Eric Cline

At one point in the Book of 1 Kings, it says the cities that Solomon fortified, and it mentions

Jerusalem and Megiddo and Hazor and Gezer.

Alongside, it also says, and there were chariot cities of Solomon.

And so from the days of Yigal Yedin in the 1950s and 60s, he dug at Hazor and at Megiddo, and then he was in correspondence with the people digging at Gezer.

And they were trying to find Solomon at all of those places because the Bible said he had fortified them.

Right.

So, in fact, Yadin did find the entry gates to the cities, and it looked to him as if they were all built on the same either six-chamber or eight-chamber, sometimes four-chambered entry gate to the city.

And he actually published articles about having found Solomon at Megiddo and Hazor and Gezer.

Nowadays, they've been redated.

Israel Finkelstein has redated the ceramics and said, no, even those are about a century later.

They're probably Ahab or Omri rather than Solomon.

But the discussion continues.

There are people who don't agree with that.

But again, the search for Solomon has been around for a very long time at Megiddo, which is actually why I think

The book that I wrote on the Chicago excavations, I think the subtitle is something like The Search for Solomon's City, something like that.

Because when Chicago went, they were looking for Thutmose III and Solomon.

Absolutely.

And the Chicago excavators who were at Megiddo from 1925 to 1939 were really, in some ways, no different from Schliemann.

In fact, Schliemann is a Troy 1870 and then on and off.

He dies in 1890.