The Real Armageddon

Armageddon is more than just a biblical prophecy hailing the end of days. It is a real place: Megiddo, an ancient city that for thousands of years stood at the crossroads of empires, trade routes and wars in the ancient Near East. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by friend of the show Eric Cline to uncover the true story of the real Armageddon. Why did Megiddo become associated with the world’s final battle? What made this city so strategically important for millennia? From Bronze Age kingdoms to biblical tradition and modern archaeology, discover the remarkable history behind one of the most famous names in history and myth. MORE Bronze Age Collapse: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000641437640 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4dEddIFS5yfamKqVZd6xAE?si=6e1a2405cc174b11 The Sea Peoples: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000722939838 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5EDFa6xFJv9yYft9v1xnvV?si=q5iPu1G4RyO_OySP2xRDGA Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/LGBTQ. That's redcrossblood.org/LGBTQ.

• 1:17Tristan Hughes?

  Hey all, welcome to the Ancients. Spring is here, summer is just around the corner in the UK. The weather is turning up and we are turning on the Ancients today to Armageddon. Now, why do you ask? Well, it is no secret. We know how much you love it when we do episodes on ancient catastrophes and collapses. We've seen the stats, your Pompeii's, your Maya collapses, your Sodom and Gomorrah's, your, or what else is there, Bronze Age collapses, prehistoric plagues, et cetera. Look, I get it. I am equally fascinated by those topics. But the team and I realised a few weeks back now, we realised that we haven't ever covered one of the biggest carnage words in our dictionary,

• 2:01Tristan Hughes?

  Armageddon, which has its own fascinating ancient story, the story of a biblical event, but more importantly, of an actual place. And that is what we're delving into today with a guest who certainly fits into the category of fan favourite on the Ancients. He is none other than Professor Eric Klein. Let's go.

• 2:36Tristan Hughes?

  Armageddon. Today, the word immediately conjures images of the end of the world, of apocalyptic catastrophes, of God's final judgement, and Bruce Willis in an astronaut suit. But Armageddon isn't just a concept or a prophesied event. It's a place. An ancient city called Megiddo, situated in modern-day Israel. Megiddo is to be the setting of the final cataclysmic battle between good and evil, where the armies of the world shall gather, at least according to the Book of Revelation. But Megiddo's story, it extends far further than its biblical significance.

• 3:19Tristan Hughes?

  Occupied for thousands of years, from the Neolithic period right through the Bronze Age and Iron Age, before its final abandonment just over 2,000 years ago, this site was a key centre for trade, politics and military affairs in the ancient Levant, owing to its position on a crossroads that linked Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. If that wasn't enough, in more recent times, Megiddo has achieved iconic status as an archaeological site, playing a key role in the birth of the modern discipline, and is still being excavated today.

• 3:56Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the real Armageddon, with Professor Eric Klein from the George Washington University. Eric is the author of Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City. Eric, welcome back to the show.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

• 4:20Tristan Hughes?

  As always now, it is now a tradition, what tie are you wearing?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  In honor of today's topic, today is an Egyptian-themed tie, because we will, I presume, at one point be talking about the Egyptian battle fought at Megiddo. So I thought an Egyptian tie might be appropriate for today.

• 4:39Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. And so first things first, Eric, Armageddon, it's not just a thing, it's a place.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  It is an actual place. Most people do not realize it. But yes, it is Megiddo, the site of Megiddo. In fact, that's where the name comes from. Armageddon is Har Megiddo. In Hebrew, that's the mound or mountain of Megiddo. And Armageddon originally had an H. It was Harmageddon originally. But you know, in Greek, the way you do an H, it's a rough breathing and it looks like an apostrophe. So at some point, when you know, the various manuscripts were being copied, some monk left the apostrophe off. And Harmageddon became Armageddon, and that's what we have today.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  It's only mentioned one place in the Bible. It's in the Book of Revelation 16:16. But so when people say to me, you know, where were you excavating from 1994 to 2014? I'm like, I was digging in Armageddon. They're like, that's not a real place. I'm like, actually, it is. Come on, I'll show you it. So Megiddo is Armageddon, and our T-shirts from each season on the back, they said, I survived Armageddon.

• 5:55Tristan Hughes?

  I love it. And so basically, this is a site now from archaeology that we're learning, we're continuing to learn more about. So you know, it isn't just that it is a place. It's a place that actually there is extensive information coming out of the ground about.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yes, even today, still, I mean, I, the renewed excavations, as they're called, which are a consortium headed by Tel Aviv University, they started 1992. They really got started in 94, and that's when I joined. And then after 20 years, I left the project in 2014, but it's still going today. So they are still excavating every other summer, usually odd-numbered summers. There is still lots of information coming out of the ground and indeed more so now than ever before because they're using remote sensing, exact life sciences, radiocarbon, DNA, I mean, you name it. They're throwing all the the new high-tech stuff out it. So the excavations at Megiddo are getting

• 6:54Speaker 02

  more and more and more interesting, in part because there's so much there. I mean, there are twenty cities, one on top of another, covering five thousand years of history.

• 7:05Tristan Hughes?

  Because we had just done the Trojan War as well, and that's many different layers of city settlements there.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  That's only nine.

