An Archaeological Contribution to the Early Iron Age Chronological Debate: Alternative Chronologies for Phoenicia and their Effects on the Levant, Cyprus and Greece

The debate over the chronology of the early Iron Age in Israel by far transcends Palestinian archaeology, history, and biblical historiography. Chronologies for most of the adjacent regions, and those of entities farther afield, such as Cyprus and Greece, are largely dependent on the Levant. The debate has centered to date mainly on historical considerations, adjusting the chronologies of the material record to the different proposed scenarios. This article advocates an opposite approach, namely, constructing detailed artifactual, mainly ceramic sequences, anchoring these to an absolute time scale by 14C dating, and only then correlating them with historical data. Southern Phoenicia is proposed as a starting point for such an endeavor. Not only does it offer the most detailed stratigraphic/ceramic sequence to date for the early Iron Age in the Southern Levant, its commercial ties provide a wealth of ceramic indices for correlating the Phoenician sequence with other series of the Levant and farther Mediterranean regions. To a large extent these overcome problems of regionalism, which otherwise hamper attempts at chronological cross-correlations in this relatively fragmented period. Two alternative chronologies are presented: the traditional, high chronology, which has been established mainly on the basis of biblical/historical considerations, and the newly proposed low one, which is supported by radiometric dates from Tel Dor. The adoption of either one will entail a revision of parts of the Cypro-Geometric and Greek (Euboean) Proto-Geometric chronologies.