Chapter 1 - PALESTINE IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE (FOURTEENTH-THIRTEENTH CENTURIES)

Summary

Landscape and Resources

Palestine is a humble and fascinating land. It is humble in its natural resources and its marginality within the region; it is fascinating because of the historical stratification of its human landscape and the symbolic stratification of its memories.

In the south-eastern extremity of the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic rainfall crashes against the mountains, which are fairly high only in the northern part (about 1,000m in Upper Galilee, about 700m in the central area) and receive adequate rainfall. Palestine is almost entirely in the semiarid zone (rainfall between 400 and 250 mm per year) and its southern parts, the Negev and Sinai desert, and its inland parts, the Transjordanian plateau and Syrian-Arabian desert, are in the highly arid zone (around 100 mm or less). There is only one river worth mentioning, the Jordan, which is fed from the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges, with its perennial tributaries, the Yarmuk and the Jabbok, or Wadi Zarqa) filled from the eastern plateaux and ending in the closed and salty basin of the Dead Sea. Cultivation is therefore enabled not by irrigation (apart from little ‘oases’ near springs), but by rainfall: and it depends on the uncertain rains, regulated by inscrutable gods – sometimes generous and beneficent, sometimes punitive.