March 24, 2020 • 14 mins
George Noory and Dr. Eric Cline explore his work studying archaeological digs to discover the ancient site Megiddo, that was fortified by King Solomon of the Bible, and how the collapse of that civilization may mirror a collapse of our modern society.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio,
and we're back with Eric Klein, George and Nory here
with you. We're talking about his wook digging up Armageddon.
His website sore linked up at Coast to Coast am
dot com. Eric had any given time how many people
lived on Meghito. Oh, that's a really hard question to answer.
(00:23):
It depends on how much space seeds one takes up, etc. Etc.
Short answer, I would say anywhere between a couple hundred
to a couple thousand of the most interesting. So it
wasn't a huge, thriving city by any means. Wasn't. No,
it was not huge. It was a typical city, but
it wasn't absolutely huge. No, you've been there, does it
(00:44):
feel strange? I mean, do you get that old biblical
feeling when you're up there? You sure do? Yes, I
had thought. I excavated there for twenty years. We dug
every other year, So I was there for ten seasons
from nineteen ninety four to twenty fourteen. And I tell you,
when you walk up on the top of the mound
(01:06):
before any tourists are there. We would get there at
five am when you walk up there. Wow, the sense
of history is just overwhelming, and every time you take
a step you wonder what am I walking over? What
is underneath me? It's just it's an amazing feeling. Either
with Breasted's excavation or yours, was anything found of any
(01:30):
major significance? Oh? Absolutely, Meguito has been at the center
of biblic archeology for the past hundred years or so.
Besides the water tunnel that I mentioned already, Breasted's team
found what they thought were the stables that Solomon built.
In fact, there's a cablegram that I found in the
archives where they wrote back and they said, we think
(01:54):
we found Solomon's stables, and that made the front page
of all the newspapers back in nineteen twenty eight. Now,
what would the significance of that be. Well, for one thing,
since the Bible says that Solomon fortified Meghito in one
passage in the Book of First Kings, and then another
(02:14):
one talks about him having chariot cities, they thought that
they had found the city that Solomon had built a Meghito.
Turned out they didn't. In fact, the city of Solomon
has been extremely elusive at Meghito. There's been four different
excavations over the last one hundred years at the site,
(02:35):
and no fewer than I believe four different levels have
been called Solomon City by this point, so it's very
difficult to find. But besides that, there were a huge
trove of ivories that were found in one of the palace,
a horde of gold. There's all kinds of things that
(02:56):
have come out of Meghito that place it firmly the
center of the archaeology of the region. And how high
is it or how high was it at its peak?
At its peak when they first got there, it was
about one hundred feet tall. But the way the Chicago
excavators dug they would expose the topmost level, what they
(03:17):
called Stratum one, they would completely reveal it. They would
take a photograph photographs, they would then draw it, and
then they would peel it up and throw it away.
They would just toss it out and then go to
Stratum two and then Stratum three. And they started running
out of money, so they switched from what we call
horizontal archaeology, which is what they've been doing, to vertical archaeology,
(03:41):
where they went straight down in one area and that's
how we know how many cities are there, twenty big cities,
one on top of one on top of the other. Yeah,
because they went right down to bedrock. So that because
they took off the top two two and a half cities,
the mound, which was one hundred feet tall, now only
about seventy feet tall. So at one point in the
(04:03):
beginning it was on ground level way back when probably
not well, yes, ground level, but it would have been
a slight small rise. The original bedrock seems to come
up above the valley floor, but not by much so
the earliest people, yeah, would have just barely been above
the valley floor. But as time went on and more
(04:25):
cities were built and then destroyed, and they kept building
and rebuilding, the mound grew until you know, one hundred
feet tall is nothing to sneeze at. Was it easier
to build on top of these older structures? Why didn't
they just level them and start over again. It was
much easier just to level them out and start build
right on top. Because they're building out of mud break,
(04:48):
not out of stone or anything like that. And the
mud break, it's exactly what it sounds like when you
knock over a mud break house. It goes back to dirt,
and so you basically just have to smooth it out
and then you can build on it again. And that's
what they would do again and again and again. It's
very typical, not just a meghito, but at many of
(05:08):
these mounds, we call them Tells, telll or Tel. They're
found over all over what is today Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Turkey,
all those areas basically the modern Middle East. They have
all these mounds, but people didn't realize that they were
actually man made until the guy with the best name
(05:33):
in archaeology, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. He was digging
in the late eighteen hundreds and up until the nineteen twenties,
and he and an American named Frederick Bliss were digging
in a site called Tell Hesse, and they suddenly realized
that this was a man made mound. And that's what
(05:53):
we've been doing ever since, excavating stratigraphically, which we've borrowed
from geology. How flat is it on the top and
what are the dimensions? Let's see on top of mcguino. Now,
it's quite flat because Chicago left it where most of
(06:15):
the stratum. Three remains are visible. That's the Neo Assyrian
period from about the seventh century BC. Now, let's see.