• 7:12Tristan Hughes?

  Only nine.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Only nine. This is at least twenty. Yeah. Yeah, it starts back in the Neolithic and goes right up through, well, it goes almost until Alexander the Great. When he marched by, it was probably abandoned. But then the Romans, the Romans established one of their legionnaires' camps right at the base of Megiddo, right, which is being excavated even today. So in essence, on the site and just off of it, it's from Neolithic right through Roman.

• 7:45Tristan Hughes?

  So it's like Jericho, one of those sites that's just continually used again and again and again in that area of the world, yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, I always tell my students that to have a successful site in antiquity, you need food, you need water, and you need defense. And Megiddo has all three, very much like Jericho. And actually, as it grew over the years, it became even better for defense because you could see farther and farther away. So when excavations started at the mound in nineteen oh three, it was a hundred and ten feet tall. It's now about seventy feet tall because, as we'll talk about, Chicago took off the top couple of twenty feet or so. But still, in order to get to the top of the mound to excavate, you have to walk up a seventy-foot-tall mound.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  First thing, five in the morning, you know, let's get that heart racing, get those steps in.

• 8:40Tristan Hughes?

  Eric, the majority of this chat, we will focus on the archaeology and what's actually been discovered at Megiddo, but we have to start off with biblical Armageddon. And so we have to go to everyone's favourite, yet strangest book in the whole of the Bible, the Book of Revelation.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yes, yes, we're basically John, and it's not quite clear which John, it's not the Apostle John, it's another John, and he goes into a cave and basically has a dream. And this is what is told to us in the Book of Revelation. By the way, it is singular, there's no S, I noticed you were good with that. Many people say, the Book of Revelations. No, it's Revelation. Yes, and in there, it says that the penultimate battle between good and evil, not the final battle, that's going to be fought in Jerusalem, like a thousand years later, but the penultimate battle between good and evil is going to be

• 9:43Speaker 02

  fought at a place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon. That's the way it reads, and that is Megiddo. And we've got all kinds of imagery that we can go into, but you know, basically, it is good versus evil, and hopefully, good is going to win. But, you know, they were never quite sure when it was going to happen. And there are still people today that have said it already happened, and the vast majority, though, are waiting for it to happen. So one of the reasons, I think, they picked this site for Armageddon, for the penultimate battle, and I wrote about this, I had a book that came out in 2000, called The Battles of Armageddon. And I don't know if you'll remember, you're probably

• 10:28Speaker 02

  too young, but in the run up to 2000, we had the whole Y2K scare. Everybody thought the world was going to end because of the computers and all that. I had already been digging at Megiddo since 94, every other year, so 94, 96, 98. And I thought, let me write a book about all the battles that have been fought at Megiddo. And and publish it before Y two K and I'll make a fortune and I can retire. But as it turned out, I found out that there were thirty four battles that have been fought there. And so it took me too long to write the book and I missed the Y two K. It came out after that. So as a result, I couldn't retire. I'm still working, but you know, so it goes.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  But what I figured is by the time that John would have had his revelation, there were already something like at least a dozen, if not more battles that had already been fought, including a number of ones that are mentioned in the Bible. For instance, when Deborah fights Barak, it is by the the river, right by Megiddo. Saul and Jonathan are killed on Mount Gilboa, which is just down the valley from Megiddo. We've also got like one of the earliest night battles is fought there.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  So by the time of John, uh, in, you know, in the early centuries A.D., they would have already known this to be a place with a huge history for battles. And when you're looking around, where do you put like the final couple of battles? Well, Jerusalem is saved for the final battle. And I think next to that, that Megiddo would have been the bloodiest place on earth that they knew of. And so I think they very deliberately picked it because of its history. But then, of course, after that, you continue to have battles, you know, um, Saladin comes there and fights the Crusaders, the Mamluks and the Mongols fight there.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Napoleon fights at Mount Tabor, just down the road. And of course, Lord Allenby fights in World War One there and actually mimics the tactics of Thutmose III from more than three thousand years earlier. So at one point, I thought that I agreed with Napoleon, who supposedly said that the Jezreel Valley And Megiddo is the most perfect battlefield on the face of the earth. But you know, I looked through everything I think that Napoleon wrote and I can't find him having said that. I think he was actually talking about Belgium, but you know, I can't prove that. So anyway.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  This is why I think Armageddon made its way into the the New Testament. Because they already knew that so many battles have been fought there. And they thought that one of the final ones would also take place there. So it it makes a lot of sense to me to explain it that way.

• 13:35Tristan Hughes?

