Yarmuth: The Dawn of City-States in Southern Canaan

A central interest of Near Eastern archaeologists is the origins and development of the early states. Pierre de Miroschedji's excavations at Yarmouth have established a new corpus of key information about this process. In this article Professor Miroschedji provides an overview of the stratigraphy and finds from the site and places them in the context of developments during the Early Bronze Age in southern Canaan. Yarmuth clearly qualifies as an early city. Work has exposed the earliest massive and complex public architecture in the region, bold in conception and meticulous in execution. A series of reconstructions, drawn by Daniel Ladiray, reveals the physical nature of the settlement of ancient Yarmuth.