so what I want to cover today is the story of Flinders Petrie who is considered by many to be the father of archeology so the question is is what exactly did he do to earn this honorable title and where did he do it I am El Hesse the reason that this site is so important is that it is the birthplace of pottery chronology if we’re asking the question whether Pottery chronology is reliable or not we need to look at where it began and how it began now this is a story that’s really important because there’s so many debates going on within archeology debates on pottery and the chronology of sites and when things date and to what and whether this lines up with historical texts or not if you’re going to understand these arguments and get to the heart of these arguments you really have to understand this story foreign so the early days of archeology were digging and and recovering things from museums and there came a time when archeology went in a more scientific Direction and the key figure through whom this happened was the archaeologist Flinders Petrie so since Flinders Petri is considered by many scholars to be the father of archeology than the place where he did his work that ended up taking the field in a more scientific direction that where he developed the methodologies that are still used today that place then would be considered the birthplace of archeology and that place is a site called Tel El hessi and it is located about 16 miles away from Gaza so after spending almost 10 years Excavating in Egypt Flinders Petrie came in 1890 to the Holy Land to excavate Tel El Hesse so this was the first sight in the holy land that he dug so of all the sites in the Holy Land why did he choose for his first excavation uh tell el hessi well he chose it because he believed it to be the city of lakeish which is mentioned in the bible over 20 times he didn’t want to dig an ancient site that isn’t mentioned in the Bible that doesn’t have historical information he wanted one that had a lot of information from historical sources I’ve just repositioned here just momentarily just just hopefully so you can see I mean the tell I’m standing on the highest part of the tell but it goes way out the city itself to these Hills off in the distance it’s it’s a very large tell it’s very substantial and it’s very impressive and I was expecting it to be much smaller Tallahassee had major challenges and one of them was that in 1890 the top of the tell was covered with crops that the owner would not allow to be destroyed however there was a stream that went past tell Hesse and it went right past the Eastern side and had cut into the mound and the erosion had eroded out a cliff that was about 60 feet high and so Petrie saw this Cliff before him and he could see the layers stacked on top of each other from the inner core of the tale of Hesse here’s the creek down below me you see the Reeds going by the base of Tel El Hesse and you see this very steep slope and going up to where uh where the side of the tell is exposed even today this um was also the case back in 1890 when Flinders Petrie came here so this is what Petrie says he says I tell Hesse there was a deep and stratified town to work on and therefore good scope for dating by levels and a clear section of the Town had been cut open by the scouring of the torrent so that any level could be worked in at once and these happy circumstances a few weeks suffice to obtain Pottery of each age from the Amorite to the Greek times so here’s tell hessy right and then the stream ran by on the and eroded the side of the towel so that it produced this cliff 60 feet tall to where uh Petrie could look and see all the layers of the tail uh exposed in that 60-foot Cliff that he was looking and so instead of digging in the typical way from the top because of all these crops that couldn’t be destroyed then Petri instead excavated from the side of the tell and then he saved Time by having already the whole inner core of the tail exposed to him and so he was able in six short weeks to understand the whole history of the site from the Canaanite period all the way to the Greek period in just six short weeks because he had this Advantage where he already had all of this exposed where he could see it and study it and pull out from each layer the pottery from that layer study it independently and so he pulled the pottery out from these different layers and he studied the the differences some of these differences were already known differences in Styles and so he used the Pottery to date the layers he also used the Bible and he correlated each layer with a Biblical event the oldest layers were the ones at the bottom of the tell and the youngest layers were the ones at the top so what he did is he now had the chronology of the site in two places he had it in the stratigraphy of the site itself in the face of this cliff and he also had the history of lakeish in the Bible and so he could connect then the events in the Bible to the events in the tell and this is what Biblical archeology is all about this is what archeology is all about it’s about connecting the historical sources that are available about a site that’s being excavated so that you can understand and interpret the things that are being found in that excavation to the historical record this is why archeology is a field that’s under the umbrella field of History it’s the goal is to connect the archaeological record to the historical record then you really have something solid this is also the reason why the uh the archeology that takes place in between Egypt and Mesopotamia in the places and the time periods that the Bible is talking about is called biblical archeology because as we see in this dig of Flinders Petri at tell el Hesse that is the goal the goal is to connect the biblical texts the Israelite history uh and their records to the events that are represented in these layers and the stratigraphy of the site that’s being excavated now Petrie’s conclusion was this we have now traced the history of the place as seen in the remains and in the Jewish records the correspondence is complete another thing that he shows is he shows a cross-section of telehessi he shows the tell and then he shows uh the cut the face of it and then he draws