Milton C. Fisher
One bright day in the autumn of 1927 University of Liverpool’s Professor of Archaeology, John Garstang, set out on a proposed three-day trek north from the Sea of Galilee in search of a lost Biblical site, the major Canaanite city of Hazor. By noon the expedition was over, and he was back on the shores of the Galilee rejoicing in his “lucky hit” of the morning. He was confident that all conditions for identification of what Kitchener’s map marked as a natural feature was indeed the location he sought, and subsequent excavations proved him right.
What sort of explorer of the ancient world was this, and why is his name less known and his achievements less heralded than those of many other archaeological greats? The second question is quickest to answer. His dating of major destruction levels at both Hazor and Jericho have been questioned and “corrected” by more recent excavators and “experts,” so his reputation has been reduced in proportion to his weakened credibility.
Did John Garstang deserve such a slight? Hardly! Just take a glance over his career. By age 23 he published the Roman site of Ribchester in England, having developed an interest in Romano-British archaeology while a mathematics scholar at Oxford. Three years later he became a reader (lecturer) in Egyptian archaeology at the University of Liverpool, then from 1907 till 1941 held a post there as Professor of Archaeological Methods and Practice.
As early as 1899 John Garstang had gone to Egypt to learn under the best of mentors, W. M. Flinders Petrie, and for the following 15 years he excavated in Egypt, Nubia, and Asia Minor. As an authority on Hittite civilization he published a standard work in 1910, with its revision as The Hittite Empire appearing in 1927. Garstang found evidence of Roman occupation at Meroe, capital of the ancient “Ethiopian” (Nubian) kingdom, during excavations in 1910–14.
So when, at the close of World War I (he served with the Red Cross), Garstang was made the first director of the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem and the next year placed in charge of the Palestinian Department
John Garstang examines an interesting find at Jericho.
BSP 5:4 (Autumn 1992) p. 129
of Antiquities, he was far from inexperienced. He retired from both these posts in 1926, but returned to Palestine the following year to conduct the expedition described at the beginning of this account. He obviously knew what he was about, and how to go about it.
Subsequently, John Garstang pursued his important exploration of the famous site of Jericho, location of which was already without question. His seven-year campaign, 1930–36, indicated for the first time the extreme antiquity of that city. The major discoveries of his excavations involved the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods.
At age 70, Garstang was not ready to slow down. In 1947–48 he accepted the post of founding director of the British School of Archaeology at Ankara, Turkey, and became president from 1949 until his death, at Beirut, Lebanon, in September of 1956. As late as 1953 he published his Anatolian excavations at Mersin, where the dig had been interrupted during World War II.
To return to the Holy Land itself, why was it that Garstang’s conclusions as to identification and date of the traces of Joshua’s conquest of both Jericho and Hazor were later called into question? Kathleen Kenyon, in 1951, reanalyzed Garstang’s pottery finds of the “Joshua era” and redated them to the mid-16th century BC. Then Kenyon’s extensive excavation of Jericho (1952–58) resulted in redating the double wall which Garstang identified as Joshua’s, to the third millennium BC. No real trace remains, scholars have concluded, of a strong walled city to be conquered by the Israelites around 1400 BC.
It was Yigael Yadin’s dating of pottery finds (especially distinctive Mycenaean ware) in his four-season dig at Hazor (1955–58) that caused Yadin to take exception to Garstang’s 1400 BC date. Instead, he dated the Conquest of Hazor to between 1250 and 1230.
John Garstang was a Wellhausian critical scholar of the Old Testament (much talk of J, E, JE, D, and P in The Foundations of Bible History: JOSHUA JUDGES he wrote in 1930), yet his discoveries led him to support the early date for the Exodus-Conquest, as implied in 1 Kings 6:1 and elsewhere. Has he truly been discredited? The staff of Associates for Biblical Research has done much research on this issue, and thinks not. Stay tuned.