Yesterday, I talked about how when one ancient civilization conquered another, it would build its city on top of the rubble of the city it had just conquered.
Because of this, sitting below each city were literally layers of rubble and artifacts that altogether formed something like a multi-layered birthday cake with different historical colors and flavors.
These manmade mountains that eventually formed were called TELS (literally meaning “heap”) in Hebrew.
Archaeologists are absolutely fascinated with the many accumulated layers that comprise a TEL because they’re jam-packed with ancient pottery, skeletons, weapons, clothing and many other things that not only give us clues as to how people lived in ancient times…
…but also give us a good idea of the time period when one particular layer of civilization began and when it ended.
The official name used to describe these layers of civilization are called “strata”.
Obviously, the oldest civilizations are at the very bottom of the pile of a TEL and become increasingly younger as we move upward.
And by the way, the existence of TELS are not restricted to the land of Israel or the Middle East.
TELS are everywhere across the globe.
Because whenever one civilization conquered another, the same reasons for rebuilding a new city on top of the rubble of the one just conquered remained the same.
There were already existing highways and travel routes established and it was already near a water source.
However, since Israel just happens to be the very center of civilization on planet earth and because of all the wars that were fought there, it contains the oldest remains of ancient civilization.
And since Israel contains tons of TELS, the country is literally an archaeologist’s dream!
In fact, Israel has so many TELS that to this day, less than 6% of them have ever been dug up by archaeologists.
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