  Love the fact there's a Battle of Thermopylae in World War Two, I believe, and a Battle of Megiddo in World War One. That's so interesting. Battle of Armageddon. You mentioned the valley there. So can you give us a good sense of the location? And just why it was such an important, such a strategic site for so many thousands of years back in in bronze, iron, and even in in Stone Age times?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. So Megiddo today is in what would be considered northern Israel. But it's not very far into the north. The Jezreel Valley, the Valley of Estralon, cuts across all of modern day Israel. It's shaped like a triangle on its side. So the tip is over in modern day Haifa. And the base of the triangle is over at the Jordan River. So that's about what thirty or forty miles east, west across modern Israel. But north, south, it is only three miles wide at its narrowest and seven miles wide at its widest. So

• 14:44Speaker 02

  if you're cutting across, it it's actually like Napoleon supposedly said, it's a perfect battleground there. But more importantly, for our purposes, there was a highway that led from, well, from Egypt up to Turkey, if you want to go in one direction, or from Turkey down to Egypt, the other. In other words, if you're an Egyptian and you want to go visit a Hittite, you take The Via Mars, the way of the sea, and that goes right here. If you're a Canaanite and you want to go to Mesopotamia, Assyria and Babylonia, you want to go east-west, you have to go right through the Jezreel Valley. So basically, all the highways met right there.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Megiddo is at the junction. So at one point, Thutmose III, the Egyptian pharaoh that fights a battle there in 1479 B.C., he said in his inscription, "The capturing of Megiddo is like the capturing of a thousand cities." And he wasn't exaggerating. So basically, every invader that has come through that region has fought a battle at Megiddo unless the area simply gave in to them without a fight. So we've got battles all the way, probably even back in the Neolithic already, but certainly by the beginning of the second millennium, we've got Canaanites fighting there.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  And then all the way through, I think the last battle per se that I documented was 1967, or maybe even 1973, there were some air skirmishes because one of the airfields is right there in the valley. So they're, you know, they've been fighting there for 4,000 years. The geography is what dictates it, and that hasn't changed. Just the people and the weapons have changed, but the fighting, you know, and the geography, that hasn't changed.

• 16:45Tristan Hughes?

  It's amazing to think that even in Iron Age times, more than 2,000 years ago, around that time, it was already well-known as a battle site, hence the biblical link. So thank you for explaining that, Eric. But let's focus in on that battle of Phutmose III, the Egyptian pharaoh. So Eric, is it correct to say that this is the earliest recorded battle in history?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yes, it is. Next question?

• 17:11Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, fine.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Yes, it is, but it it depends on how you say it. It is the earliest recorded battle in history, yes. It's not the earliest battle in history. That's when one Neolithic thug picked up a rock and bashed another one over the head. But it is the earliest one that is written down. Because what it seems to have happened is that Thutmose III, when he came to the throne in his first year, we think it's about 1479 B.C., the Canaanite rulers rise up in rebellion. And he has to march up to Canaan to put down the rebellion.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Well, he took along scribes with him. They kept a daybook, if you will, a diary, a campaign journal. And then when they got back, they put up a concise version on the walls of one or more of the temples down in Egypt. So he says things like, "We began marching. After ten days, we got to the site of Yechem, and we stopped and held a council." And and this is what it says on the wall. So it is recording what happened. So we know precisely what happened, but it's from the Egyptian point of view. So do you believe it or not?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  So if you want, I can tell very quickly what he says.

• 18:43Tristan Hughes?

  Please do, please do. And also, so the enemy, because my mind immediately goes also to the Battle of Kadesh, where you do have the Hittite version of it as well. But that's Egyptians versus Hittites. With Megiddo, is it Egyptians versus local Canaanites? Is that what you think?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  It is, and yet, yes, it's Egyptians versus, we're told, about thirty local Canaanite princes. But among them, and led by them, is the prince or king of Kadesh.

• 19:11Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  This is the same place that 200 years later, the Egyptians and the Hittites are gonna fight, right? And Kadesh is in what is today Syria. The ruler of Kadesh is supposed to be one of the leaders of this rebellion by local Canaanites. All right, okay. So what happens is that Thutmose III has come to the throne. He's really young, like eight years old or so. And so his stepmother, also his aunt, Hatshepsut, Hatshepsut, one of the famous female pharaohs, she rules on his behalf for 20 years. So then she disappears. When he's about 28, Thutmose III comes to the throne finally.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  And there must have been a suppressed libido or whatever. But there's also a rebellion. So he takes off and fights this major battle in his first year. He also then fights almost every year for like the next 17 years. So there's something going on there with him. He probably needed to see a therapist, but we won't go into that. At any rate, that first battle, he, I mean, and that's the best time to rebel is the first year when there was a new king on the throne. I don't know if you're planning to do that, but just in case you had that in mind. That's the best time. Yeah, the first year.

• 20:29Tristan Hughes?

  Watch out, Dan. Yep.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Right, so they march up, he says, in like 10 days. They march up to Yecham and they stop and they have a war council. Because it seems that there are three ways to get to Megiddo from where they are. There is the central way, which is the fastest, but also the most narrow and therefore susceptible to ambush. And that comes right out of Megiddo, right? It's known as the Wadiyara, the Nahal Iron. It's still used today to get up there. The other two ways are more roundabout. One goes around to the north and comes out by Yocniam. And the other comes around to the south and comes out by Tanakh.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Well, his generals said, please don't go up the middle route. It's suicide, basically. Take either the northern route or the southern route. And Thutmose III tells us that he said to the generals, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that's exactly what the Canaanites will be expecting. Because They know that I'm not that stupid, that I would go up the central route, you know, that would be, you know, committing suicide. And he said, but you know what? I am that stupid. I'm gonna go right up there because they're not gonna be expecting it. And we're told in the inscription that they went one guy after the next, and it took like 12 hours, and they

