Palace 6000 at Megiddo in Context: Iron Age Central Hall Tetra-Partite Residencies and the "Bīt-Ḫilāni" Building Tradition in the Levant

Abstract

Megiddo's Palace 6000, traditionally attributed to the building activities of King Solomon, has long served as a hallmark of 10th-century B.C.E. monumental architecture. Following its initial discovery and excavation, Y. Yadin and others identified this building as one of several early southern Levantine examples of an Iron Age bīt ḫilāni. This term, appearing in Assyrian documents, has been interpreted by most scholars to refer to Iron Age royal residencies known from excavated sites in northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. This paper presents a detailed stratigraphic and architectural analysis of Palace 6000 and examines the evidence regarding its identification as a bīt ḫilāni. We propose that Palace 6000 belongs to a group of southern Levantine Iron Age II public structures with a multipurpose "central hall tetra-partite" plan that could function as a residency, palace, citadel, and/or tower. In our opinion, the origin of this distinctive tetra-partite plan is local and should be understood as developing out of the ubiquitous Iron Age four-room house tradition. In contrast, the bīt ḫilāni building tradition was confined to northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. These two different architectural traditions, with their clearly defined geographical distribution, illustrate the regional character of Levantine societies and cultures during the early centuries of the first millennium B.C.E.