תואר: דוקטורט

דוא"ל: ala.rabinovich@gmail.com

תקציר:

The last third of the second millennium BCE, or, in terms of material culture, the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, is one of the decisive periods in the history of the eastern and central Mediterranean. In the Late Bronze Age, dated c. 1550–1150 BCE, an efficient and tightly-knit political and economic network of empires and palatial centres controlled the sphere. Following a systemic collapse around the late 13th – early 12th century BCE and a period of re-organisation, a wholly different socio-political structure developed by the beginning of the first millennium BCE, bringing to the front new territorial states and cultures (among them, in the Southern Levant: Israelites, Judahites, Philistines etc.).

During the Late Bronze Age bronze became one of the major staples of the Mediterranean economy, and tons of raw metals (copper and tin ingots) as well as utilitarian and luxury bronze artifacts were transported and exchanged all across the Mediterranean basin and beyond. Iron gradually came into use in the transitional period in the late second millennium BCE and became the dominant metal for production of working tools and weapons during the early first millennium BCE.

In my study, I am following the development of utilitarian metal objects – tools and weapons through the aforementioned period of 700 years, by means of a detailed functional typology. Against the backdrop of the continuity in using certain types of tools and weapons, the changes in typology, such as the appearance of large agricultural tools made of iron, should highlight the transformations that the region went through. Thus, the metal objects serve as a proxy for the social, economic and technological processes in the Southern Levant.

The main sources for the study are the assemblages of bronze and iron tools and weapons from the major archaeological sites, such as Megiddo, Hazor and Beth-Shean, and a number of recently uncovered assemblages, studied and published for the first time in the framework of the thesis – Khirbet Qeiyafa, Tel Rehov and Abel Beth Maacah among others.

Metals, in their utilitarian role in daily life and warfare and the difficulty of their procurement reflect changes in social and political structures, subsistence patterns and trade. I believe that studying the metal artefacts from a longue durée perspective will form a significant contribution to the understanding of the changes and transformations that occurred in the Southern Levant during the second half of the second and beginning of first millennium BCE.