HAIFA, ISRAEL—The latest excavations at the 4,000-year-old site of Tel Kabri in northern Israel have uncovered three more rooms with plastered floors containing storage jars, and there are more rooms in the palace complex to be excavated. The palace at Tel Kabri, which resembles Crete’s palace of Knossos, was inhabited continuously for more than 250 years and features banquet rooms and halls. Last season, Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa and Eric H. Cline of The George Washington University discovered a room full of storage jars that had contained an aromatic red wine. “The goal of this season was to further understand the Canaanite palatial economy, by expanding the excavation beyond the area where the jars were found last season. We were hoping to find additional store rooms, thinking about the palace of Mari and the palaces in Crete from the same period—but to find ones that are actually filled with jars was unexpected. This kind of a find is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn about Canaanite economy and rulership,” Yassur-Landau told Haaretz. To read more about this fascinating Bronze Age site, go to "Off the Grid-Tel Kabri."
