Eric Cline

The first excavations at Megiddo are 1903 by a German-American named Schumacher.

And then Chicago comes in 1925.

And Schumacher, when he was at Megiddo, 1903 to 1905, guess how he digs at Megiddo?

Puts down a whacking great trench right through the middle of the mound, just like Sleeman had done at Troy.

And they were only digging 30, 35 years apart.

So, you know, it kind of makes sense.

The Chicago excavators were much more careful and much better, but they too, I mean,

Right away, as they were digging, when they found these buildings, they identified as stables.

They didn't just say, hey, we found stables.

No, they announced to the world they had found Solomon's stables, and that made headlines around the world, just like the headlines that Sleeman had made at Troy.

Okay.

And I will put in at the beginning here, just like we have at Troy, there is nothing at Megiddo that says it's Megiddo, right?

We have a little bit of writing, not much.

There's a fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh that's been found.

We still haven't found the archives that I know are there, right?

In the late Bronze Age, Biridia, the king of Megiddo,

writes to the Egyptian pharaohs, Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, and we've got six letters from him.

There must be return correspondence, and it's in the late Bronze Age palace, the half that Chicago did not excavate and throw away.

So, but...

We don't know that Megiddo was actually Megiddo.