Assaf Yasur Landau | Red Wine and Minoan Frescoes: The Canaanite Palace at Tel Kabri

Assaf Yasur-Landau, Associate Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology, Department of Maritime Civilizations, University of Haifa.

Tel Kabri, in the western Galilee of Israel, is a large site surrounded by rich agricultural land. During the Middle Bronze Age it was the center of a Canaanite polity and its proximity to the Mediterranean coast facilitated its connections to major land routes, as well as to the sea. Over the last decade, the vast palace of Kabri was extensively excavated by co-directors Assaf Yasur-Landau and Eric H. Cline. The palace, abandoned after the Middle Bronze Age, provides an extraordinary opportunity to gain insights into the life of Canaanite elite and into the political economy. The strong Mediterranean connections of the palace are demonstrated by the commission of paintings in an Aegean style—a rare phenomenon in the Middle Bronze eastern Mediterranean. Maritime trade provided access to imported goods, such as Cypriot pottery and cedar from Lebanon. At the same time, there are no signs of literate administration in the palace, or even of an administrative use of sealings. Patterns of animal husbandry, textile production, pottery manufacture and consumption, and storage within the palace all provide evidence that it behaved economically more like an estate than like a redistributive center. The recent find of large wine storage rooms may provide an unexpected explanation to the ways Canaanite rulers used the palatial economy to further its political goals.

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