of the ivories were found in the western half of the northernmost room (3073C, originally known as N=3073). There were so many here that Loud subdivided the room into one-meter squares, each one labeled with a Roman numeral from I to IX, in order to keep better track of where the various ivories were found. We now call this “fine gridding” or “micro-gridding,” which is a procedure that is frequently done today in exactly such situations. Loud included a sketch, which never made it into the final publication, but that clearly depicts the rooms and the subdivided sections of the northern room.42
Early on, Loud estimated that there were more than a hundred “first-class pieces.” In fact, there are closer to four hundred pieces all told, including items that Loud thought had “Egyptian, Syrian, Cretan, and Assyrian motives.” He was correct—later scholars have confirmed the international nature of this collection, detecting Hittite, Mycenaean, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Canaanite, and Assyrian motifs.43 They found so many ivories that Loud told Wilson he had hired a photographer named G. Eric Matson, from the American Colony in Jerusalem, to help out with all of the documentation.44 No doubt he now regretted that they had parted ways with Lind less than six months earlier.
In addition to the combs, spoons, plaques, medallions, and various other items that Loud had mentioned in his original letter to Wilson back in early March, there was also a box, measuring fifteen centimeters square and ten centimeters high, that was carved in deep relief on all four sides. Two sides had a pair of sphinxes and two sides had “as good representations of the Lion of Babylon as you could wish to find.” Loud needed help with this object, so Iliffe came with his ivory expert to assist in removing it without undue damage during the process. Iliffe also agreed to have his conservators work on all the fragmentary ivories at no cost to the Chicago expedition, and to allow for an immediate loan of the pieces that were still complete and could survive the trip to the United States, both of which were incredibly generous offers.45
FIG. 47. Ivory pen case with cartouche of Ramses III (after Loud 1939: plate 62; courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
Another piece, one of the last to appear but possibly the most important, was another box, long and rectangular, that is usually identified as a “pen case,” that is, a receptacle for the writing implements used by Egyptian scribes. This particular one belonged to an Egyptian official named Nakht-Amon, who was a “king’s messenger.” To the excavators’ delight, the inscribed text on the case included the cartouche of Pharaoh Ramses III, thereby allowing them to date the case, the ivory deposit as a whole, and the destruction of the palace as well, for Ramses’s dates of rule during the first half of the twelfth century are well known (1184–1153 BCE).46 It is perhaps worth noting in passing that this is exactly the sort of discovery for which Breasted had been waiting—if only it had happened two years earlier.
When Loud later published the ivories, he used some of the same phrases that he had written earlier in his private letters and field diary: “The helter-skelter arrangement of the ivories as they were discovered is astonishing,” he wrote in 1939. “The great majority of the pieces were found in the western half of the outermost room [N=3073]. They were in close confusion, mingled with occasional fragments of gold jewelry and alabastra and with scattered animal bones, the whole mass topped with a complete animal skeleton.” He went on to note that the ivories were not found lying in clear-cut layers; instead, “one piece might overlap another, often in actual contact. They were found in all positions, in oblique planes as often as horizontally.”47
Both Loud and later scholars have suggested that the “helter-skelter” distribution of the ivories was the result of looters and thieves who had broken into the Treasury, perhaps as the palace was undergoing its final destruction, and that they ripped apart wooden furniture, and the like, leaving these ivory pieces lying on the floor. However, Loud emphasized the fact that many of the pieces had been broken before being buried—implying that they were not broken at the final moment, but rather at some earlier point. He also suggested that the ivories were stored on wooden shelves, which had long since disintegrated, a hypothesis that many other scholars accept. In the end, he concluded that perhaps these pieces, even the broken parts, constituted a collection that belonged to a prince of Megiddo whose hobby was collecting pieces of ivory.48
However, later scholars have taken issue with this suggestion. Richard Barnett, a longtime keeper at the British Museum, most definitely did not like the “weak” suggestion offered by Loud that the “eccentric lord” of Megiddo had a hobby of “ivory collecting.” Instead, Barnett and others, including most recently Marian Feldman and David Ussishkin, have pointed to the real commercial value of the ivories, along with the fragmentary alabaster jars, gold beads, and other items that were scattered among them, and have thought that all this actually represents the tangible wealth of the prince—and the royal family—of Megiddo. Feldman suggests that the pieces may have been deliberately buried as a hoard rather than merely a group of items collected as part of a hobby. Still others have suggested that this might have been an ivory workshop.49
The conundrum of the skeletons continued to puzzle Loud and is still an enigma today. After all of the ivories had been safely removed, Loud wrote to Wilson: “The late date for the ivories which Ramses III attaches to them was at first startling, but the ivory rooms are clearly of the last phase of the palace, the earlier walls having been ruthlessly cut away for this one unit, the floor level of which is below the earliest palace. The whole thing suggests to me a treasury of cellar-like construction from which the objects of intrinsic value were removed in haste while the ivories were simply chucked aside. But I still can’t account for the child and camel skeletons unless they were caught in the act of thieving and paid the extreme penalty on the spot.”50
In the final publication of the ivories, he wrote further: “Even if such a theory of ivory collection be accepted, we are still at a loss to explain the presence among the ivories of the animal bones and of the complete skeleton.”51 Note that he here mentions only “animal bones” and the “complete [animal] skeleton.” There is no mention of the skeleton of a child, or even simply “the two human skulls and some human ribs,” either here or in his Megiddo II volume, despite the fact that they were quite specifically mentioned in two of his letters and two field diary entries.52 Did the “two human skulls and some human ribs” or the “skeletons of a child and a young camel plus another human skull, and more camel skull” later become simply “animal bones”? This seems extremely unlikely—one does not usually mistake human skulls and ribs for animal bones.
