Ashkelon (also Ashqelon and Ascalon; Hebrew: אַשְׁקְלוֹן 
(audio) (help·info); Arabic: عسقلان (ˁAsqalān); Latin: Ascalonia; Akkadian: Isqalluna) is a coastal city in the South District of Israel on the Mediterranean coast, 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of Tel Aviv, and 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) north of the border with the Gaza Strip. The ancient seaport of Ashkelon dates back to the Neolithic Age. In the course of its history, it has been ruled by the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Israelites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians and the Crusaders, until it was destroyed by the Mamluks in 1270. The Arab village of al-Majdal (Arabic: المجدل, Hebrew: אל-מג'דל, מגדל), was established nearby in the 16th century, under Ottoman's own rule.
In 1918, Ashkelon became part of the British Mandate for Palestine. In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Majdal was the forward position of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force based in Gaza.[2] The village was occupied by Israeli forces on November 5, 1948, by which time most of the Arab population of 11,000 had been forced to leave. In 2010, the population of Ashkelon was 112,900.[1]
The name Ashkelon is probably Western Semitic, derived from the root škl ("to weigh") attesting to its importance as a center for mercantile activities. Ashkelon is mentioned in the Egyptian Execration Texts of the 11th dynasty as "Asqanu."[3] Scallion and shallot are derived from Ascalonia, the Latin name for Ashkelon.[4][5]
Archaeological site with artifacts from the Neolithic era
The Neolithic site of Ashkelon is located on the Mediterranean coast, 1.5 km (0.93 mi) north of Tel Ashkelon. It is dated radiometrically (14C) to ca. 7900 bp (uncalibrated), to the poorly known Pre-Pottery Neolithic C phase of the Neolithic. It was discovered and excavated in 1954 by French archaeologist Jean Perrot. In 1997–1998, a large scale salvage project was conducted at the site by Yosef Garfinkel on behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and nearly 1,000 sq.m were examined. A final excavation report was published in 2008.
In the site over a hundred fireplaces and hearths were found and numerous pits, but no solid architecture, except for one wall. Various phases of occupation were found, one atop the other, with sterile layers of sea sand between them. This indicates that the site was occupied on a seasonal basis.
Ashkelon Pre-Pottery Neolithic C flint arrowheads
The main finds were enormous quantities of animal bones (ca. 100,000) and 20,000 flint artifacts. Usually at Neolithic sites flints far outnumber animal bones. The bones belong to domesticated and non-domesticated animals. When all aspects of this site are taken into account, it appears to have been used by pastoral nomads for meat processing. The nearby sea could supply salt necessary for the conservation of meat.
Ashkelon was the oldest and largest seaport in Canaan, one of the "five cities" of the Philistines, north of Gaza and south of Jaffa (Yafa).
The city was originally built on a sandstone outcropping and has a good underground water supply. It was relatively large as an ancient city with as many as 15,000 people living inside walls a mile and a half (2.4 km) long, 50 feet (15 m) high and 150 feet (50 m)[citation needed] thick. Ashkelon was a thriving Middle Bronze Age (2000–1550 BC) city of more than 150 acres (61 ha), with commanding ramparts including the oldest arched city gate in the world, eight feet wide, and even as a ruin still standing two stories high. The thickness of the walls was so great that the mudbrick Bronze Age gate had a stone-lined tunnel-like barrel vault, coated with white plaster, to support the superstructure: it is the oldest such vault ever found. Later Roman and Islamic fortifications, faced with stone, followed the same footprint, a vast semicircle protecting Ashkelon on the landward side. On the sea it was defended by a high natural bluff.
In 1991, a votive silver calf was discovered in the ruins of a sanctuary. During the Canaanite period, a roadway more than 20 feet (6.1 m) in width ascended the rampart from the harbor and entered a gate at the top. Nearby, in the ruins of a small ceramic tabernacle was found a finely cast bronze statuette of a bull calf, originally silvered, 4 inches (100 mm) long. Images of calves and bulls were associated with the worship of the Canaanite gods El and Baal.
The Amarna letters correspondence of Ashkelon/(Ašqaluna), of 1350 BC, contains seven letters to the Egyptian pharaoh, from its 'King'/mayor: Yidya. Yidya was the only ruler of Ašqaluna during the 15–20-year time period. One letter from the pharaoh to Yidya was discovered in the early 1900s.