You can walk across it in ten minutes going in
any direction, so the top is not very big. It's
also dotted with palm trees, which there's an apocryphal story
(06:38):
that the Egyptian workmen that Breasted brought to excavate it
was actually a holdover from Petrie's days where he had
taught the Egyptian workman to do the pickaxes and shoveling
in this and that they would bring the Egyptian workmen
every year to oversee the local villagers who were the
(06:59):
ones carrying in the and the story goes that the
Egyptian workmen would eat dates at breakfast and at lunch
and would toss the pits out on the mound, and
from then the date palms that you see today grew.
I personally think it's kind of apocryphal, but it's a
nice story. It is a good story. Now you uncovered letters,
(07:20):
cable grams, cards and notes from Breasted's team. Where'd you
find them? Found them in the archives of the Oriental Institute.
I wanted to write a book about Meguito and the archaeology.
I was going to go level by level, city by city.
But when I went into the archives to look at
(07:40):
their notebooks and all of that, to my surprise, I
haven't expected it. I found that they had the diaries
and the letters and the cable grams, not just from
the directors there were three directors over the fifteen years
or so, but also the team members. And I suddenly
realized nobody had written a book about an excavation using
(08:04):
materials from the team members themselves and telling the story
of the excavation from their point of view. So it
was absolutely fascinating, especially for me because I knew most
of the history already, Like I knew that they had
found the so called Solomon Stables, but I didn't realize
that there was a cable in the archives where the
(08:25):
director wrote back to Breasted and said, I have found
Solomon's Stables. And I kind of sat back in my
chair and I went, oh, my gosh, look at this.
I'm like, look look. I started waving around. So the
people came to life for me. They had been just
names on the spines of books, you know, and in
lists of participants and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, And
(08:46):
then all of a sudden, here I am reading their
letters back home and their diaries, and they became real people,
you know, with hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions,
and oh my god. It was like a soap opera
there a lot of time. So I suddenly thought, you know,
the story of the archeologist is just as interesting as
(09:07):
the story of the archaeology, and nobody's really ever told
that before. So let me see if there's a story there.
And lo and behold, and there sure was. Eric. At
what point is it estimated that civilizations ceased to live
up there. Well, the last people that are there are
(09:28):
the Persians. So by the time Alexander the Great came by,
which would have been about three thirty two VC, the
mound was no longer inhabited. Not quite sure why. I
think the water source might have given out, at least temporarily.
And so in fact, when the Romans came, there's an
(09:51):
entire Roman legion that has planted there. They lived just
off the mound, and in fact their fort has been
found and is being excavated by Matt Adams and Yo
Tom Tepper and others. So we're they're actually retrieving the
Roman fort that you can see from the top of
(10:14):
the mound. It's just right near the bottom. So the
Romans are there too, but they're not up on top
of the mound. They're actually the Romans are using the
mound more as a cemetery. They're they're putting graves in
the side and up on the top. At the time
of Christ, what do you think it was being used
on the top of Meghito. Nothing, no, nothing, you know,
(10:35):
maybe Shepherd is, maybe this and maybe that. But speaking
of that, it's rather interesting at the crossroads right there,
the Meghito junction, which is about half a kilometer or
so away from the site, is the Meghito Prison. Today
it's a it's a modern day prison. When they were
excavating about fifteen years ago to put up a new building,
(10:59):
they came across an ancient building from the couple centuries
after the time of Christ. It's like the third century,
fourth century, fifth century a d. But in one of
the rooms of the building they found a mosaic, and
the mosaic mentions the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the earliest
(11:20):
mention that we've got of Jesus Christ anywhere. As far
as I know now, what happened during the eleven seventy
seven BC collapse, the eleven seventy seven BC collapse, that's
the end of the Late Bronze Age, So that's about
thirty two hundred years ago. And basically the world that
(11:42):
stretched from what is today Italy to what is today
Afghanistan and from what is today Turkey down to Egypt
was all internationalized. It was globalized for their time period.
