A Middle Bronze Age Fortification and Late Iron Age Destruction:

Tall Zarʿa is situated in the Wādī al-ʿArab in northern Jordan, which connects the Jordan Valley with the Transjordanian Plateau. In 2019, a team from the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Amman, funded by the German Archaeological Institute, resumed excavations focusing on the Late Iron Age and Hellenistic periods. The excavation team, the residents of Umm Qais, the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, and the GPIA are sincerely thanked for their support. Special thanks are also extended to the DAI for their financial support and to the anonymous peer reviewer for the constructive suggestions with regard to this manuscript. The Late Iron Age dwellings identified at the site could only be retrieved at the tall’s northern edge; the rest fell victim to massive construction works carried out in the Hellenistic period. The inventory of the Iron Age houses suggests a timeframe of the mid to late 8th cent. BCE. It indicates that the inhabitants suddenly had to flee the site, which can be linked to Tiglath-Pileser III’s campaigns in 733/732 BCE. A 50-meter-long rectilinear fortification complex with two stone massifs still standing to a height of c. four meters was further uncovered. The stratigraphic analysis and the layout of this complex resemble Middle Bronze Age fortifications.