The Philistines conquered Canaanite Ashkelon about 1150 BC. Their earliest pottery, types of structures and inscriptions are similar to the early Greek urbanised centre at Mycenae in mainland Greece, adding weight to the hypothesis that the Philistines were possibly one of the populations among the "Sea Peoples" that upset cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Ashkelon became one of the five Philistine cities that were constantly warring with the Israelites and the Kingdom of Judah. According to Herodotus, its temple of Venus was the oldest of its kind, imitated even in Cyprus, and he mentions that this temple was pillaged by marauding "Scythians" during the time of their sway over the Medes (653–625 BC). When this vast seaport, the last of the Philistine cities to hold out against Nebuchadnezzar finally fell in 604 BC, burnt and destroyed and its people taken into exile, the Philistine era was over.[citation needed]
Ancient sarcophagus in Ashkelon
Ashkelon was soon rebuilt. Until the conquest of Alexander the Great, Ashkelon's inhabitants were influenced by the dominant Persian culture. It is in this archaeological layer that excavations have found dog burials. It is believed the dogs may have had a sacred role, however evidence is not conclusive. After the conquest of Alexander in the 4th Century BC, Ashkelon was an important Hellenistic seaport.
According to the Tanakh, Ashkelon is one of the cities given to the Jewish people as a heritage.[6] The Jews of Judea drove the Greeks out of the region during the Maccabean Revolt, which lasted from 167 to 160 BC. The Hasmonean Kingdom was then established, which Ashkelon thereafter became a part of.
The Hasmonean kingdom fell in 63 BC, and the area was incorporated into the Roman Republic. Queen Cleopatra VII used Ashkelon as her place of refuge when her brother and sister exiled her in 49 BC. She organized an army on the site but did not need to use it due to Julius Caesar's arrival in Alexandria. Ashkelon was later placed under the rule of Herod the Great, a Jewish client king of Rome. Ashkelon may have even been his birthplace. Josephus states Ashkelon was not ceded to Herod the Great in 30 BC,[7] yet he built monumental buildings there: bath houses, elaborate fountains and large colonnades.[8] The city remained loyal to Rome during the Great Revolt, 66–70 AD, and in the following centuries it grew to be an important centre. It appears on a fragment of the 6th century AD Madaba Map.[citation needed]
During the Crusades, Ashkelon (known to the Crusaders as Ascalon) was an important city due to its location near the coast and between the Crusader States and Egypt. In 1099, shortly after the Siege of Jerusalem (1099), an Egyptian Fatimid army that had been sent to relieve Jerusalem was defeated by a Crusader force at the Battle of Ascalon. The city itself was not captured by the Crusaders because of internal disputes among their leaders. This battle is widely considered to have signified the end of the First Crusade. Until 1153, the Fatimids were able to launch raids into the Kingdom of Jerusalem from Ashkelon, which meant that the southern border of the Crusader States was constantly unstable. In response to these incursions into Outremer, King Fulk of Jerusalem constructed a number of Christian settlements around the city during the 1130s, in order to neutralise the threat of the Muslim garrison. In 1148, during the Second Crusade, the city was unsuccessfully besieged for eight days by a small Crusader army that was not fully supported by the Crusader States.
In 1150, the Fatimids fortified the city with 53 towers, as it was their most important frontier fortress. Three years later, after a five-month siege, the city was captured by a Crusader army led by King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. It was then added to the County of Jaffa to form the County of Jaffa and Ascalon, which became one of the four major seigneuries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
After the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem the six elders of the Karaite Jewish community in Ashkelon contributed to the ransoming of captured Jews and holy relics from Jerusalem's new rulers. The Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon, which was sent to the Jewish elders of Alexandria, describes their participation in the ransom effort and the ordeals suffered by many of the freed captives.
A few hundred Jews,Karaites and Rabbanites, were living in Ashkelon in the second half of the 12th century, but moved to Jerusalem when the city was destroyed in 1191.[9]
Muslim pilgrims to the Shrine of Seyid Hussein, April 1943.
In 1187 Saladin took Ashkelon as part of his conquest of the Crusader States following the Battle of Hattin. In 1191, during the Third Crusade, Saladin demolished the city because of its potential strategic importance to the Christians, but the leader of the Crusade, King Richard I of England, constructed a citadel upon the ruins. Ashkelon subsequently remained part of the diminished territories of Outremer throughout most of the 13th century and Richard, Earl of Cornwall reconstructed and refortified the citadel during 1240–41, as part of the Crusader policy of improving the defences of coastal sites. The Egyptians retook Ashkelon in 1247 during As-Salih Ayyub's conflict with the Crusader States and the city was returned to Muslim rule. The Mamluk dynasty came into power in Egypt in 1250 and the ancient and medieval history of Ashkelon was brought to an end in 1270, when the Mamluk sultan Baybars ordered the citadel and harbour at the site to be destroyed. As a result of this destruction, the site was abandoned by its inhabitants and fell into disuse.
