Ramses II Gate Garden

Two sources agree on this and neither makes a fuss about it. The 2017 field report prints an aerial view of the excavation after the 2013 season and notes, in the caption, the concrete reconstruction by the Israel Antiquities Authority of the Ramesses II facade, from the 1990s, standing at the right of the frame. The municipality's audio route calls the structure a reconstruction of the original and sends visitors to the antiquities museum on Mifraz Shlomo Street for the stones themselves.

It is worth understanding why a replica was the only option. Kaplan recovered slightly less than half of the monumental facade, and he did not find any of it in place. The inscribed blocks turned up reused as ordinary building material in the gate that was put up after the one they had decorated burned down, which is how Kaplan dated the earlier gate to Ramesses II in the first place. There was never a standing portal here to conserve, and the reconstruction is a drawing turned into concrete rather than a repair.

The original fabric is the low material the replica sits above. The mudbrick of the tower walls, the stone plinths identified on both sides of the entryway, the boulders of the later threshold that Kaplan left in the eastern part of the passage, and the sloping roadway leading out to the south-east are all excavated remains. They are grey, waist-high and easy to walk past, which is exactly what most visitors do.

• Concrete facade: Israel Antiquities Authority, 1990s
• Inscribed originals: Jaffa Museum of Antiquities, Mifraz Shlomo Street
• Excavated in place: mudbrick towers, plinths, threshold boulders, roadway
• Facade fragments recovered by Kaplan: slightly less than half, none of it in situ

The blocks were cut from kurkar, the local wind-cemented sandstone the headland is made of, carved with hieroglyphs, plastered with lime and painted in yellow and red. The field report calls them the most conspicuous artefacts from New Kingdom Jaffa recovered to date, which is a careful way of saying nothing else found here looks remotely as imperial.

The text is a royal titulary rather than a narrative. Roger Atwood, writing in Archaeology in July 2017, gives it as: Horus-Falcon, Strong Bull, Beloved of Maat, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Usermaatre Setepenre, Son of Re, Lord of Crowns, Ramesses. The municipality's route describes the same thing from the other end, as three of the pharaoh's five names set out with their titles. Aaron Burke's summary of the effect, quoted in the same article, is that the gate said to everyone who came, this is Egypt.

The dating that follows from it is looser than tour patter suggests. Kaplan attributed the gate to Ramesses II on the strength of these blocks, and the renewed excavation confirmed the association. But the field report points out that the facade could have been added to a gateway already standing, so the construction may fall in the late fourteenth or early thirteenth century rather than in the reign itself. The excavators therefore use a provisional date of about 1300 BCE and say plainly that there is no way to be certain at present. Guides here round the whole thing to 3,300 years old.

The ground is open at all because of a demolition. Kaplan's Area A was diggable in 1955 as a result of the British military's Operation Anchor of 1936, which led to the abandonment of much of Jaffa's old city, and it remains available today because Kaplan worked to limit construction on the mound. Every archaeologist who has since dug on this hill has been standing in a hole made by sappers.

He began in 1955 and hit the first evidence of the Egyptian fortress in 1956. He held the post of municipal archaeologist of Tel Aviv-Jaffa from 1955 to 1974, and in all that time the Ramesses Gate produced only a series of very short preliminary notes in the Israel Exploration Journal. His abrupt removal from the post in 1974 followed a change in Tel Aviv's mayors and restricted his access to the finds he needed for a final publication, which is why no plan of the gateway was ever published in his lifetime.

The recovery of that work is a second, slower story. The Kaplan legacy archive, covering more than thirty sites, was deposited with the Israel Antiquities Authority in 1999, the same year Tel Aviv University's soundings on the tell came to an end. The Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project was founded in 2007 as a partnership with the Antiquities Authority, worked out that Kaplan's records could be reconstructed into usable stratigraphy, and reopened the gate itself from 2011 to 2014. Roughly ten metres of the passageway had never been dug at all.

One episode from Kaplan's seasons is worth carrying up the hill with you. In 1956 he exposed the eastern threshold and found, lying in the ash on its southern side, one of the two bronze hinges of the final gate, weighing 30 kg and still oriented as it had been when the doors burned. It was packed with the charred remains of a door no less than 20 cm thick, the nails still protruding from its bronze casing. Within days of its excavation the hinge was stolen, apparently for its weight as scrap metal. The object displayed in the Jaffa Museum is a facsimile made from the preliminary drawings and photographs.