They were happily trading for two three four hundred years
at the end of the Ron's Age, you know, usington
and copper to make bronze. But suddenly round about eleven
(12:05):
seventy seven everything collapsed. They went down within a couple
of decades, a century at most, and what had been
a thriving set of civilizations seven and all the Canaanites
and the Egyptians and the Hittites, Myceneans, Manoans, a, Syrians,
Babylonian suddenly they're all gone. It was a catastrophe such
(12:26):
as the world had never seen and wouldn't see again
until the Roman Empire collapsed, and that was fifteen hundred
years later. So the collapse of the Le Bronze age
is eleven seventy seven, and that is the title of
my previous book, which I'm now working on revising because
it seems that it might be time to do it.
(12:49):
So eleven seventy seven, I think that's the one that
you were on with me back in twenty fifteen, wasn't it.
Absolutely that's exactly what it is. You have a good memory,
so yes, so I'm revising that. But I'm also writing
a sequel called After eleven seventy seven, which deals with
how they pull themselves back up after they collapse. The
(13:11):
subtitle is the Rebirth of Civilization, and it's going to
cover the four hundred years down to seven seventy six,
which is the first Olympics in Greece, and so it
deals with resiliency and rebirth and what do you do
after your civilization has collapsed, how do you come back
and rebuild? And so again, that not only seems a
(13:34):
perfect sequel to eleven seventy seven, but also seems like
it might be a little appropriate for our world today.
I was going to just ask you about that, Eric,
do you see any similarities between eleven seventy seven BC
and what's happening today. I'm afraid I do. I see
an awful lot of similarity. Yeah, famines, drought, invaders, war,
(14:00):
you name it. Yeah, We've got most of the things
that they had, which is why at the end of
the book I just simply kind of gently say, you know,
they collapsed. We've got most of what they had. It
might be heboristic to think that we won't collapse. And
now with the coronavirus running around, I'm thinking, God, I
hit it when I'm prescience, you know, I think, MITCHO, Yeah,
(14:25):
we have what they had back then, and they collapse.
So I'm usually very optimistic, but I'm a little worried
right now. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every
weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to
Coast am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio,
and we're back with Eric Klein, George and Nory here
with you. We're talking about his wook digging up Armageddon.
His website sore linked up at Coast to Coast am
dot com. Eric had any given time how many people
lived on Meghito. Oh, that's a really hard question to answer.
(00:23):
It depends on how much space seeds one takes up, etc. Etc.
Short answer, I would say anywhere between a couple hundred
to a couple thousand of the most interesting. So it
wasn't a huge, thriving city by any means. Wasn't. No,
it was not huge. It was a typical city, but
it wasn't absolutely huge. No, you've been there, does it
(00:44):
feel strange? I mean, do you get that old biblical
feeling when you're up there? You sure do? Yes, I
had thought. I excavated there for twenty years. We dug
every other year, So I was there for ten seasons
from nineteen ninety four to twenty fourteen. And I tell you,
when you walk up on the top of the mound
(01:06):
before any tourists are there. We would get there at
five am when you walk up there. Wow, the sense
of history is just overwhelming, and every time you take
a step you wonder what am I walking over? What
is underneath me? It's just it's an amazing feeling. Either
with Breasted's excavation or yours, was anything found of any
(01:30):
major significance? Oh? Absolutely, Meguito has been at the center
of biblic archeology for the past hundred years or so.
Besides the water tunnel that I mentioned already, Breasted's team
found what they thought were the stables that Solomon built.
In fact, there's a cablegram that I found in the
archives where they wrote back and they said, we think
(01:54):
we found Solomon's stables, and that made the front page
of all the newspapers back in nineteen twenty eight. Now,
what would the significance of that be. Well, for one thing,
since the Bible says that Solomon fortified Meghito in one
passage in the Book of First Kings, and then another
(02:14):
one talks about him having chariot cities, they thought that
they had found the city that Solomon had built a Meghito.
Turned out they didn't. In fact, the city of Solomon
has been extremely elusive at Meghito. There's been four different
excavations over the last one hundred years at the site,
(02:35):
and no fewer than I believe four different levels have
been called Solomon City by this point, so it's very
difficult to find. But besides that, there were a huge
trove of ivories that were found in one of the palace,
a horde of gold. There's all kinds of things that
(02:56):
have come out of Meghito that place it firmly the
center of the archaeology of the region. And how high
is it or how high was it at its peak?
