Gezer
— — a low hill that remembers everything.
Not only on a wall.
“A long tell rising out of the wheat country between the coastal plain and the Judean hills. Gezer was a Canaanite city, then a Solomonic gate town, then a Hellenistic fortress, then a kibbutz field. The standing stones still hold the ridge. Below them, the famous limestone tablet was lifted in 1908 with the oldest Hebrew agricultural calendar scratched into its face. The wind comes up the valley most afternoons. From the studio.
Gezer, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tel Gezer sits on a ridge in the Shephelah, the foothill country between the Mediterranean coastal plain and the Judean highlands, about 30 kilometres southeast of Tel Aviv. The mound covers roughly 33 acres and rises to about 229 metres. It was a major Canaanite city by the second millennium BCE, fortified again under Solomon in the tenth century, and inscribed in 2015 onto the UNESCO World Heritage list as one of three biblical tels. The site is managed today as Tel Gezer National Park by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
Ten monoliths stand in a row along the ridge, the largest more than three metres tall. They were raised in the Middle Bronze Age, around the seventeenth century BCE, and the purpose is still argued. Macalister, who first cleared the site between 1902 and 1909, called it a high place. The six-chambered gate further along the tell is the one that has been linked, controversially, to Solomon's building program in 1 Kings 9:15. The limestone is local, cut from the same Shephelah ridges.
The Gezer Calendar, found by Macalister in 1908 and now in the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, is a small limestone tablet inscribed in paleo-Hebrew script around the tenth century BCE. Seven short lines list the agricultural year in two-month pairings: olive harvest, sowing, late sowing, flax, barley, wheat, summer fruit. It is one of the earliest known examples of Hebrew writing. The signature at the end reads Abijah. The tablet remains the single most cited artefact from the tell.