Painted from Memory

One of the earliest fortified settlements in the region, built with Egyptian involvement at the point where the coastal road met the desert crossing. Its mudbrick walls were raised, destroyed and raised again across several centuries, which tells you what the site was worth. Everything that follows in this chronology is a variation on the same fact: this stretch of coast is where Egypt ended and Bilad al-Sham began, and whoever held it controlled the traffic between them. Tell es-Sakan establishes the pattern five thousand years before the rest of the story.

A walled Canaanite town at the mouth of Wadi Ghazza, excavated by Flinders Petrie in the 1930s, who found gold hoards, jewellery and imported Cypriot ware that placed it firmly inside the Bronze Age Mediterranean trade network. Some archaeologists identify it with Sharuhen, the fortress the Egyptians besieged after expelling the Hyksos. The name Gaza itself — Ghazzat, roughly “the strong one” — is already in use in this period and has never since changed. Four millennia of conquest have altered the language of the city three times and its name not at all.

Gaza appears in the annals of Thutmose III as the assembly point for the Egyptian march north to Megiddo — the first securely dated written mention of the city by name. Under the Egyptian New Kingdom it becomes the administrative capital of the province of Canaan, garrisoned and governed from within its walls. This is Gaza as a governing city rather than a settlement, and the role recurs: Mamluk provincial capital, Ottoman sanjak seat, headquarters of every subsequent power that needed to administer the coastal plain.

The Amarna letters — cuneiform tablets sent to the Egyptian court by the rulers of Canaanite city-states — refer to Gaza as an Egyptian stronghold under the name Hazzatu. The correspondence is the earliest detailed record of political life in Canaan written by its own inhabitants: local rulers petitioning, accusing each other, requesting troops. It is worth noting what these letters are evidence of. Long before any of the region's later national claims, there were settled Canaanite communities here with their own rulers, their own quarrels and their own correspondence with the great powers.

The Amarna letters were written in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age, by scribes whose own language was Canaanite. A local ruler writing to Egypt in a Mesopotamian language is the crossroads in miniature.

Migrants of Aegean origin settle the coastal plain and Gaza becomes one of five Philistine cities alongside Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath. Within a few generations the archaeology shows blended material culture — Aegean pottery forms made with local clay, Canaanite deities under new names. The Philistines did not replace the population so much as join it. This becomes the template for every later arrival here, and it is why the region's name descends from theirs while its people descend from a much longer mixture.

Philistine is attested only through personal names, a few administrative terms, and brief inscriptions in undeciphered scripts. Whether it was a distinct language or a heavily acculturated dialect remains unresolved.

The harbour at Blakhiyya, on the shore north of the city, is established and remains in use for roughly nineteen centuries — through Philistine, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic periods, each leaving a layer directly on top of the last. Excavated by a joint Palestinian–French expedition between 1995 and 2005 and placed on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List in 2012. Very few sites anywhere hold that continuous a sequence in one place, and the sequence is the value: not the objects individually but the order in which they sit.

By the tenth and ninth centuries the Philistines had largely adopted the local Canaanite language.

Under Persian rule Gaza is a fortified royal city and the western end of the caravan route carrying frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia through Nabataean Petra to the sea. The city mints its own coinage on the Athenian standard. Its wealth in this period is entirely a function of position — Gaza produced little and moved everything, and the pattern of a prosperous entrepôt dependent on open routes holds for the next two thousand years, which is also why closing those routes has always been the most effective way to damage it.

Alexander had swept through Bilad al-Sham with little resistance until Gaza, where the commander Batis held out for two months behind walls on a raised mound, forcing the Macedonians to build siege ramps and bring engines down from Tyre. Alexander was wounded twice. When the city fell it was sacked and its defenders killed. Arrian and Curtius both treat the siege as notable precisely because it was an exception. Gaza's reputation for holding out under siege longer than its size warrants is not a modern invention; it is the oldest thing said about the city.

Ptolemy IV defeats Antiochus III just south of Gaza in one of the largest battles of the Hellenistic world — perhaps a hundred thousand men and more than a hundred war elephants, African against Indian. The Ptolemies held the coastal plain as a result for another two decades. Rafah, then as now, is where the road from Egypt enters the Strip, and it has been the site of a battle, a border post or a crossing in almost every century since. The geography does not change; only the names of the parties fighting over it do.

The Hasmonean king besieges Gaza for a year and razes much of it. Josephus is the main source and gives the episode considerable detail, including the killing of the city council. Gaza recovers, as it does after Alexander, after the earthquake of 1033, after the British bombardment of 1917. The chronology of this city is a sequence of destructions with rebuildings between them, and the honest thing to say about that is not that Gaza is indestructible but that it has been destroyed repeatedly and rebuilt each time by people who did not leave.