• 21:56Speaker 02

  came out at Megiddo, and sure enough, it was unguarded. The Canaanites were at the northern and the southern entrances to the Jezreel Valley. They were not at the central part because they hadn't expected him. It was a surprise attack, and that was it. He captured Megiddo. There is a battle when the Canaanites come, you know, too late, and he beats them. But he did make a major mistake, which he admits. He let his men stop to loot the camps of the Canaanite rebels, which were all around Megiddo. That allowed the people inside the city time to close the

• 22:36Speaker 02

  city gates, including hauling people up using, you know, ropes made of cloth and linen and all that. And it then took them at least three months, if not eight months, to actually capture the city. So I tell my students, the lesson is that if you're gonna do this, capture the city first, then loot and plunder. Don't do it the other way around, because it will, it will cost you. Right? So the end result is that he wins the battle. He puts down the rebellion. He captures all kinds of things. He tells us the sheep, the goat, the cattle, the chariots that he takes back. And that's it. He puts down the rebellion. So it is not only a victory for

• 23:19Speaker 02

  him, but it's, like we said, the earliest recorded battle. And the Egyptians then really never relinquish control until about 1140 B.C., which is, you know, 300 years later, when the Late Bronze Age collapse takes place. So the battle at Megiddo is by Thutmose III, is one of the famous Battles from antiquity, right? It's up there along with all the other battles that one learns like Thermopylae and Salamis and all of that. But it's because this is the earliest one. It's not the only one. Like I said, there's like 34 battles that are fought there, but it is the first one that's recorded.

• 24:13Speaker 01

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• 24:56Speaker 03

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• 25:48Tristan Hughes?

  And does Megiddo continue to be occupied from then on until into Greek and Roman times? Or should we be thinking, I've got on my notes, obviously, that you have the United Kingdom of Israel, then the Divided Kingdom as well?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  They're all there. They're all there. Megiddo functions. Yeah, it's under Egyptian control at first, but then, yes, one by one, they each rule in turn. The problem is trying to find them. So, for instance, we know after the Late Bronze Age collapse, we know that there's immediately a city built on the ruins, Iron Age Megiddo. And that's probably the time of David and Solomon in the the United Monarchy. I'm always careful not to call it the United Kingdom, because that's another entity, you know, like where you are right now. So that the United Monarchy. But then, when Solomon dies, that splits

• 26:43Speaker 02

  into the Divided Kingdoms with the Northern Kingdom of Israel up north and Southern Kingdom of Judah down south. Megiddo is part of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And there are Iron Age remains there. Probably something of David, probably something of Solomon. Very hard to identify, though. The Chicago excavators, as we'll talk about, thought they had found Solomon's stables. They're now no longer thought to be Solomons. They're probably Ahab or Amri from like 100 years later. But people have been looking for Solomon at Megiddo since the earliest excavations, you know, 1903, 1905, and certainly when

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Chicago got there in 1925.

• 27:30Tristan Hughes?

  And Eric, why is that? So is there a particular mention of Megiddo and Solomon in the Old Testament?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  There is, in fact, yes. There is at one point in the Book of First Kings. It says, "The cities that Solomon fortified," and it mentions

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Jerusalem and Megiddo and Hatzor and Gezer. Alongside, it also says, and there were chariot cities of Solomon. And so from the days of Yehudah Yadin in the 1950s and 60s, he dug at Hatzor and at Megiddo, and then he was in correspondence with the people digging at Gezer. And they were trying to find Solomon at all of those places because the Bible said he had fortified them. Right. So in fact, Yadin did find the entry gates to the cities. And it looked to him as if they were all built on the same either six-chamber or eight-chamber,

• 28:32Speaker 02

  sometimes four-chambered entry gate to the city. And he actually published articles about having found Solomon at Megiddo and Hatzor and Gezer. Nowadays, they've been redated. Israel Finkelstein has redated the ceramics and said, no, even those are about a century later. They're probably Ahab or Omri rather than Solomon. But the discussion continues. There are people who don't agree with that. So, but again, the search for Solomon has been around for a very long time at Megiddo, which is actually why I think the book that I wrote on the Chicago excavations,

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I think the subtitle is something like The Search for Solomon City, something like that. Because when Chicago went, they were looking for Thutmose III and Solomon.

• 29:27Tristan Hughes?

  Because it is that, it is that classic of archaeology in the early 20th century, isn't it, Eric? That it's almost that people went out there, trowel in one hand and Bible in the other, and just wanting to find something, even if the information's not there, and just to label it. We talked about Schliemann as well in our Trojan War chat, and him labeling it as Priam's treasure or the mask of Agamemnon, just that because you're so invested in it, that desire to label something you find is linked to what you know in the Bible.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and the Chicago excavators who were at Megiddo from nineteen twenty-five to nineteen thirty-nine were really, in some ways, no different from Schliemann. In fact, I mean, Schliemann is at Troy eighteen seventy and then on and off, he dies in eighteen ninety. The first excavations at Megiddo are nineteen oh three by a German-American named Schumacher. And then Chicago comes in nineteen twenty-five. And Schumacher, when he was at Megiddo nineteen oh three to nineteen oh five, guess how he digs at Megiddo? Puts down a whacking great trench right through the middle of the mound, just like Schliemann had done at Troy.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  And they were only digging thirty, thirty-five years apart. So, you know, it kind of makes sense. The Chicago excavators were much more careful and much better, but they too, the, I mean, right away, as they were digging, when they found these buildings, they identified as stables. They didn't just say, hey, we found stables. No, they announced to the world they had found Solomon stables. And that made headlines around the world, just like the headlines that Schliemann had made at Troy.

