Egyptians in Jaffa: A Portrait of Egyptian Presence in Jaffa during the Late Bronze Age

Kaplan could not have been more fortunate in his choice of excavation areas, and in 1956, during only the second season in Area A, he encountered stone fragments of the monumental gate façade inscribed with the name of Ramesses II (ca. 12641198 B.c.E.) that adorned the entrance to the Late Bronze Age Egyptian fortress (fig. 3). In this article, we review Jaffa's status during the Late Bronze Age and the light shed by our recent efforts to examine ceramics from Jaffa's earliest phase of Egyptian settlement, dated to the fifteenth century, as well as unique evidence for local production of Egyptian ceramics in Canaan during the early Late Bronze Age.