Posted on 06/24/2019 9:24:27 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
A watchtower dating from the time of the Kingdom of Judah (8th century BCE - during the reign of King Hezekiah) was recently uncovered by archaeological excavations carried out by IDF soldiers, together with the Israel Antiquities Authority...
The tower, whose dimensions in antiquity are estimated to have been 15 x 10.5 ft, was erected on a high elevation site, and served as an observation point on the Hebron Mountains...
It was built using very large stones, weighing some 8 tons each. Its height today reaches around 6 ft. According to Sa'ar Ganor and Valdik Lifshitz, excavation directors on behalf of the IAA, "the strategic location of the tower served as a lookout point over the Philistine enemy, one of whose cities was Ashkelon. In the days of the First Temple, the Kingdom of Judah built a range of towers and fortresses as points of communication, warning and signaling, to transmit messages and field intelligence. This tower is one of the observation points connecting the large cities in the area, located in the Beit Mirsim (Mirsham), Tel Eton and Tel Lachish sites. In ancient times, to transmit messages, beacons of smoke were lit during the day and beacons of fire at night. It is likely that the watchtower now uncovered was one of the towers that bore some of the beacons."
Activity in the ancient tower ceased on the eve of the expedition of Sennacherib, King of Assyria, in Judah in 701 BCE. Archaeological excavations have revealed that the entrance to the tower was blocked, and the force stationed there apparently converged on one of the nearby fortified towns. From biblical testimonies and archaeological findings in the area, we know that Sennacherib's attack virtually destroyed Judah, including 46 cities and 2,000 villages and farms.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishpress.com ...
Just wind and time, probably.
Anything left alone gets about 1/4 cm dust a year on it in the Negev, sometimes more, sometimes less. Voids (e.g., a hole) get filled faster.
Doesn’t take long.
My old house in Gush Katif is literally invisible from the air. It was burned in 2005.
When I was a kid, I remember an elderly black lady preaching on the street. She was handing out copies of “The Watchtower” and telling people they were going to Hell...
Yup. It amazes me how stuff just gets absorbed into the surrounding area when left alone.
Baalbeck in Lebanon has building stones a lot bigger than 8 tons!
Ancient Egyptian building stones were a lot bigger and done much earlier.
Lucky mooslimbs didn’t find it. They would have blown it up.
[[Well, I want to know who covered it up in the first place.]]
Termites- I blame everything on termites
Don’t you mean Trump? :-)
Nah, the dude’s ok by me- termites- they are the baddies-
Had some in FL and their tool belt wearing buddies carpenter ants.
You can see on Youtube how a single man can manipulate huge stones (a la Stonehenge) all by himself, basically using
small stones, pulleys, and leverage.
I’m sure the ancient engineers had thought of all sorts of similar ways to move heavy objects, besides simply dragging them.
lol- Yep- Carpenter ants- Forgot about those rascals- Wish they’d build me a house- instead of ‘renovating’ all the time- lol
Your perspicacity is truly a wonder to us all.
Perhaps it's allergies.
To answer your question; Egypt, Babylon, Hittites (were they still around then?), Assyria, Greeks, numerous "nations" in today's India and China.......various cultures in Europe, even.
A kingdom that wishes to survive!
Dang, Mike Ehrmantraut plays a mean guitar!
Well hell, that’s a tiny little tower.
It's a signal tower apparently. Besides, the Assyrian Empire didn't mess around, and it's unlikely that an even larger fortification would have sufficed.
King Hammurabi is the best known of the early monarchs of ancient times... belonged to the First BabyIonian Dynasty which came to an end, under circumstances shrouded in mystery, some three or four generations after Hammurabi. For the next several centuries, the land was in the domain of a people known as the Kassites. They left few examples of art and hardly any literary works -- theirs was an age comparable to and contemporaneous with that of the Hyksos in Egypt, and various surmises were made as to the identity of the two peoples. A cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan was even found in Babylonia and another in Anatolia, a possible indication of the extent of the power and influence wielded by the Hyksos. Until a few decades ago, the reign of Hammurabi was dated to around the year 2100 before the present era... At Platanos on Crete, a seal of the Hammurabi type was discovered in a tomb together with Middle Minoan pottery of a kind associated at other sites with objects of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, more exactly, of its earlier part. This is regarded as proof that these two dynasties were contemporaneous... however... At Mari on the central Euphrates, among other rich material, a cuneiform tablet was found which established that Hammurabi of Babylonia and King Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria were contemporaries. An oath was sworn by the life of these two kings in the tenth year of Hammurabi, The finds at Mari "proved conclusively that Hammurabi came to the throne in Babylonia after the accession of Shamshi-Adad I in Assyria"... The Khorsabad list ends in the tenth year of Assur-Nerari V, which is computed to have been -745... the first year of Shamshi-Adad is calculated to have been -1726 and his last year -1694... it reduced the time of Hammurabi from the twenty-first century to the beginning of the seventeenth century... "a puzzling chronological discrepancy", which could only be resolved by making Hammurabi later than Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty... If Hammurabi reigned at the time allotted to him by the finds at Mari and Khorsabad -- but according to the finds at Platanos was a contemporary of the Egyptian kings of the early Twelfth Dynasty -- then that dynasty must have started at a time when, according to the accepted chronology, it had already come to its end. In conventionally-written history, by -1680 not only the Twelfth Dynasty, but also the Thirteenth, or the last of the Middle Kingdom, had expired. [Hammurabi and the Revised Chronology, Immanuel Velikovsky]
Among others, the Israelites were, duh. Mycenaean Greeks were building tholos tombs (corbelled domes) prior to this time.
Okay, rktman-
“Had some in FL and their tool belt wearing buddies carpenter ants.”
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I just KNEW termites and ants were Unionized little critters!!!
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