• 31:11Tristan Hughes?

  So Eric, is it the beginning then of the twentieth century that excavations, I don't even want to say proper excavations, but like official excavations begin at the site of Megiddo. They know where Megiddo is already.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:25Tristan Hughes?

  Then that's when excavations begin. Well, let's start with the first one. Let's start with nineteen oh three then.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Okay. And I will put in at the beginning here, just like we have at Troy, there is nothing at Megiddo that says it's Megiddo, right? We have a little bit of writing, not much. There's a fragment from the Epic of Gygymes that's been found. We still haven't found the archives that I know, I know are there, right? In the late Bronze Age, Birydiya, the king of Megiddo, writes to the Egyptian pharaohs, Amenhotep the third and Akhenaten. And we've got six letters from him. There must be, there must be return correspondence. And it's in the late Bronze Age palace, the half that Chicago did not excavate and throw away.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  So, but we don't know that Megiddo is actually Megiddo. And in the late eighteen hundreds, other people were identifying other sites in the Jezreel Valley as potentially Megiddo. But again, Just like Hiserlik has to be Troy, so Armoud, which the actual official name in Arabic is Tel El Mutaselim. Tel El Mutaselim is Megiddo, it has to be. There's nothing else that fits the description over time. So, in 1903, when Gottlieb Schumacher went there, he was originally from Zanesville, Ohio,

• 32:53Speaker 02

  German extraction. His father was a Templar, not the Knights Templar, but the German movement that thought that the Second Coming was imminent and that you should move to the Holy Land. His father, Jacob, was hired to be, I believe his title was actually city planner for Haifa. And he's the one, among others, who planned the modern city of Haifa. So, young Gottlieb moved to the region when he was about nine years old. And in fact, some of the surveyors, Condor and Kitchener, who did the famous survey of Western Palestine,

• 33:35Speaker 02

  and actually, the boundary between Israel and Lebanon today is where Condor and Kitchener stopped their survey. We know for a fact that they stayed overnight, or for a couple of days, with Schumacher's family in Haifa. And they actually went up on top of Megiddo as part of their survey. And then later, Schumacher goes, he gets his PhD in archaeology, and opens up the excavations at Megiddo, 1903. At that time, it's Ottoman-controlled. So he had to get permission from the Sultan to dig there. And he's there 1903 to 1905 with this huge trench, like I said, that goes right through.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  He makes some discoveries, but misses others. So, one of the things he finds is a little tiny jasper seal, about one and a half inches across, a couple of centimeters, and on it, it says... Servant of Shema, I think is what it says, or Shema servant of Jeroboam. And that was probably Jeroboam the second. Well, that seal is now missing because Schumacher sent it up to Istanbul to the Sultan. We know it made it to Istanbul and then it disappears. So he did find that, but it's gone. He also found a large boulder, piece of stone, which has a cartouche of Sheshank,

• 35:04Speaker 02

  biblical Sheshak, that came from an inscription or some sort of building that Sheshank put up at Megiddo. This would be about nine twenty-five B.C. After Solomon dies. And indeed, in his inscription down in Egypt, it's very much like Thutmose III, but you know, four hundred, five hundred years later, Sheshank says he captured Megiddo. And lo and behold, here is this fragment with his cartouche at Megiddo. But Schumacher and his men missed it and they threw it out on their back dirt pile. They never knew they had found it. So we're not sure what level it comes from.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  The only reason we know even that it exists, when Chicago showed up in nineteen twenty-five, the first thing that they did was run around the site, collecting rocks and stones from Schumacher's back dirt pile to build their dig house.

• 36:04Tristan Hughes?

  Ah.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  And one of the Egyptian workmen carrying this stone down the hill said, hey, you know, there are cartouches on here. And they're like, oh, my word. And so when James Henry Brested came over from what was then the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, he said, wait, that's Sheshank, that's biblical Sheshak, right? So. Schumacher found great stuff, but he also missed great stuff. If we knew which level he had found that inscription in, we would know which level Sheshank had captured. And therefore, since we know Sheshank was just after Solomon, we would know what level at Megiddo is Solomon's.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  But we don't know any of that, so we're still searching for Solomon. So, anyway, Schumacher did a, a, a, a pretty good job. Better than Schlemann at Troy, let's put it that way. But then, when he ended in 1905, the site just lay there for 20 years, until Chicago came and started excavating in 1925. Brested had just started the Oriental Institute at Chicago. Now it's the Institute for the Study of either Ancient Cultures or Ancient Civilizations, it's ISAC. Brested started it in 1920, and he immediately started looking around for an excavation. And in fact, he went to Lord Allenby

• 37:33Speaker 02

  and asked Allenby where he should dig. Why did Brested and Allenby have a relationship? Because when Allenby fought his battle at Megiddo in 1918, he had gotten explicit instructions from London as to how to conduct the campaign. But Allenby looked at the geography and realized that he was camped. And there were three ways to get to Megiddo. There was the central way, which was narrow but most susceptible to ambush. There was the northern route, there was the southern route. And so Allenby read his history, realized what Thutmose III had done,

• 38:17Speaker 02

  and did it himself with the same results. The Turks and Germans were not expecting him to come up that way. He captured Megiddo in 1918 with nobody killed at all. Couple of horses died, they ran them into the ground, but very successful battle. And later, after he had been, I guess, given a title and he became Lord Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, they actually asked him, "Do you want to be Allenby of Armageddon?" And he kind of laughed and said, "No, all the cranks and chrism done will come out of the walls for that one."