• 1936: Operation Anchor clears the ground Kaplan later digs
• 1955–1962: excavation of the Ramesses Gate in Area A
• 1974: Kaplan removed as municipal archaeologist; no final report follows
• 1999: the Kaplan archive is deposited with the Israel Antiquities Authority
• 2011–2014: the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project reopens the gate

The gate was destroyed twice in the second half of the twelfth century BCE, rebuilt in between to the same plan, and then not rebuilt again. The renewed excavation dated both events with short-lived botanical samples: grain and olive pits from the floor of the earlier gate, sealed under its collapse, and grain from floors, occupation debris and a storage jar caught on the floor of the last one. Twenty-one samples were run at two laboratories, the Keck accelerator facility at the University of California, Irvine and the Oxford Research Accelerator Unit, and modelled in OxCal against the IntCal13 curve.

The results are unusually tidy. No sample qualified as an outlier under the model's own test. The earlier destruction falls most probably between 1142 and 1125 BCE, the intermediate phase ends most probably between 1134 and 1115 BCE, and the final destruction, which has no later dated context to bracket it, most probably falls between 1127 and 1098 BCE. That last conflagration put an end to Egyptian habitation at Jaffa. The excavators argue that these dates give the clearest basis yet for about 1125 BCE as a terminus post quem for the end of Egyptian rule in Canaan.

Who did it is where the argument sits. The field report reads the sequence as local resistance to the Egyptian garrison, probably organised from Canaanite centres across the coastal plain, rather than as one imperial collapse arriving from outside; it names Gezer as a plausible coordinator of an earlier attack on the gate. Kaplan himself changed his mind more than once, putting the earlier destruction in the third quarter of the thirteenth century in one account and attributing it to Sea Peoples who occupied the Jaffa area in another. The claim that gives Jaffa its weight in this debate is a negative one: no other Egyptian fortress in Canaan has been excavated, so there is nothing to check it against.

The 2013 season reached the floor of the passageway beneath the collapse, and what lay on it changed the reading of the building. There were several arrowheads and what may be a spearhead, and a lead weight, which is the expected furniture of a gate taken by assault. There were also the antlers of at least thirty-two deer, whole and carefully cut, strewn along the southern side of the passage: not weaponry but stock, evidence that a trade in antler tools and raw material was carried on inside the gateway. Decorative ivory inlays came off the same floor.

So did thousands of burnt seeds. Barley, emmer and free-threshing wheat, olive pits, grape pips, chickpeas, lentils, grass peas, broad beans, vetch and pistachios were recovered directly from the surface along the whole excavated length, and not one seed came from the thick destruction debris of the upper storey above it. The excavators take that distribution to mean the produce was standing in the gateway in sacks or baskets when the roof came down, rather than being stored overhead. The grains were uncrushed and lay in sorted heaps by type.

The collapse itself yielded about two dozen beam and plank segments from the ceiling, roof and second-storey floor, in cedar of Lebanon, oak and olive wood. The field report calls them the largest group of timbers recovered from Late Bronze Age contexts in Israel to date. Taken together the finds describe a gate that was a market and customs point as much as a defence, which fits what Egyptian sources expect of a harbour base: a place that monitored the passage of people and goods, collected tariffs and stored supplies.

• Antlers of at least 32 deer, whole and cut, along the south side of the passage
• Arrowheads, a probable spearhead, a lead weight and ivory inlays
• Thousands of burnt seeds in sorted heaps, all from the floor and none from the collapse
• About two dozen timbers of cedar, oak and olive from the roof and upper storey

The gate garden is not a separate attraction with a boundary of its own. It occupies the lower, south-eastern part of HaPisga Garden, the terraced park on the summit and northern slope of the Old Jaffa headland that the municipality lays out as station eight of the same walking route, and which is also signposted as Abrasha Park. The municipality calls the summit the highest point in Old Jaffa, and the view from the top takes in the sea, the front of St Peter's Church and the Tel Aviv shoreline as far as Neve Tzedek.

The park is a piece of 1960s municipal design rather than an old garden. The Tel Aviv Hotel Association's visitor service describes it as laid out by the municipality in that decade as part of the plan to renovate the old city. The white arch on the crest above the excavation is the Statue of Faith by Daniel Kafri, its three carved elements showing the fall of Jericho, the binding of Isaac and Jacob's dream. It is the most photographed object on the hill and it has nothing to do with the gate below it.

Practically, this means the excavation is reached on foot from inside a public park, from Kedumim Square over the wishing bridge or up from the port, and that nothing here is ticketed. It also means no interpretation desk, no attendant and no gate: the signage is the municipality's, and the audio commentary on the city's own route is the fullest free explanation on the spot.