Abstract

The presentation examines the concept of the “city” in the Southern Levant from the Middle Bronze Age to the early Iron Age and challenges the assumption that the settlements of ancient Israel and its neighbors should be understood as fully developed urban centers. Rather than applying universal definitions of urbanism derived largely from Mesopotamian models, the paper approaches the archaeological evidence through a comparative and processual framework that emphasizes variability in the formation of complex societies.

Two distinct socio-political formations are identified. The first consists of Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age polities organized around small fortified centers that continued Middle Bronze Age traditions. These settlements functioned as capitals of small city-states governed through patrimonial monarchy, where political authority and economic organization were embedded in the household of the ruler and closely tied to cultic institutions. Despite their architectural resemblance to cities, their limited population and economic scale suggest a form of “secondary urbanism” that imitated earlier urban traditions without fully sustaining them. The second formation emerged in the highlands during the early Iron Age. Here, archaeological evidence points to networks of small villages organized primarily along kinship lines rather than centralized state institutions. Over time, processes of synoecism brought several hamlets together into fortified “village-towns,” often housing between 500 and 1000 inhabitants—the approximate threshold for self-sustaining endogamous communities. These settlements were characterized by limited economic specialization, absence of monumental architecture, and corporate social organization based on lineage and clan structures. The analysis suggests that many so-called “Israelite cities” were in fact complex rural communities rather than urban centers in the classical sense. By comparing these formations with other Mediterranean examples of small-scale complex societies, the paper argues that the archaeology of the Southern Levant reveals alternative pathways to social complexity that challenge traditional models of ancient urbanism.