| Giza
ca. 2613 to 2465 BCE Giza was one of several sites of tombs built by Pharaohs in about 2613-2465 BCE. The three Great Pyramids at Giza were built by the Pharaohs Khafre, Menkaure, and Khufu close to their royal capital of Noph. The nearby Sphinx was also built by the Pharaoh Khafre. Its face has his features and its body is that of a lion. In the field around the pyramids are scores of flat-topped tombs belonging to relatives of the royal families of the 4th dynasty. So much labor was spent during this period on building at Giza and nearby Noph that it appears no other major architectural monuments were undertaken elsewhere |
| Ramamses 1279 to 1213 BCE During the long reign of Pharaoh Rameses II (ruled 1279-1213) a prodigious amount of building was done in Egypt. Because his family was from the Nile delta region Rameses built himself a residential city here and called it Pi-Ramesse (House of Rameses). Scholars generally believe that this was the city known in the Bible as Raamses. The surrounding delta region was home to Canaanites, Syrians, and other displaced peoples of Asia. It is likely that the roots of the biblical story of the Exodus lie among those Asian people who were conscripted by Rameses to labor on his city. |
| Jerusalem
3rd to 2nd millennium BCE The city of Jerusalem was located in the hill country to the north of the Judean desert. The surrounding land was not rich, nor was the city well supplied with water, but it was easily defended. The earliest mention of Jerusalem may be in Syrian commercial documents from about 2400 BCE. There a city is mentioned with the name "Salim". Egyptian texts from the 20th and 19th century refer to the city as Urushalimun and later Egyptian texts call it Urusalim, meaning "the god Salem is its founder." By 1900 BCE Jerusalem was a small fortress city, far from any major trade route. Its population was probably about 1000 people. The Hebrew Bible, which preserves a memory of the city in the late 2nd millennium, refers to the inhabitants of the city as Jebusites. Unlike most other Canaanites, however, they did not speak a Semitic language. Their ethnic origins remain unknown. |
| Mt.
Sinai Late 2nd millennium BCE This is one traditional location for the mountain where Exodus describes Moses receiving the law from God and giving it to the people of Israel. The actual location of "Mount Sinai" has been the subject of tremendous debate. The mountain is called by several different names in the Exodus account, including the Mountain at Horeb, and the Mountain of God. The origin of the term Sinai, itself, is unclear. The location of Mount Sinai was perhaps unknown even to the Israelites when they founded their kingdom and edited their sacred texts. It was not until the Christian period -- more than a thousand years after the events of the Exodus -- that efforts were made to identify a mountain as Sinai. In about the 4th century CE Christian monks identified Jebal Musa at the southern extreme of the Sinai peninsula as the most probable location and built a monastery here. Jebal Musa, the site marked here, remains to this day the mountain most popularly associated with Mount Sinai. |
| Haran
2nd millennium to 7th century BCE At a crossroads of major routes leading from Nineveh to the Mediterranean and to Anatolia, Haran was a major commercial center from the 19th century BCE. Its very name is the Akkadian word for road. In the patriarchal narratives of the Bible, Haran is the city to which Abram's family moves after leaving Ur. The personal names of several of Abram's family reflect thenames of places in the vicinity of Haran. Haran and Ur were both important centers for worship of the Mesopotamian moon god Sin, and some have suggested that the migration of Abram's family might recall the movement of the moon cult from one city to the other. |
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