Tell Jisr, Tell el-Jisr or Tell ej-Jisr is a hill and archaeological site northwest of

Joub Jannine Joub Jannine ( / ALA-LC: ''Jub Jannīn'') is a city located in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. Joub Jannine serves as the capital of West Beqaa and it is the center of the Western Beqaa District, hosting the Grand Serail, Serail, which is a main go ...

in the

Beqaa Valley The Beqaa Valley (, ; Bekaa, Biqâ, Becaa) is a fertile valley in eastern Lebanon and its most important farming region. Industry, especially the country's agricultural industry, also flourishes in Beqaa. The region broadly corresponds to th ...

Lebanon Lebanon, officially the Republic of Lebanon, is a country in the Levant region of West Asia. Situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean Basin and the Arabian Peninsula, it is bordered by Syria to the north and east, Israel to the south ...

. It was discovered in 1965-1966 by

Lorraine Copeland Lorraine Copeland (born Elizabeth Lorraine Adie, 1921April 2013) was a British archaeologist specialising in the Palaeolithic period of the Near East. She was a secret agent with the Special Operations Executive during World War II. Early life ...

and Peter Wescombe but the perimeter and extent of the find was not fully determined. It is suggested to have been surrounded by fertile

arable land Arable land (from the , "able to be ploughed") is any land capable of being ploughed and used to grow crops.''Oxford English Dictionary'', "arable, ''adj''. and ''n.''" Oxford University Press (Oxford), 2013. Alternatively, for the purposes of a ...

suitable for crop cultivation and was likely a river crossing, situated on the east bank of the Litani.

Excavation

A large amount of the material collected by

Henri Fleisch Reverend Father Henri Fleisch (1 January 1904 – 10 February 1985) was a French archaeologist, missionary and Orientalist, known for his work on classical Arabic language and Lebanese dialect and prehistory in Lebanon. Fleisch spent years re ...

and M. Tallon is now kept by the

Museum of Lebanese Prehistory The Museum of Lebanese Prehistory (, ) is a museum of prehistory and archaeology in Beirut, Lebanon. History The museum is the first museum of prehistory in the Middle East and was opened in June 2000 to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Sain ...

, part of

Saint Joseph University Saint Joseph University of Beirut (; French: ''Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth'', commonly known as USJ) is a private Catholic research university in Beirut, Lebanon, founded in 1875 by French Jesuit missionaries and subsidized by the Go ...

Flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Historically, flint was widely used to make stone tools and start ...

tools were of the heavy type suggested to have been used for

deforestation Deforestation or forest clearance is the removal and destruction of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then converted to non-forest use. Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban use. Ab ...

, they included trapezoidal

axe An axe (; sometimes spelled ax in American English; American and British English spelling differences#Miscellaneous spelling differences, see spelling differences) is an implement that has been used for thousands of years to shape, split, a ...

s, choppers, a variety of scrapers including advanced fan scrapers, segmented

sickle A sickle, bagging hook, reaping-hook or grasshook is a single-handed agricultural tool designed with variously curved blades and typically used for harvesting or reaping grain crops, or cutting Succulent plant, succulent forage chiefly for feedi ...

blades with fine denticulation and some

obsidian Obsidian ( ) is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed when lava extrusive rock, extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is an igneous rock. Produced from felsic lava, obsidian is rich in the lighter element ...

. The range of

pottery Pottery is the process and the products of forming vessels and other objects with clay and other raw materials, which are fired at high temperatures to give them a hard and durable form. The place where such wares are made by a ''potter'' is al ...

found included stone and basalt bowls and vessels ranging from coarse

White Ware White Ware or "Vaisselle Blanche", effectively a form of limestone plaster used to make vessels, is the first precursor to clay pottery developed in the Levant that appeared in the 9th millennium BC, during the pre-pottery (aceramic) neolithic pe ...

to fine, burnished and decorated sherds. A spectrum of jar designs were found with some having red or cream washes. The materials show an established

neolithic The Neolithic or New Stone Age (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'new' and 'stone') is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Mesopotamia, Asia, Europe and Africa (c. 10,000 BCE to c. 2,000 BCE). It saw the Neolithic Revo ...

settlement with many similarities to

Byblos Byblos ( ; ), also known as Jebeil, Jbeil or Jubayl (, Lebanese Arabic, locally ), is an ancient city in the Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate of Lebanon. The area is believed to have been first settled between 8800 and 7000BC and continuously inhabited ...

and lower Jordan Valley sites that flourished until the

Bronze Age The Bronze Age () was a historical period characterised principally by the use of bronze tools and the development of complex urban societies, as well as the adoption of writing in some areas. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of ...

. The tell is also notable as the location of the discovery of a fragment of pottery called the McClelland Sherd, ''Tell Jisr Sherd'' or ''El-Jisr Sherd'' that shows incisions suggested to be the oldest

alphabetic An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given ...

writing yet discovered.Mendenhall, George E., The Northern Origins of Old South Arabic Literacy, The University of Michigan and Yarmouk University, Yemen Update 33:15-19 (1993)

References

External links

Geographic.org information on Tell ej Jisr
{{Portal, Lebanon, History, Asia 1965 archaeological discoveries Neolithic settlements Archaeological sites in Lebanon