So how does one account for the full or partial child(ren) and animal skeletons, especially since there is no such thing as a “thieving camel”? Most scholars don’t even try—they ignore the fact that even in his book on the ivories, Loud included a picture that clearly shows the animal skeleton still in situ, directly on top of the spot where he would later remove the ivories using the fine grid system. An even better photograph is also in the Oriental Institute archives and was first published by Marian Feldman (see fig. 46).53
However, there is one explanation that can account for everything Loud found in these rooms and for the confused, and confusing, state in which he found it all. In 1993, Rolf Hachmann, subsequently followed by other scholars, proposed that these three interconnected rooms at Megiddo are actually a built royal tomb, specifically placed in a semisubterranean level of the palace. Hachmann had previously published an excellent parallel from his site of Kamid el-Loz, located near Damascus in what is now Syria, where there is a built tomb associated with the Late Bronze Age palace. He noted that there were other possible parallels as well, found in Bronze Age levels at the sites of Byblos and Alalakh.54
Interestingly, the tomb at Kamid el-Loz was also dubbed the “Treasury” by the site’s excavators. It contained the skeletons of a child and an adult in one room and a second child in another room, apparently interred at two different times. The grave goods included pottery, gold ornaments, and a number of ivory objects that were already broken when they were placed in the tomb, as well as others that apparently were scattered when the tomb was reopened for the second burial(s).55
If these rooms at Megiddo are also a tomb, perhaps with two interments made at different times, it would explain the presence of the two children and the two animals, as well as the scattered and broken objects.56 According to this scenario, the ivories would belong to the earlier interment, to which would also be assigned the partial skeletons, that is, the skulls (and perhaps the ribs) of one of the children and the other animal. In preparation for the later interment, all of the earlier material, including the ivories, would have been pushed to the back of the tomb, as frequently happens in such cases. If the ivories had been carelessly shoved into a pile in the back room in order to create space for the second burial, it would explain why they were found lying “helter-skelter” and in disarray, “in oblique planes as often as horizontally.” It could also explain why broken pieces from the different rooms fit together, since they may have been shattered and fragmented during this process.
Furthermore, such a situation would also explain the other items that were found scattered among the ivories, including gold pomegranate beads, gold jewelry, scarabs, fragmentary alabaster jars, and pottery sherds,57 which might now be identified as grave goods. Moreover, if the two children had been interred at different times, this might explain why the complete animal skeleton was found directly on top of the ivories, for it and the other grave goods that accompanied the later interment of the second child may simply have been placed on top of, and/or next to, the earlier material.
While all of this must remain a very tentative hypothesis, it does seem to better account for all of the items present, and for their specific locations within the rooms, than any of the other suggestions that have been made to date. Moreover, it is worth noting again that in his initial diary entry, Loud himself referred to all of the skeletal material as a “strange burial,” although he seems to have promptly forgotten that fact.58
As for the complete animal skeleton, Feldman suggested that the animal was more likely some sort of bovid: a cow, rather than a camel.59 More recently, however, Haskel and Tina Greenfield have suggested that it is actually much more likely to be an equid (i.e., a horse, a donkey, or an onager).60 Since the bones were discarded by Loud long ago and we are reduced to looking at fuzzy, low-quality photographs now, we cannot decide for certain what type of animal it was, nor what type of animal the other “camel” skull was from. However, if it is an equid, then there are a number of parallels and other examples of tombs in Canaan in which equids were buried alongside the human remains, including at Tell es-Safi in the Early Bronze Age and Tell el-Ajjul during the Middle Bronze Age.61
The other detail to consider is when all of this took place. The fact that the pen case was inscribed with the cartouche of Ramses III meant that the destruction of the palace could not have happened before his reign, but did it take place during his reign or sometime afterward? This is a question of great importance, for this is the approximate time period when most of the great civilizations, and some of the minor ones, in the ancient Near East came crashing down, in what is usually referred to as the “Collapse” at the end of the Bronze Age.62
The final destruction of the VIIA palace at Megiddo fits right into this context. Radiocarbon dates seem to indicate that it took place sometime after the reign of Ramses III, no earlier than approximately 1130 BCE and perhaps a few decades later, rather than during his actual reign.63 However, there is another aspect to consider, for there is also a destruction of an earlier phase of the palace, about which we haven’t yet spoken, namely, the palace of Stratum VIIB.