• 38:55Speaker 02

  So, Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, and he met up with Brested in Cairo in 1919. And Brested asked Allenby, "How did you know to repeat what Thutmose III had done?" And Allenby looked at Brested and said, "Well, I had read your book." Because in 1906, Brested had translated into English that record that Thutmose III had left on the wall in Egypt. And so, Allenby had been able to read it and therefore redo the same tactics. Which leads me to, you know, George Santayana says, you know, "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it."

• 39:40Speaker 02

  I would say those who do study history can repeat it if you want to. So, when Brested was looking around for a site to excavate, he met up with Allenby, and Allenby said, "Well, why don't you dig Megiddo? You've got the Battle of Thutmose III. Why don't you find evidence for the battle? And you've also got Solomon." And Brested said, "Great." He was a showman also, all about PR. There's an exhibit at the University of Chicago right now on the Chicago excavations, and it shows how Brested used the media back then. So, that's where it came from.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  That's why they started digging at Megiddo, was because of Allenby having won the battle there in 1918. And that was because Brested had published Thutmose III. So, you see, it's all one big happy family, one big circle.

• 40:36Tristan Hughes?

  It's really interesting and and what you're also mentioning there, Gomat Shumaka, so finding like Jeroboam, mention of Jeroboam, so he's a king of the northern kingdom, just to clarify. But the Shoshank, that Egyptian pharaoh, I think he's in the 22nd dynasty.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:50Tristan Hughes?

  Or something like that, isn't he, with the silver coffin, which survives, beautiful silver coffin.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  You've got Pusenne's a little bit, yeah, 21st and 22nd dynasty. But yeah, but Shoshank is a Libyan who founds the 22nd dynasty, right? But we're all there in the, you know, the third intermediate period and all that, yeah.

• 41:11Tristan Hughes?

  So there, and so you've got those things and obviously Brested. That that Egyptian link only comes to light when they are making their dig house, the link to Allenby, the British general as well.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:22Tristan Hughes?

  So yeah, it's taken away. So that excavation begins looking for, yes, the Solomon link is there. But what do we know about these excavations? How long do they go on?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  So the Chicago excavations go on for 14 or 15 seasons, if you want to call it that. They dug almost all year round, but they first get there in 1925. It's a small group of about five people and they they grow and shrink and grow and shrink over the years. I mean, at one point, there's probably 14 or 15 staff members there because they were able to bring their spouses. And so they had, you know, one big happy family in the dig house, wasn't always so happy. There were soap operas galore. I mean, oh, my word. So, but they're there until 1939. And they end because of World War Two, mostly because a couple of the key members went off and got other jobs.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  But most of them went into the war effort, went to work for them. And so 1939, they dissipate. There is actually a letter that gives permission that they could, Chicago could have started up the excavations again. And it said, as long as they start within two years after the war has ended. But they never did get. Their act together because again, the group had dispersed and so they held on to it with a caretaker until nineteen fifty-five and then Chicago sold the site of Megiddo and the dig house and all of its

• 43:03Speaker 02

  possessions to the state of Israel for one dollar.

• 43:08Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  And

• 43:09Tristan Hughes?

  One dollar.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, in nineteen fifty-five. So they got there in nineteen twenty-five and they give up possession in nineteen fifty-five. So all told, it's thirty years that they're there, but they're actively digging only for about fifteen years. And in those fifteen years, they have three different directors because Brested, micromanaging from far off Chicago, though coming to the dig every couple of years, fired them one after the other, right? So we, it was trials and tribulations. So Clarence Fisher was the first director. He gets fired after two years and then PLO Guy,

• 43:50Speaker 02

  British, he runs the dig from about nineteen twenty-seven to nineteen thirty-four. Then he gets fired by Brested and then Gordon Loud comes in and he runs the dig from nineteen thirty-five to nineteen thirty-nine. And each of those directors found something substantial that they could, you know, hang their hat on. So Fisher is when they figured out that they had that Cheshunk cartouche. And then Guy is the one that claimed they had found Solomon's Stables, which they are stables, I think, but they're probably Ahab or Amri. They're probably, you know, ninth century

