March 16, 1959

Dear Dr. Danelius:

Your letter of February 23rd was very welcome; it contains a mine of information, only a fraction of which I have ahd from you before. I have had a letter from Claude Schaeffer; and I go to retype a list of quotations from archaeological literature, and you will have a copy; the literature on excavations is very bulky and each item extracted from it for the purpose of Ages is Godsent.

To your question about Megiddo—I enclose a postcard from Dr. Federn. I, too, have a similar problem. In the cases of Thutmose III it seems that he took Megiddo, because in the description of the front line he refers to it and to Taanach. It seems that the division at the first decade after Solomon was not unsimilar to the present division of Palestine between Israel and Jordan, with Judah stretched to the Carmel; Megiddo was a strong fortress and could resist Jeroboam; Thutmose, however, came to capture it. Together with this, in the el-Amarna time Megiddo is the fortress, and Biridri in his letters to the Pharaoh referred to his fortress (Knudzon) deliberately, as Makeda and Megiddo (Magiidda) [Ages I, p. 312]. As I believe, I have told you, the northern frontier of Israel was by a large margin more to the north than the spring of the Jordan. — A similar problem I had before me through years, and still have. In the O.T. Pharaoh-Necho meets king Josiah at Megiddo; but acc. to Herodotus, at Migdol. In order to block the progress of the Egyptian army toward the Euphrates, Megiddo seems to me for the king of Jerusalem too far to the north. Possibly Herodotus is right, and Migdol may be the same Migdol where the Israelite army, acc. to the press of that time, beat the Egyptian army that also intended to penetrate toward the north: there was the place to stop it.