Tell El-Hesi - History

History

The site was occupied from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period to the Hellenistic period, though not continuously. The city reached a size of 25 acres in the Early Bronze Age during the middle of the 3rd Millennium BCE. It then fell into disuse until the middle of the 2nd millennium during the Late Bronze Age when it was rebuilt, staying in use for around a thousand years. A military trench system was dug into the top of the mound during the 1948 Arab –Israeli War. Petrie identified Tell el-Hesi as the Biblical site of Lachish, and Bliss accepted this identification, but it is no longer accepted. In 1924 W. F. Albright proposed that Tell el-Hesi was Biblical Eglon, an identification still accepted by Yohanan Aharoni in the 1970s. This identification, too, is unlikely and the site should be considered unidentified.