Dutch and Palestinian archaeologists, while working on an urban lot in Nablus, West Bank, Palestine, have unearthed what could be termed as remains of the ancient city of Shekhem.
The city of Shekhem, positioned in a pass between the mountains of Gerizim and Eibal and controlling the Askar Plains to the east, was an important regional center more than 3,500 years ago. As the existing remains show, it lay within fortifications of massive stones, was entered through monumental gates and centered on a temple with walls five yards (meters) thick.
The king of Shekhem, Labaya, is mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of the Pharaonic archive found at Tel al-Amarna in Egypt, which are dated to the 14th century B.C. The king had rebelled against Egyptian domination, and soldiers were dispatched north to subdue him. They failed.
Two millennia ago, the Romans abandoned the original site and built a new city to the west, calling it Flavius Neapolis. The Greek name Neapolis, or “new city,” later became enshrined in Arabic as Nablus. In Hebrew, the city is still called Shekhem. Nablus has since spread, and ancient Shekhem is now surrounded by Palestinian homes and car garages near the city’s eastern outskirts. One morning this week, a garbage container emitted smoke from burning refuse not far from the remains of the northwestern city gate in a curved wall built by skilled engineers around 1600 B.C.
The city is mentioned several times in the Bible. Abraham camped near Shekham in Genesis. Later, Jacob's daughter, Dinah, was raped by men from Shekham. His sons razed the city in revenge. Centuries later, when the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they brought with them the bones of Joseph, which were laid to rest at Shekham.
The identity of the city’s residents at the time remains unclear. One theory posits that they were Hyksos, people who came from northern Syria and were later expelled from Egypt. According to the Bible’s account, the city was later Canaanite and still later ruled by Israelites, but archaeology has not corroborated that so far.
A German team began excavating at the site in 1913, with Nablus under the control of the Ottoman Turks. The dig was interrupted by World War I but resumed afterward, continuing sporadically into the 1930s under British rule. Much of the German documentation of the dig was lost in the Allied bombings of WWII.
American teams dug at the site in the 1950s and 1960s, under Jordanian rule. Israel conquered Nablus, along with the rest of the West Bank, in the 1967 Mideast war.
Over the years, the site fell into disrepair. The neglect was exacerbated after the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, when Nablus became a center for resistance to Israeli control.
Its condition further deteriorated after the second, more violent, uprising erupted in 2000, drawing Israeli military incursions and the imposition of roadblocks and closures that all but cut the city off from the outside world. In recent years, with the Western-backed Palestinian Authority increasingly asserting security control over the cities of the West Bank, Israel has removed some roadblocks and movement has become more free.
From: Yahoo News