Eric Cline

And in the late 1800s, other people were identifying other sites in the Jezreel Valley as potentially Megiddo.

But again...

just like Hisolik has to be Troy, so Armand, which the actual official name in Arabic is Tel el-Mutaselim.

Tel el-Mutaselim is Megiddo.

It has to be.

There's nothing else that fits the description over time.

So in 1903, when Gottlieb Schumacher went there, he was originally from Zanesville, Ohio, German extraction.

His father was a Templar, not the Knights Templar, but the German movement that thought that the Second Coming was imminent and that you should move to the Holy Land.

His father, Jacob,

was hired to be, I believe his title was actually city planner for Haifa.

And he's the one, among others, who planned the modern city of Haifa.

So young Gottlieb moved to the region when he was about nine years old.

And in fact, some of the surveyors, Condor and Kitchener, who did the famous survey of Western Palestine, and actually the boundary between Israel and Lebanon today is where Condor and Kitchener stopped their survey.

We know for a fact that they stayed overnight or for a couple of days with Schumacher's family in Haifa.

And they actually went up on top of Megiddo as part of their survey.

And then later, Schumacher goes, he gets his PhD in archaeology and opens up the excavations at Megiddo, 1903.

At that time, it's Ottoman-controlled.

So he had to get permission from the sultan.

to dig there.

And he's there 1903 to 1905 with this huge trench, like I said, that goes right through.