At its peak when they first got there, it was
about one hundred feet tall. But the way the Chicago
excavators dug they would expose the topmost level, what they
(03:17):
called Stratum one, they would completely reveal it. They would
take a photograph photographs, they would then draw it, and
then they would peel it up and throw it away.
They would just toss it out and then go to
Stratum two and then Stratum three. And they started running
out of money, so they switched from what we call
horizontal archaeology, which is what they've been doing, to vertical archaeology,
(03:41):
where they went straight down in one area and that's
how we know how many cities are there, twenty big cities,
one on top of one on top of the other. Yeah,
because they went right down to bedrock. So that because
they took off the top two two and a half cities,
the mound, which was one hundred feet tall, now only
about seventy feet tall. So at one point in the
(04:03):
beginning it was on ground level way back when probably
not well, yes, ground level, but it would have been
a slight small rise. The original bedrock seems to come
up above the valley floor, but not by much so
the earliest people, yeah, would have just barely been above
the valley floor. But as time went on and more
(04:25):
cities were built and then destroyed, and they kept building
and rebuilding, the mound grew until you know, one hundred
feet tall is nothing to sneeze at. Was it easier
to build on top of these older structures? Why didn't
they just level them and start over again. It was
much easier just to level them out and start build
right on top. Because they're building out of mud break,
(04:48):
not out of stone or anything like that. And the
mud break, it's exactly what it sounds like when you
knock over a mud break house. It goes back to dirt,
and so you basically just have to smooth it out
and then you can build on it again. And that's
what they would do again and again and again. It's
very typical, not just a meghito, but at many of
(05:08):
these mounds, we call them Tells, telll or Tel. They're
found over all over what is today Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Turkey,
all those areas basically the modern Middle East. They have
all these mounds, but people didn't realize that they were
actually man made until the guy with the best name
(05:33):
in archaeology, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. He was digging
in the late eighteen hundreds and up until the nineteen twenties,
and he and an American named Frederick Bliss were digging
in a site called Tell Hesse, and they suddenly realized
that this was a man made mound. And that's what
(05:53):
we've been doing ever since, excavating stratigraphically, which we've borrowed
from geology. How flat is it on the top and
what are the dimensions? Let's see on top of mcguino. Now,
it's quite flat because Chicago left it where most of
(06:15):
the stratum. Three remains are visible. That's the Neo Assyrian
period from about the seventh century BC. Now, let's see.
You can walk across it in ten minutes going in
any direction, so the top is not very big. It's
also dotted with palm trees, which there's an apocryphal story
(06:38):
that the Egyptian workmen that Breasted brought to excavate it
was actually a holdover from Petrie's days where he had
taught the Egyptian workman to do the pickaxes and shoveling
in this and that they would bring the Egyptian workmen
every year to oversee the local villagers who were the
(06:59):
ones carrying in the and the story goes that the
Egyptian workmen would eat dates at breakfast and at lunch
and would toss the pits out on the mound, and
from then the date palms that you see today grew.
I personally think it's kind of apocryphal, but it's a
nice story. It is a good story. Now you uncovered letters,
(07:20):
cable grams, cards and notes from Breasted's team. Where'd you
find them? Found them in the archives of the Oriental Institute.
I wanted to write a book about Meguito and the archaeology.
I was going to go level by level, city by city.
But when I went into the archives to look at
(07:40):
their notebooks and all of that, to my surprise, I
haven't expected it. I found that they had the diaries
and the letters and the cable grams, not just from
the directors there were three directors over the fifteen years
or so, but also the team members. And I suddenly
realized nobody had written a book about an excavation using
(08:04):
materials from the team members themselves and telling the story
of the excavation from their point of view. So it
was absolutely fascinating, especially for me because I knew most
of the history already, Like I knew that they had
found the so called Solomon Stables, but I didn't realize
that there was a cable in the archives where the
(08:25):
director wrote back to Breasted and said, I have found
Solomon's Stables. And I kind of sat back in my
chair and I went, oh, my gosh, look at this.
