Strata: In Their Own Words

Why have archaeologists found so little in Jerusalem from the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.E.), the period just before the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan? We know an important city existed there, despite the paucity of archaeological evidence, because we have correspondence between the Egyptian pharaoh and the king of Jerusalem, Abdi-Heba, preserved in the archive of cuneiform tablets known as the Amarna letters.^a Jerusalem archaeologist Eilat Mazar gives this analysis in her recently published preliminary report on her current Jerusalem excavations:¹