Tell el-Hesi
| תל חסי | |
Tell el-Hesi
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 Shown within Israel
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| Location | Southern District, Israel |
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| Region | Levant |
| Coordinates | 31°32′52″N 34°43′49″E / 31.54778°N 34.73028°ECoordinates: 31°32′52″N 34°43′49″E / 31.54778°N 34.73028°E |
| Type | Settlement |
| Site notes | |
| Condition | In ruins |
Tell el-Hesi (Hebrew: תל חסי) is a 25-acre archaeological site in Israel. It was the first major site excavated in Palestine, first by Flinders Petrie in 1890 and later by Frederick Jones Bliss in 1891 and 1892, both sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Petrie's excavations were one of the first to systematically use stratigraphy and seriation to produce a chronology of the site.Tell el-Hesi is located southwest of the modern Israeli city of Qiryat Gat.
The site was occupied from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period to the Hellenistic period, though not continuously. The city reached a size of 25 acres in the Early Bronze Age during the middle of the 3rd Millennium BCE. It then fell into disuse until the middle of the 2nd millennium during the Late Bronze Age when it was rebuilt, staying in use for around a thousand years. A military trench system was dug into the top of the mound during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Petrie identified Tell el-Hesi as the Biblical site of Lachish, and Bliss accepted this identification, but it is no longer accepted. In 1924 W. F. Albright proposed that Tell el-Hesi was Biblical Eglon, an identification still accepted by Yohanan Aharoni in the 1970s. This identification, too, is unlikely and the site should be considered unidentified.
The site was first described in 1839 by Edward Robinson. It is 200 feet above the land in the East and 60 feet high in the other directions. The mound was roughly square with 200 feet on a side in Robinson's time but has been reduced by excavations and military action.
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