Tel Miqne is a fifty-acre tell on the inner coastal plain, twenty-two miles west of Jerusalem and thirty-five miles south of Tel Aviv — one of the largest Iron Age sites in Israel and the northernmost of the five cities of the Philistine pentapolis (Joshua 13:3; 1 Samuel 6:16–17). Trude Dothan of the Hebrew University and Seymour Gitin of the W. F. Albright Institute co-directed the joint Hebrew University–Albright excavations there from 1981 through 1996 — fourteen seasons that established Tel Miqne as the most fully excavated Philistine city. The Iron Age I occupation, dated to the twelfth century BC, marks the arrival of the Philistines as one of the Sea Peoples groups documented in the Egyptian inscriptions of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu. The earliest stratum produced the diagnostic Philistine bichrome pottery — red-and-black painted wares with Aegean parallels — together with hearths, cult installations, and architecture sharply distinct from contemporary Canaanite sites. Ekron is named in 1 Samuel 5–6 as the final destination of the captured ark of God before the Philistines sent it back to Israel; in 2 Kings 1, King Ahaziah of Israel sends to inquire of Baal-zebub of Ekron and is rebuked by Elijah. The city is condemned in Amos 1:8, Zephaniah 2:4, and Jeremiah 25:20 as part of the standard Philistine quartet. The seventh-century BC city — the period of Assyrian vassalage under Padi and his successors — produced the largest concentration of olive-oil pressing installations yet found anywhere in the ancient world: 115 industrial-scale presses, with an estimated annual production of a thousand tons of oil. The Ekron Royal Inscription, recovered from the destruction of 603 BC and treated separately in this archive, names five Ekronite kings and the city itself in five lines of Phoenician script. The destruction layer matches Nebuchadnezzar's campaign against Philistia. The site is an Israel Antiquities Authority park; the finds are at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Trude Dothan and Seymour Gitin, Tel Miqne-Ekron Summary of Fourteen Seasons of Excavation (Israel Exploration Journal 47, 1997); Seymour Gitin, Tel Miqne-Ekron Excavations 1995–1996: Field IV Lower (W. F. Albright Institute, 2016); Trude Dothan, The Philistines and Their Material Culture (Israel Exploration Society / Yale, 1982); 1 Samuel 5–6; 2 Kings 1:2–16.
Tel Miqne's identification as biblical Ekron anchors Philistine archaeology to specific Old Testament narratives — the ark's itinerary in 1 Samuel, Ahaziah's consultation of Baal-zebub in 2 Kings — while its industrial olive-oil complex and the Ekron Royal Inscription supply rare epigraphic and economic data for Iron Age Philistia.