“Unearthed Wonders: How a Massive Ancient City Could Rewrite Our Understanding of the Bronze Age”
En Esur shows remarkable signs of sophisticated urban planning and covers an area of 160 acres. Researchers are confident that the city was once home to an estimated 6,000 people, a substantial increase over the similarly unearthed towns of Megiddo and Jericho in southern Israel.
The foresight of En Esur’s city planners is evidenced by the impressive network of streets, which were covered by plaster and stone to avert flooding, and the use of large silos for long-term food storage.
“Even in our wildest imaginings, we didn’t believe we would find a city from this time in history,” said IAA archaeologist Dina Shalem, according to Bloomberg.
“There is no doubt that this site dramatically changes what we know about the character of the period and the beginning of urbanization of Israel.”
APThe excavation project took two and a half years and relied on 5,000 volunteers, many of who were teenagers.
“By the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., the site became a city,” said IAA’s Dr. Dina Yitzhak Paz. “It is one of the earliest cities known in the southern Levant, and it is the largest by far.”
En Esur “is the largest site and the most important from that era” in the region, added Itai Elad, a lead archaeologist on the project.
“This is a huge city — a megalopolis in relation to the Early Bronze Age, where thousands of inhabitants, who made their living from agriculture, lived and traded with different regions and even with different cultures and kingdoms in the area.”
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