Alert readers will recall Loud’s observation in the east area from a year earlier, during spring 1936, when he noted that there seemed to be two parts to Stratum VII, separated by a burnt layer. This matched what they had seen in the south area as well, and they had already begun to suspect at the time that the same was true in the north area. Now they were able to confirm that this was indeed the situation here in the palace.
This phase of the palace lay in between the edifices of VIII and VIIA, meaning that the entire history of the palace lasts from sometime in the fifteenth century to sometime in the twelfth century BCE. Loud does note that some of the western portion was altered, while a later construction in Stratum VI destroyed most of the eastern wing. However, the VIIB palace was also violently destroyed, at least in part, such that Loud noted the following in his Megiddo II volume: “The Stratum VIIB palace obviously suffered violent destruction so extensive that the Stratum VIIA builders deemed it more expedient to level off the resulting debris and build over it than to remove it all as was the procedure in previous rebuilding undertakings. When excavated court 2041 and room 3091 of Strata VIII–VIIB were filled with fallen stone to a height of about a meter and a half … over which a new, Stratum VIIA pavement must have stretched.” As the late Itamar Singer noted, that means that the floor of the Stratum VIIA palace was almost two meters above the floor of the VIIB palace.64
Back in 1995, David Ussishkin suggested that this is not a separate destruction, but that the palace simply had two stories, both of which were destroyed at the same time in the twelfth century BCE. He has since doubled down on this suggestion, even though it has not found much favor with other scholars.65
Mario Martin, currently one of the codirectors of the ongoing Tel Aviv Megiddo Expedition, has recently proposed a different scenario, which seems more logical to me. He suggests that the VIIB phase of the palace was destroyed in the early twelfth century BCE, which is in line with the destructions at other sites. He then dates the final destruction of the VIIA phase of the palace, and the entire city, to a few decades later.66
In any event, this miraculous season, so unexpected back in January—and which almost didn’t come to pass in the first place, given the events at the end of the previous season—finally wrapped up when digging stopped in mid-April.67 Among the last things that they did was to begin removing the remains of the palace that they had just painstakingly spent all season excavating. In his field diary entry for 7 April, Loud noted that they had started “breaking down the walls of the ivory unit to get its connection with the real palace.” A week later, he wrote, “The ivory rooms [are] gradually being wrecked in order to trace the walls of earlier periods which run underneath and form quite a different plan.”68
They ended up, over the course of the next seasons, removing every bit of the VIII and VII palaces that they had found, leaving nothing standing. They took out the walls that stood fully four meters tall and had painted plaster on them, as well as the mosaic shell pavement, to see what lay beneath. Unfortunately, there was nothing nearly as spectacular underneath, and today there is nothing to be seen at the site of this once-magnificent palace. For that I personally mourn, and I agree with Ussishkin’s recent assessment that it was “a totally superfluous action.”69
There is, however, still a part of the palace remaining, because Loud and his team did not get to it. This is the continuation of the palace to the south, which is now tantalizingly partially visible in the forty-foot-high balk that the Chicago team created in this area. The current Tel Aviv excavators began to dig here in the early 1990s but later moved away from this sheer drop. Since then, they have been excavating immediately to the west of this space, in their Area H, with excellent results, and are now down into Middle Bronze Age levels, but they will miss recovering the rest of the palace by a few dozen feet at the most.
The division of the artifacts found during the season, with the exception of the ivories, was made on 1 May.70 Two days after that, Loud wrote to Wilson, saying that “the division was really astonishing.” He and Iliffe had already agreed to leave the division of the ivories for the next year, after they had all been conserved and repaired, so they had been splitting the rest of the objects. Loud told Wilson that perhaps Iliffe was “lying in wait for the ivories,” but he actually thought “it is because Iliffe likes this expedition and hopes for the future from us.” Iliffe had taken a lot of the pottery and scarabs, “but not at all unfairly.” And, as for the rest of the objects, “he scarcely took a thing,” according to Loud.71
In addition to everything that they had acquired in the division, Loud said, he was also going to be shipping to Chicago more than a hundred pieces of ivory from the “Treasury” as well as the two gold artifacts from the hoard in room 3100 that Iliffe had taken for the museum but was loaning them for the coming year. All of these they were allowed to put on exhibition, which Loud hoped would take place in October, if all went well.72
Loud then sent all of the ivories down to Jerusalem for initial conservation and renovation. Along with them went several pages of a detailed inventory list, so that they would know which came from each of the separate rooms.73
And with that, Loud and the other members of the team began packing up the dig house and prepared to head off in various directions for well-deserved vacations. They would all reconvene in Chicago for the fall, including Shipton (who was eagerly anticipating his first visit to the States), in order to work on the publications. Lamon would not be joining them, though, for back in March he had taken a job in Ibagué, Colombia, working as a petroleum geologist—he continued in that career for the rest of his life, as mentioned previously.74
Loud closed a late April letter to Wilson with the words “Thus ends the 1936/37 Megiddo season.” He left Megiddo in mid-May, sailing for London via Trieste, and then a week later for New York, on the SS Aquitania, arriving on the first day of June. The others left a few days later, for a well-deserved vacation in Jordan, at Petra and Aqaba, before heading back to the States as well.75