Hannathon in the Amarna Perio
Hannathon (Ḫinatuna) is mentioned for the first time in history in two Amarna Letters. Both demonstrate the central position of the city in northern Canaan, along the highway leading from Megiddo to the Akko Plain.
EA 8 is a complaint sent from the king of Babylon to the famous Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV). According to this letter, Babylonian merchants were detained in Hannathon and killed by men from Akko, who also stole the silver they carried with them.
No less interesting are the events mentioned in EA 245, which was sent from Biridiya of Megiddo to Akhenaten. This letter describes how Biridiya and Yashdata captured Lab’ayu, the infamous king of Shechem. Surata of Akko took Lab’ayu from Megiddo in order to hand him to the Egyptians at the harbor of his hometown. He failed. At Hannathon, Lab’ayu escaped, ostensibly by bribing Surata. The events that followed are not entirely clear, but the result was that, maybe as part of a failed attempt to recapture him, Lab’ayu was killed.
Tiglath-Pileser III and Israelite Hannathon
In the second half of the eighth century BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire successfully subjugated its southwestern periphery. As part of this process, several local kingdoms, such as Hamath, Aram-Damascus, and Israel, collapsed. Hannathon is mentioned in the royal annals of Tiglath-Pileser III (Ann. 18, Line 5) among the north-Israelite cities that were conquered in the military campaigns of 734-732 BCE and from which local populations were deported.
Hannathon After Tiglath-Pileser III
Archaeological surveys carried out in the Lower Galilee in the 1970s by the archaeologist Zvi Gal suggested that the region experienced an exceptionally long occupational gap after the military campaigns of the Assyrians: from the late eighth century to the final days of the Persian period, ca. 4th century BCE. One of the main objectives of the current project is to reexamine this theory anew based on detailed excavations at a key site such as Tell el-Badawiya/Hannathon.
The Crusader Farm
After Tiglath-Pileser III’s campaigns, Hannathon was not mentioned again in historical sources. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the regional center moved to Sepphoris, about 4.5 km to the southeast. Tell el-Badawiya enjoyed renewed prosperity in the Middle Ages, when a small fortified farm was built at the western sector of the mound. Its excavations demonstrated that the structure was used also during the Mamaluke period (14th-16th centuries CE).
The Ottoman Period
In the Ottoman period, a new structure was built at the site. It was marked in Conder and Kitchener’s maps of the Survey of Western Palestine as Khan el-Badawiya. The date of its final abandonment is unknown.
In Search of Historical Hannathon
Based on its strategic location,at the western edge of the Beit Netopha Valley (Sahl al-Battuf), Tell el-Badawiya was identified by Albrecht Alt, the renowned biblical scholar from Leipzig University, with Hannathon, an ancient city mentioned in the Amarna Letters (EA 8 and 245), the royal annals of Tiglath-Pileser III (Ann. 18, Line 5), and the Hebrew Bible (Josh 19:14).
Tell el-Badawiya in the Modern Era
In contrast to many other archaeological sites in northern Israel, very limited fieldwork has been carried out at Tell el-Badawiya/Hannathon. In 1923, W.J. Phythian-Adams was granted a permit to conduct soundings at the site on behalf of the British School of Archaeology. Unfortunately, the results of these soundings were not published and are mentioned only briefly by W.F. Albright.
More recently, the site was surveyed by Zvi Gal, as part of a broader regional study of the Lower Galilee in the Bronze and Iron Ages. A decade later, in 1987, Ruth (Ruthy) Gertwagen investigated the subterranean hall of the crusader fortress and revealed various finds dated from the 12th-16th centuries CE.