Tel Aviv - Tell Qasileh

In the center of the Eretz Israel Museum complex in Tel Aviv is Tell Qasileh with its excavations and a pavilion displaying finds from the site. The Israeli archeologist B. Mazar identified twelve occupation levels on the tell, the earliest dating back to the 12th century B.C. A brick building of that period was found in stratum XII and a strong wall and two copper-smelting furnaces of the 11th century in stratum XI. These two levels are attributed to the Philistines.

Stratum X dates from the 10th century, when, after David's conquest of the area, the kings of Israel had a port here. Recently some scholars have suggested that the cedarwood from Lebanon which Solomon required for the building of the Temple was landed here, at the mouth of the Yarqon, rather than in the port of Jaffa. The discovery of store-rooms and storage jars here have shown that at that period the agricultural produce of the region was shipped from Tell Qasileh. After its destruction by Egyptian forces the settlement was rebuilt by the kings of Israel in the ninth century B.C., but it was again destroyed by the Assyrians in 732 B.C. In the fifth century B.C. cedarwood from Lebanon was again landed here for the building of the Second Temple (Ezra 3,7). The later strata show that Tell Qasileh was still occupied in Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic times, after which it was abandoned in favor of Jaffa.