• 44:33Speaker 02

  rather than tenth century. And then Gordon Loud is the one that found the famous Ivories and the gold hoard that Megiddo is also known for. So each of them has something that they can claim and overall.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  The excavations were among the most scientific of the time. They were cutting edge. They were one of the first to use balloon photography. They were the first to use Muncell color charts to describe the color of the soil, which Brested had learned about when he went to a dinner party. And somebody from the art department said, hey, we've got these new things called Muncell color. And Brested's like, we could use that on the dig. And then they eventually used a code book because they were sending telegrams back and forth. And Brested didn't want the telegram operators to know what they had found.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  So he issued them Bentley's code book. And so when they found the ivories and the gold, the telegrams were sent in code. And they're in the archives at Chicago. I've seen them. I've got pictures of them. It's really cool. So it was, they were at the forefront of scientific expeditions. And Megiddo is still like among the backbone of what I would call biblical archaeology. Everything else in the country, not everything, but a lot of it from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They would refer to the levels at Megiddo, the pottery at Megiddo and say, you know, here we are in relation to it.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  So Chicago's excavations for those 15 years were extremely important. But it was a revolving door of staff. And some of the most important work was done by the most junior people that you wouldn't expect. I'll give you just one example. The very first volume, um, what's called Megiddo one, which is the 1925 excavations up to about 1935, is authored by two guys, Lamont and Shipton. Lamont was a Chicago undergrad when he started out. Eventually got his degree by correspondence. Shipton, Shipton was a high school dropout and he was from Wales.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  And he went on to become one of the most important people because he and Le Monde learned at the site and they became experts on the pottery, on the architecture, on everything. And their books are to some degree more important than anything published by the first two directors. Absolutely amazing. So the stories behind it. I went to write up the archaeology of Megiddo and I went into the archives at Chicago and found all of their personal letters and archives, you know, journals, diaries, sometimes saying, make sure this

• 47:44Speaker 02

  doesn't see the light of day, you know, this is personal. I'm like, yeah, too late. And David Yushishkin, one of the co-directors at Megiddo, when I was there, he was, I then learned, writing a book on the archaeology, the stratigraphy of Megiddo, which has come out since it's really good. And so I thought, we don't need two books that do the same thing. Let me tell the story behind the story. Let me tell you about the archaeologists who excavated. And that, I thought, is really interesting. It's not for everyone, but if you're interested in learning how archaeology worked, especially in colonial British mandate

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Palestine, and what life was like for them, this is the book for you because I've got all, pardon the pun, I have all the dirt on what happened at that excavation. So lots of, lots of fun.

• 48:47Speaker 01

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• 49:31Speaker 03

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• 50:22Tristan Hughes?

  But the thing I wanted to ask there is that, you know, Late Bronze Age, before the collapse, if we think about the Mycenaean and the kind of the palatial centres, it seems also with Megiddo as well, like there seems to have been someone at the top in the Late Bronze Age, living in a palace, probably with archives, haven't been discovered, as you've mentioned. But, but should we be imagining before these two destructions that you hinted at, you know, this is a thriving, dare I say, some sort of city-state, thousands of people with, with some sort of ruler monarch at the top?

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm not sure I would say thousands, maybe thousands, certainly hundreds.

• 51:00Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Yes. But one thing that we've got in Canaan during the Bronze Age, which would probably be similar to the Mycenaean, there is no one great king of Canaan. There are a series of city-states, each with their own ruler, who, the actual name for him in, in Akkadian, it's either mayor, or ruler, or governor, or king, whatever. But they're vassals, they're vassals to the Egyptians. They each have control of their city and the area around it, so a city-state. And we know...

• 51:40Speaker 02

  In part from the Amarna letters, that some of them are places that are still today, right, where I'm actually doing an upper level seminar on the Amarna archives this semester, because I have, wait for it, another new book out, Love, War and Diplomacy on the Amarna archives. And we have city-states at Megiddo, at Hatzor, at Akko, at Jerusalem, at Gaza, at Gezer, at Damascus, Byblos, Beirut, Tyre, Sidon, right, these names still resonate today. They're still in the news today. They are in the news back then, and they are each writing

• 52:22Speaker 02

  letters to the Egyptian pharaoh complaining about each other, right? There are just under 400 letters in the Amarna archive, written to or from Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. About 50 are letters from the great kings that we've mentioned, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites, and so on. But there are about 300 that are from these Canaanite vassal kings, including one guy, one of my favorites, the king of Byblos by the name of Ribhada. He writes 60 letters, six zero, to the pharaoh. They must have been coming two and three a day.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  And the Egyptian pharaoh, oh my God, from Ribhada again, who's he complaining about now? Right? So we actually can get a pretty good idea of what life was like. But that's in the 14th century. Thutmose III would have been 100 years, 120 years earlier in the 15th century, but those same city-states, they were already there. So we can, we can figure out what life was like at that time. So there is no one great king in Canaan, just like I don't think there was any one great king over in Mycenaean Greece. But we are talking the same time period, right? Everybody is communicating with everybody. In fact, there is quite a lot of Mycenaean pottery.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Found at these Canaanite sites, they are trading either directly or indirectly with the Mycenaeans. We find Mycenaean pottery at Megiddo, at Hatzor, and elsewhere. So it's rather interesting, but it all comes to a screeching halt temporarily when the palace in Stratum VII at Megiddo is burnt to the ground. And that's where we get the gold hoard, which is actually Stratum VIII, and then the ivory hoard, which is Stratum VII. And that's what made Gordon Laid famous, though they almost didn't find it. They almost

• 54:32Speaker 02

  closed down the dig in 1936 because they had run out of money. But then they suddenly found an extra $50,000 that was part of a grant that they had semi-forgotten about. And so they said, okay, one more year, one more year, which turned out to be two more years. And during those two years, they found the gold hoard and the ivory hoard. So they almost didn't find it, but they did.

