Tel Gezer is an ancient city in the hills of the Shfela region at the midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is now an Israeli national park. Gezer was a prominent fortified Canaanite city in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The city was several times destroyed and rebuilt since to its strategic position at the crossroads of the trade route linking Egypt with Syria and the road to Jerusalem and Jericho. The coastal trade route continued to Anatolia and Mesopotamia and thus linked the two centers of the ancient world, The Egyptian Empire and the Mesopotamian kingdoms. The essential archive ever discovered of the ancient world named "Amarna letters" mentions kings of Gezer swearing loyalty to the Egyptian Pharaoh. In the Hebrew Bible, Gezer is associated with Joshua ben Nun and Solomon.
Photo By Mickael101 at Hebrew Wikipedia - Transferred from he.wikipedia to Commons by מתניה., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9624397
A few hours walk along Tel Gezer. You can start a day with a picnic in the charming forest of Hamagenim. Then, through the village of Karmay Yosef, we rise to the famous ancient hill Gezer. At this place, the battles of ancient history took place and the Egyptian pharaoh subjugated the disobedient rulers of Canaan. These rulers gathered together and concluded military alliances near one of the most mysterious structures of the ancient East - stone giants from Tel Gezer. Descent into an ancient well of forty-meter depth is the most mysterious part of the walk. We will end the day in the cool water spring of Yarda, where the battle of the Crusaders against Saladin once took place.
Cover photo by: Maximidf - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62461515
