Armageddon

Perennial battleground of the ancient world was Armageddon, which lies about ten miles south of Nazareth, 15 miles from the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. The Hebrew word is har magiddo, which may originally have meant "fruitful mountain" or "desirable city." Megiddo, the name by which the site is known to modern archeologists, guards the pass from Egypt through the Carmel ridge to the once-rich valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris. There, according to the Old Testament, "Pharoaohnechoh king of Egypt went up against the king of Assyria" and Josiah, in disguise, battled against him. * There Thutmose III of Egypt vanquished the rebellious King of Megiddo and his Asiatic allies, after a surprise movement of the Egyptian cavalry through the pass. There, during the World War, General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby of Britain bested the Turks by repeating Thutmose's maneuver, and was elevated to the peerage as Lord Allenby of Megiddo. The old Biblical writers logically looked to Armageddon as the site of the world's final, cataclysmic battle, and predicted that there the armies of Gog--a popular representation of Antichrist--would meet crushing defeat.

Just 100 years ago a pioneer archeologist in Palestine, Professor Edward Robinson of Union Theological Seminary, stood on the site of Armageddon, but failed to recognize it. In Robinson's day archeology was more a matter of looking for surface indications than laborious, carefully planned digging. The site was one of the flat-topped mounds which the natives call tells. This particular one, Tell-el-Mutesellim, was picked as the probable site of Armageddon by Harold Haydon Nelson of the University of Chicago, and the university's Rockefeller-endowed Oriental Institute started digging there in 1925. The diggers found the palace of the Egyptian princes with a gaudily painted court and a washroom paved with seashells; a rich hoard of art objects in gold, ivory, lapis lazuli and electrum (gold-silver alloy); an inscription of the Pharaoh Shishak who plundered Jerusalem; and stables built by King Solomon large enough to house 300 horses.

Last week Archeologist Gordon Loud, a veteran digger of 37 who now commands the Oriental Institute's Megiddo Expedition, was back in Chicago with news that he had penetrated the site down to bedrock, through 20 culture levels dating back to 3,500 B. C. Beneath the oldest level was a stone age cave containing flint instruments and bones. At the 19th level the excavators found a flagged paving in which drawings of horned animals and men had been cut. At the 18th level was a stone fortification wall 15 feet high and 24 feet wide, which indicated that there might have been fighting at Armageddon as far back as 3,000 B.C.

* II Kings 23: 29-30; II Chronicles 35: 22.

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