in the different levels that he found there the way that that works is simply went down to the oldest layers in the tell and the Bible specifically says that lakeish was an Amorite City the amorites were a tribe of the Canaanites so it was a Canaanite City that came to an end at a destruction level and the Bible says that the Canaanite city of lakeish was destroyed by Joshua and the Israelites so he connects that then with the conquest and then it becomes the Kingdom of Israel and later the kingdom of Judah and so he connects evidence from certain Kings who the Bible says built up Judah like Solomon and rehoboam he connects events to Hezekiah and then that city is destroyed he finds this destruction uh layer and so he goes to the biblical record which says sennacherib the king of Assyria destroyed lakish and he connects that event in the Bible with the event and the evidence that he found in the tell and then the city is rebuilt and then it’s destroyed again that’s the Babylonian destruction the Bible says that Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians destroyed lakish so he identifies that destruction and then it’s rebuilt and it lasts until the Greek period and then the city comes to an end he summarizes the pottery this way he says all of the pottery found was kept classified roughly at first and then as I began to learn it and to be able to understand the town eat piece was leveled to within a foot or two every distinctive piece was kept and is here drawn on plates five through nine [Music] the nature of the pottery is stated the levels in feet and in the parts of the site at which it has been found and the approximate dates corresponding to those levels stated in Years BC this is where it began this is the birthplace of pottery chronology because he was the first one Flinders Petrie right here at telehessi that used the pottery and the layers that were exposed in this tell and the Bible to correlate with them in order to date the occupation of this ancient city one layer at a time using both the Bible and the pottery here’s the problem the problem is is that Petri was wrong he made a mistake in identifying telehessi as uh lakeish because lakeish was later to be discovered at another site called tell do Weir and the excavations that have happened at Tel deweir have made it pretty much certain that that is the site of lakeish lakeish was later discovered by uh William Foxwell Albright it’s not too terribly far from here so these connections that Petrie made between telehessi as lakeish in the Bible are lost not completely they’re not completely lost because whatever City tell el Hesse was it certainly was a Canaanite Amorite city that was a part of Canaan and that was affected by the conquest of the Israelites and it became an Israelite City and it was affected by the conquests of the Assyrians and the Babylonians and so it wasn’t all disconnected but um but there was the mistake of it being misidentified archaeologists today credit uh lenders Petrie for for starting Pottery chronology and for starting to put into practice the way that to this day archeology layers are dated and so he gets credited for that but they don’t accept his actual dating of the occupation of this site is it surprising that the father of archeology back in 1890 made a mistake in his archeology is that shocking no that’s not shocking do archaeologists make mistakes today uh yeah quite frequently and so we’re human you know and that’s part of it and so I don’t think this takes away from Flinders Petri and what he contributed to the field of archeology in fact you know if you think about it uh if there is today a contradiction uh between the Bible and the archeology um it’s assumed that the problem is on the side of the Bible because it’s a very secular field but actually in the original excavation here when the mistake was made of course it wasn’t on the side of the Bible the Bible knew where lakeish was it was a mistake by the archaeologist so what do we learn from this story well first of all we learned this we go back to this site we go back to this original excavation and archaeologist who began to develop these important methodologies that began to take archeology in a more scientific Direction and it’s important to understand that Petrie used the Bible the field of archeology was birthed out of the biblical worldview not out of the secular world view archeology came about it was Bible inspired and it was Bible driven now the concept is oh well if you use the Bible then you’re not being scientific you need to be more scientific by not using the Bible well that’s not the way it started that’s not what happened with Flinders Petrie that’s not what the excavations at tell Hesse were about they were very much about the Bible and connecting the archeology to the biblical record so that’s how the field originally went in the direction of becoming more scientific and using methodologies those methodologies were developed using the Bible and so how is it now that somehow we reverse the process and somehow become more scientific by not using the Bible by not using the historical information that’s available to archaeologists who are digging the times and the places that the Bible is talking about to dig deeper you can order a copy of my book which has been a number one bestseller in archeology just click the link in the description below this video and so I think this is a very important story to understand and to know and to reference back to when confronted with all of the um with all of the criticisms that we often run into in the field today because it has become very secular and either is skeptical of the Bible or ignores the Bible and here’s the thing is none of us were in the ancient past we don’t know the specifics of what happened in the ancient past because we weren’t there the people that were there that saw it that were that experience that time and those places and those events and wrote those down those are the ones that we need to rely on in order to understand what’s left behind from those events in those places and so it’s it’s pretty simple but it’s also pretty brilliant and the one who really started developing that originally was Flanders Petri and his excavations at telehessi