Ashkelon (
Hebrew ????????????;
Arabic ???????, also ??????
?Asqalan&_160;
(help·info);
Latin Ascalon;
Akkadian Isqalluna) is a coastal city in
southern Israel. The ancient seaport of Ashkelon dates back to the
Bronze Age. In the course of its history, it has been ruled by the
Canaanites, the
Philistines, the
Babylonians, the
Phoenicians, the
Romans, the
Muslims and the
Crusaders. It was destroyed by the
Mamluks in the late 13th century. In the
1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Arab village of Majdal in the Ashkelon region was the forward position of the
Egyptian Expeditionary Force based in
Gaza.
[1] The village was occupied by Israeli forces on November 5, 1948 and the Arab population fled to Gaza together with retreating Egyptian Army.
[1] The modern Israeli city of Ashkelon (population 117,000) was founded in 1950.
Ashkelon was the oldest and largest seaport in Ancient Israel, one of the "five cities" of the Philistines, north of Gaza and south of Jaffa (Yafa). Archaeological excavations begun in 1985 led by Lawrence Stager of Harvard University are revealing the site with about 50&_160;feet (15&_160;m) of accumulated rubble from successive Canaanite, Philistine, Phoenician, Iranian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Crusader occupation.
In the oldest layers are shaft graves of pre-Phoenician Canaanites. The city was originally built on a sandstone outcropping and has a good underground water supply. It was relatively large as an ancient city with as many as 15,000 people living inside walls a mile and a half (2.4 km) long, 50 feet (15 m) high and 150 feet (50 m) thick. Ashkelon was a thriving Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 BC) city of more than 150 acres (607,000 m²), with commanding ramparts including the oldest arched city gate in the world, eight feet wide, and even as a ruin still standing two stories high. The thickness of the walls was so great that the mudbrick Bronze Age gate had a stone-lined tunnel-like barrel vault, coated with white plaster, to support the superstructure it is the oldest such vault ever found.
The Bronze Age ramparts were so capacious that later Roman and Islamic fortifications, faced with stone, followed the same footprint, a vast semi-circle protecting Ashkelon on the landward side. On the sea it was defended by a high natural bluff.