• 55:02Tristan Hughes?

  And these, these two hoards, so, well, clues in the name. So one's a lot of gold and one's a lot of ivory from?

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:09Tristan Hughes?

  India or?

• 55:10Speaker 02

  No, no, local, probably. The gold hoard, which is Stratum VIII, that, that actually might be closer to the time of Thutmose III. And that seems to be exactly what it sounds like. Somebody buried a hoard intending to come back for it and did not. So, we don't know, a king, a prince, a princess, a queen, not sure. It's very near and partially under a wall in the palace. The ivories are, I think, almost more interesting. They were found in a separate area that Gordon Laid dubbed the treasury. It's a room with three chambers, and the ivories are found scattered.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  In those three, actually broken up so that a piece from the back chamber will match up with a piece from the front chamber. Obviously, something happened and they all got scattered. And what Louden others, and Louden actually published a book called The Megiddo Ivories, he thought that in the destruction of the palace, a couple of boys and a camel got into the treasury and created havoc. Because when they excavated, they found what Louden said was the skeleton of a camel and a couple skulls and rib bones

• 56:38Speaker 02

  from young boys. And he thought they wandered down or they got, you know, locked in. And then when the palace was destroyed, round about, you know, eleven seventy seven or eleven forty, they died in there. Now, I think Louden was incorrect. There is a parallel from another site from the same time period up, not so far away, up in Syria. And that one is obviously a tomb, a royal tomb. And I think that this is not a treasury, but is a burial of, who knows, somebody from the palace who died. And those two

• 57:22Speaker 02

  boys, I don't think they got trapped in there during the collapse. I think they're buried in there. They, it's a multi-person burial, maybe multi-generational. And we've got other tombs from Megiddo now that have been found recently, where you can see there's, you know, eight, 10 bodies in there. So I think this is a family tomb, if you will. And that is not a camel that is on top of the ivories. It is a donkey or something related, that kind of a species. And we know, even in the early Bronze Age, that in

• 58:04Speaker 02

  The Levant in Canaan, they are doing equid, donkey burials, where you put a guy or a woman in the burial and then you sacrifice a donkey or some sort of equid in there. I think that was, is what we've got here. And indeed, I showed a picture of the so-called camel to a couple of friends who do archaeology. And they're like, that's not a camel. Yeah, that's, that's a donkey or something, something related. So I think that Loud misinterpreted it. And he was digging a tomb that was connected to the palace. And you've got an animal burial in there. I don't know, maybe a favorite donkey

• 58:45Speaker 02

  that the boys used to ride. And I don't know how the boys died or whatever, but I think that's what we've got there. So the gold horde and the ivory horde are very different in terms of how they got there. Because I think the gold horde really is hidden by somebody when the palace was being attacked. But the ivory horde, I think, is from a tomb. And then the last thing I'll say, and then I'll, I'll shut up for a while, is Gordon Loud was, announced this to the world. It was put on display in New York and Chicago, the ivory and the gold. And then he excavated beneath, took out that palace, threw it away, and went to see what was underneath.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  There was stuff underneath from Stratum nine and 10 and 11 and 12, but nothing like what he had found. So there is now just this gaping hole in the side of the mound. I mean, you're actually, he took away that side of the mound. So it's almost like a cliff face. But he only took away half of the, of the palace. The other half is still there in the mound. And if you look at the bulk, the side that he left, which goes up about 50 feet, you can see the walls of the palace. Still, they're not jutting out, but you can see them.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  And that's where the archive is. That's where Burydias archive. But there's a good 20 feet of stratified remains above, including the Neo Assyrian palaces that Chicago excavated from Stratum III from the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. And they are directly on top, like right vertically on top of the Late Bronze Age Palace. So we would have to pull a Chicago and pick up and throw away the Neo Assyrian palaces in order to get down to the other half of the Late Bronze Age Palace.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  And that will almost likely never happen. We could do like what Yedain did at Hotsor, where he moved an Iron Age building from where it had been to a new location and carefully reconstructed it and then dug underneath where it had been. If we could move some of the parts of the Neo Assyrian Palace, we could get down. And I bet you there's more to be found, not just an archive, but all kinds of other goodies in that palace.

• 1:01:24Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Eric, what a story and really interesting to see that there's still much more to discover from Megiddo in years ahead. But that is the truth about Armageddon, as mentioned right at the start. It's not just a thing from the Bible, not just an event at the end times. It is also a place.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And if things get more peaceful over there, they will be excavating. And anybody listening to this could volunteer to go dig in Armageddon yourselves.

• 1:01:51Tristan Hughes?

  Eric, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me back on.

• 1:02:01Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was the one and only fan favorite of the show, Professor Eric Klein, talking you through the real story of Armageddon. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you've been enjoying the show, please make sure that you're following us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:02:37Tristan Hughes?

  That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.