According to Shiite tradition, the head of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Mohammad, was buried in Ashkelon. In the late 11th century it was moved to a new shrine named Mashad Nabi Hussein (or Sabni Hussein) built for the purpose. In 1153, at the time of the Crusaders' conquest of Ashkelon, the head was moved to Fustat (Egypt). The shrine was described as the most magnificent building in Ashkelon.[10] In the British Mandate period it was a "large maqam on top of a hill" with no tomb but a fragment of a pillar showing the place where the head had been buried.[11] In July 1950, the shrine was destroyed at the instructions of Moshe Dayan.[12]
High-rise residential development along the beach
The Arab village of Majdal was mentioned by historians and tourists at the end of the 15th century.[13] In 1596, Ottoman records showed Majdal to be a large village of 559 Muslim households, making it the 7th most populous locality in Palestine after Safad, Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, Hebron and Kafr Kanna.[14][15]
The census of 1931 found 6,166 Muslims and 41 Christians living there.[16] By 1948, the population had grown to about 11,000.
Majdal was especially known for its weaving industry. The town had around 500 looms in 1909. But the industry suffered from imports from Europe and by 1927 only 119 weaving establishments remained. The three major fabrics produced were 'malak' (silk), 'ikhdari' (bands of red and green) and 'jiljileh' (dark red bands). These were used for festival dresses throughout Southern Palestine. Many other fabrics were produced, some with poetic names such as ji'nneh u nar ('heaven and hell'), nasheq rohoh ('breath of the soul') and abu mitayn ('father of two hundred').[17]
During the 1948 war, the Egyptian army occupied a large part of Gaza including Majdal. Over the next few months, the town was subjected to Israeli air-raids and shelling.[18] All but about 1,000 of the town's residents were forced to leave by the time it was captured by Israeli forces as a sequel to Operation Yoav on November 4, 1948.[18] General Yigal Allon ordered the expulsion of the remaining Arabs but the local commanders did not do so and the Arab population soon recovered to more than 2,500 due mostly to refugees slipping back and also due to the transfer of Arabs from nearby villages.[13][18] Most of them were elderly, women, or children.[13] During the next year or so, the Arabs were held in a confined area surrounded by barbed wire, which became commonly known as the "ghetto".[13][19][20] Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were in favor of expulsion, while Mapam and the Israeli labor union Histadrut objected.[18] The government offered the Arabs positive inducements to leave, including a favorable currency exchange, but also caused panic through night-time raids.[18] The first group was deported to the Gaza Strip by truck on August 17, 1950 after an expulsion order had been served.[21] The deportation was approved by Ben-Gurion and Dayan over the objections of Pinhas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut, who envisioned the town as a productive example of equal opportunity.[22] By October 1950, 20 Arab families remained, most of whom later moved to Lydda or Gaza.[18] According to Israeli records, in total 2,333 Arabs were transferred to the Gaza Strip, 60 to Jordan, 302 to other towns in Israel, and a small number remained in Ashkelon.[13] Lavon argued that this operation dissipated "the last shred of trust the Arabs had in Israel, the sincerity of the State's declarations on democracy and civil equality, and the last remnant of confidence the Arab workers had in the Histadrut."[22] Acting on an Egyptian complaint, the Egyptian-Israel Mixed Armistice Commission ruled that the Arabs transferred from Majdal should be returned to Israel, but this was not done.[23]
Re-population of abandoned Arab dwellings by Jews became official policy by December 1948 but the process began slowly.[20] The Israeli national plan of June 1949 designated Majdal as the site for a regional urban center of 20,000 people.[20] From July 1949, new immigrants and demobilized soldiers moved to the new town, increasing the Jewish population to 2,500 within six months.[20] The town was initially called Migdal Gaza, Migdal Gad and Migdal Ashkelon. In 1953, the nearby neighborhood of Afridar was incorporated and the name "Ashkelon" was adopted. By 1961, Ashkelon ranked 18th among Israeli urban centers with a population of 24,000.[20]
Panorama of modern Ashkelon
Holiday Inn and 13th century tomb of Sheikh Awad
In 1949 and 1950, three immigrant transit camps (ma'abarot) were established alongside Majdal (renamed Migdal) for refugees from Arab countries, Romania and Poland. Northwest of Migdal and the immigrant camps, on the lands of the abandoned Arab village al-Jura, entrepreneur Zvi Segal, one of the signatories of Israel's Declaration of Independence, established the upscale Barnea neighborhood.[24]
A large tract of land south of Barnea was handed over to the trusteeship of the South African Zionist Federation, which established the neighborhood of Afridar. Plans for the city were drawn up in South Africa according to the garden city model. Migdal was surrounded by a broad ring of orchards. Barnea developed slowly, but Afridar grew rapidly. The first homes, built in 1951, were inhabited by new immigrants from South Africa and South America, with some native-born Israelis. The first public housing project for residents of the transit camps, the Southern Hills Project (Hageva'ot Hadromiyot) or Zion Hill (Givat Zion), was built in 1952.[24]