I'm like, look look. I started waving around. So the
people came to life for me. They had been just
names on the spines of books, you know, and in
lists of participants and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, And
(08:46):
then all of a sudden, here I am reading their
letters back home and their diaries, and they became real people,
you know, with hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions,
and oh my god. It was like a soap opera
there a lot of time. So I suddenly thought, you know,
the story of the archeologist is just as interesting as
(09:07):
the story of the archaeology, and nobody's really ever told
that before. So let me see if there's a story there.
And lo and behold, and there sure was. Eric. At
what point is it estimated that civilizations ceased to live
up there. Well, the last people that are there are
(09:28):
the Persians. So by the time Alexander the Great came by,
which would have been about three thirty two VC, the
mound was no longer inhabited. Not quite sure why. I
think the water source might have given out, at least temporarily.
And so in fact, when the Romans came, there's an
(09:51):
entire Roman legion that has planted there. They lived just
off the mound, and in fact their fort has been
found and is being excavated by Matt Adams and Yo
Tom Tepper and others. So we're they're actually retrieving the
Roman fort that you can see from the top of
(10:14):
the mound. It's just right near the bottom. So the
Romans are there too, but they're not up on top
of the mound. They're actually the Romans are using the
mound more as a cemetery. They're they're putting graves in
the side and up on the top. At the time
of Christ, what do you think it was being used
on the top of Meghito. Nothing, no, nothing, you know,
(10:35):
maybe Shepherd is, maybe this and maybe that. But speaking
of that, it's rather interesting at the crossroads right there,
the Meghito junction, which is about half a kilometer or
so away from the site, is the Meghito Prison. Today
it's a it's a modern day prison. When they were
excavating about fifteen years ago to put up a new building,
(10:59):
they came across an ancient building from the couple centuries
after the time of Christ. It's like the third century,
fourth century, fifth century a d. But in one of
the rooms of the building they found a mosaic, and
the mosaic mentions the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the earliest
(11:20):
mention that we've got of Jesus Christ anywhere. As far
as I know now, what happened during the eleven seventy
seven BC collapse, the eleven seventy seven BC collapse, that's
the end of the Late Bronze Age, So that's about
thirty two hundred years ago. And basically the world that
(11:42):
stretched from what is today Italy to what is today
Afghanistan and from what is today Turkey down to Egypt
was all internationalized. It was globalized for their time period.
They were happily trading for two three four hundred years
at the end of the Ron's Age, you know, usington
and copper to make bronze. But suddenly round about eleven
(12:05):
seventy seven everything collapsed. They went down within a couple
of decades, a century at most, and what had been
a thriving set of civilizations seven and all the Canaanites
and the Egyptians and the Hittites, Myceneans, Manoans, a, Syrians,
Babylonian suddenly they're all gone. It was a catastrophe such
(12:26):
as the world had never seen and wouldn't see again
until the Roman Empire collapsed, and that was fifteen hundred
years later. So the collapse of the Le Bronze age
is eleven seventy seven, and that is the title of
my previous book, which I'm now working on revising because
it seems that it might be time to do it.
(12:49):
So eleven seventy seven, I think that's the one that
you were on with me back in twenty fifteen, wasn't it.
Absolutely that's exactly what it is. You have a good memory,
so yes, so I'm revising that. But I'm also writing
a sequel called After eleven seventy seven, which deals with
how they pull themselves back up after they collapse. The
(13:11):
subtitle is the Rebirth of Civilization, and it's going to
cover the four hundred years down to seven seventy six,
which is the first Olympics in Greece, and so it
deals with resiliency and rebirth and what do you do
after your civilization has collapsed, how do you come back
and rebuild? And so again, that not only seems a
(13:34):
perfect sequel to eleven seventy seven, but also seems like
it might be a little appropriate for our world today.
I was going to just ask you about that, Eric,
do you see any similarities between eleven seventy seven BC
and what's happening today. I'm afraid I do. I see
an awful lot of similarity. Yeah, famines, drought, invaders, war,
(14:00):
you name it. Yeah, We've got most of the things
that they had, which is why at the end of
the book I just simply kind of gently say, you know,
they collapsed. We've got most of what they had. It
might be heboristic to think that we won't collapse. And
now with the coronavirus running around, I'm thinking, God, I
hit it when I'm prescience, you know, I think, MITCHO, Yeah,
(14:25):
we have what they had back then, and they collapse.
So I'm usually very optimistic, but I'm a little worried
right now. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every
weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to
Coast am dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal: Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a brand new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-4 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.