Excavations at Jerusalem by Kathleen Kenyon
Antiquity Volume XXXVI (June 1962)

Excerpts and Definitions and Addendums

Jerusalem first enters written history as one of the towns of which the rulers were in correspondence with Egypt in the period covered by the Amarna letters in the first third of the 14th century BC. It later appears in the Book of Joshua as a town of the Canaanite Jebusites who dwelt in the midst of the Israelites and were not conquered by them in the early stages of the entry into Palestine. It thus enters the historical age as an important Canaanite town of the second half of the second millennium BC.

Jerusalem lies athwart the backbone of the upland ridge of Palestine at a point where it is intersected by an important east-west route between the coastal plain to the west and Jordan and the Dead Sea Valley to the east. It thus assumed major political importance particularly when the coastal plain was under the control of first Egypt for most of the second millennium and then the Philistines from about 1200 BC onwards. The control of Jerusalem was therefore essential to the development of the political power of the Hebrews and it was not until Jerusalem was captured by David about 995 BC that the Hebrew tribes became a nation ...

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