Ashkelon is the northern terminus for the Trans-Israel pipeline, which brings petroleum products from Eilat to an oil terminal at the port. The Ashkelon seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plant is the largest in the world.[25][26] The project was developed as a BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) by a consortium of three international companies: Veolia water, IDE Technologies and Elran.[27] In March 2006, it was voted 'Desalination Plant of the Year' in the Global Water Awards.[28]
Since 1992, Israel Beer Breweries has been operating in Ashkelon, brewing Carlsberg and Tuborg beer for the Israeli market. The brewery is owned by the Central Bottling Company, which has also held the Israeli franchise for Coca-Cola products since 1968.[29]
The city has 19 elementary schools, and nine junior high and high schools. The Ashkelon Academic College opened in 1998, and now hosts thousands of students. Harvard University operates an archaeological summer school program in Ashkelon.[30]
Ashkelon marina breakwater
Ashkelon Khan and Museum contains archaeological finds, among them a replica of Ashkelon’s Canaanite silver calf, whose discovery was reported on the front page of The New York Times.[31] The Outdoor Museum near the municipal cultural center displays two Roman burial coffins made of marble depicting battle and hunting scenes, and famous mythological scenes.[31] The remains of a 4th century Byzantine church with marble slab flooring and glass mosaic walls can be seen in the Barnea Quarter.[31] Remains of a synagogue from this period have also been found.[32] A domed structure housing the 13th century tomb of Sheikh Awad sits atop a hill overlooking Ashkelon’s northern beaches.[33] A Roman burial tomb two kilometers north of Ashkelon Park was discovered in 1937. There are two burial tombs, a painted Hellenistic cave and a Roman cave. The Hellenistic cave is decorated with paintings of nymphs, water scenes, mythological figures and animals.[31]
The site in Ashkelon where the head of Husayn ibn Ali is believed to have been buried was discovered on the grounds of the local hospital. With the blessing of the hospital, a marble prayer area was built there for Shiite pilgrims from India and Pakistan.[34]
In 1986 ruins of 4th- to 6th-century baths were found in Ashkelon. The bath houses are believed to have been used for prostitution. The remains of nearly 100 mostly male infants were found in a sewer under the bathhouse, leading to conjectures that prostitutes had discarded their unwanted newborns there.[35] The Ashkelon Marina, located between Delila and Bar Kochba beaches, offers a shipyard and repair services. Ashkeluna is a water-slide park on Ashkelon beach.[31]
The ancient site of Ashkelon is now a national park on the city's southern coast. The walls that encircled the city are still visible, as well as Canaanite earth ramparts. The park contains Byzantine, Crusader and Roman ruins.[36] The largest dog cemetery in the ancient world was discovered in Ashkelon.[37]
Ashkelon and environs is served by the Barzilai Medical Center, established in 1961.[34] Situated six miles (10 km) from Gaza, it has been the target of numerous Qassam rocket attacks, sometimes as many as 140 over one weekend. The hospital plays a vital role in treating wounded soldiers and terror victims.[38] A new rocket and missile-proof emergency room is under construction.
In the early 1950s, many South African Jews settled in Ashkelon, establishing the Afridar neighborhood. They were followed by an influx of immigrants from the United Kingdom.[39]
On 1–2 March 2008, rockets fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip (some of them Grad rockets) hit Ashkelon, wounding seven, and causing property damage. Mayor Roni Mahatzri stated that "This is a state of war, I know no other definition for it. If it lasts a week or two, we can handle that, but we have no intention of allowing this to become part of our daily routine."[40] On May 12, 2008, a rocket fired from the northern Gazan city of Beit Lahiya hit a shopping mall in southern Ashkelon, causing significant structural damage. According to The Jerusalem Post, 4 people were seriously injured and 87 were treated for shock. 15 people suffered minor to moderate injuries as a result of the collapsed structure. Southern District Police chief Uri Bar-Lev believed the Grad-model Katyusha rocket was manufactured in Iran.[41] In March 2008, 230 buildings and 30 cars were damaged by rocket fire on Ashkelon.[42]
In March 2009, a Qassam rocket hit a school, destroying classrooms and injuring two people.[43]
In July 2010, a Grad rocket hit a residential area in Ashkelon, damaging nearby cars and an apartment complex.[44]
The Ashkelon Sports Arena opened in 1999. The "Jewish Eye” is a Jewish world film festival that takes place annually in Ashkelon. The festival marked its seventh year in 2010.[45] The Breeza Music Festival has been held yearly in and around Ashkelon's amphitheatre since 1992. Most of the musical performances are free.
Ashkelon is twinned with:
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- Y. Garfinkel and D. Dag. 2008. Neolithic Ashkelon. Qedem 47. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University.
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| 500,000+ |
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| 200,000 – 499,999 |
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| 100,000 – 199,999 |
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| 50,000 – 99,999 |
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