Archaeology of Israel

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The archaeology of Israel is the study of the archaeology of the present-day Israel, stretching from prehistory through three millennia of documented history. The ancient Land of Israel was a geographical bridge between the political and cultural centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Despite the importance of the country to three major religions, serious archaeological research only began in the 15th century.^[1] Although he never travelled to the Levant, or even left the Netherlands, the first major work on the antiquities of Israel is considered to be Adriaan Reland's Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum, published in 1708. Edward Robinson, an American theologian who visited the country in 1838, published its first topographical studies. Lady Hester Stanhope performed the first modern excavation at Ashkelon in 1815. A Frenchman, Louis Felicien de Saucy, embarked on early "modern" excavations in 1850.^[1]

Today, in Israel, there are some 30,000 sites of antiquity, the vast majority of which have never been excavated.^[2]

In discussing the state of archaeology in Israel in his time, David Ussishkin commented in the 1980s that the designation "Israeli archaeology" no longer represents a single uniform methodological approach; rather, its scope covers numerous different archaeological schools, disciplines, concepts, and methods currently in existence in Israel.^[3]