Background
Many cities were uncovered in Bronze and Iron Age Israel, the vast majority of which were located on tells – artificial mounds created as a result of gradual human settlement activity. Notably, not every location is suitable for the emergence of a center, even of a local nature, and each site had advantages and disadvantages in relation to factors such as security, water supply, transportation (roads) and the availability of soils. Consequently, only several locations could, in antiquity, provide livelihood for a large population at any given region. This resulted with a repeating pattern in which the centers of many periods were continuously located one on top of the other, thus creating the famous tellswhich are so typical of the Middle Eastern landscape. Although in many instances extramural neighborhoods were built on the slopes of the tells (and in some rare instances cities were not built on tells), it is only in the later half of the first millennium BCE that the...
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Faust, A. (2008). Cities and Towns in Ancient Israel (Bronze and Iron Ages). In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8505
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