Gaza is detached from Hasmonean control and attached to the new Roman province; the proconsul Gabinius rebuilds the city in 57 BCE on a fresh grid slightly south of the old site. What follows is three centuries of prosperity. Roman Gaza has a school of rhetoric, a hippodrome, a temple to Zeus-Marnas that became famous enough to be worth destroying later, and an export trade in wine shipped in distinctive amphorae found as far away as Britain.

Hilarion, born near Gaza, returns from Egypt and settles in the dunes south of the city, attracting followers until the hermitage grows into one of the earliest monastic complexes in the Middle East: five successive churches, Roman baths, a crypt, and mosaic floors laid over three centuries. He died in Cyprus in 371 and his remains were returned here. The complex was still in use after the Muslim conquest. It is the outstanding heritage site in the Gaza Strip and, as of 2024, a World Heritage Site inscribed and placed in danger in the same decision.

Christian Palestinian Aramaic emerges around this period, a Western Aramaic dialect used by the Melkite community from roughly the fifth to the thirteenth centuries.

Bishop Porphyrius closes the Marneion, the last great pagan temple of the city, and the Eudoxiana church is consecrated on the site in 407. The church now bearing his name, and holding his tomb, is conventionally dated to 425 and is among the oldest churches still in use anywhere. Gaza's Christian community worshipped in it continuously for sixteen centuries — a Palestinian Christian population, not a foreign one, descended from the same inhabitants who later became the city's Muslim majority.

Procopius of Gaza, Choricius and their circle make the city a genuine intellectual centre of the late antique Mediterranean, teaching rhetoric and writing descriptions of Gaza's churches so detailed that they remain a source for buildings that no longer exist. Gaza wine is exported across the empire in the same period under its own name. This is the counter-argument to any account that treats Gaza as peripheral: for two centuries it was a place people travelled to in order to study, and its products were known by their place of origin across three continents.

Procopius led a school of rhetoric that flourished in Gaza in the fifth and early sixth centuries, alongside Choricius, Aeneas, and Zacharias, applying Greek sophistic education to Christian purposes.

Gaza passes to Muslim rule during the Rashidun conquests, largely without destruction. The existing population — Christian, Samaritan, Jewish, Aramaic- and Greek-speaking, descended from the Canaanite-era inhabitants — gradually adopts Arabic and, over several centuries, Islam. This is the single most important thing to understand about the chronology on this page. The conquest is a change of language and religion among substantially the same people in substantially the same villages. Continuity of population runs straight through it, which is why the archaeology shows layers rather than replacement.

Arabization was gradual. Greek and Aramaic remained in use for centuries, and Arabic only became dominant in administration and daily life by the early Abbasid period.

The Byzantine cathedral becomes the city's congregational mosque, on ground that had already carried a Roman temple precinct. Gaza also holds the tomb of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, who died here on a trading journey — from which the city takes its epithet Ghazzat Hashim. The mosque accumulated a historic manuscript library and served as the principal place of worship in Gaza until December 2023. Roughly nineteen centuries of continuous religious use on one plot of ground, across three religions, in an unbroken line.

The founder of one of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence — followed today by several hundred million Muslims across Egypt, East Africa, Southeast Asia and Bilad al-Sham — was born in this city. Few towns of Gaza's size in any period have produced a figure of comparable influence on a world civilisation. He is included here for the same reason as the School of Gaza: the record of what this place contributed is not thin, it is simply not widely taught.

The Crusaders take Gaza, grant it to the Templars, and convert the congregational mosque into the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, adding the Gothic nave whose arcade survived until 2023. Saladin recaptures the city in 1187 and it is reconverted. The sequence matters and is often reported backwards: temple, then church, then mosque, then cathedral, then mosque again. Each power built on what it found rather than clearing the ground, which is precisely why the building carried nineteen centuries of evidence in its fabric.

Under the Mamluks, Gaza governs a province running from Rafah to Caesarea and enters a long building boom: Qasr al-Basha, the Souq al-Qaysariyya, khans, hammams, madrasas and mosques. Most of what stood in the old city until recently dates from this period or was rebuilt on its foundations. This is also when Gaza's documentary record thickens — endowment deeds, tax registers, court records naming families, shops and landholdings, the beginning of a continuous paper trail of ownership that runs through the Ottoman registers into the twentieth century.

The Mamluk sultan Barquq's governor builds a fortified caravanserai on the Egypt road, and the town that grew around it takes its name from the building: Khan Yunis, the khan of Yunus. The castle secured the pilgrimage and postal route between Cairo and Damascus. Its gateway, with the founder's inscription, stood in the middle of the town's market until recent years. A place name that is simply the name of a fourteenth-century building, still in daily use by half a million people, is its own kind of evidence.

Gaza is incorporated into the Ottoman empire and made the seat of a sanjak within the province of Damascus. Ottoman administration brings the cadastral surveys — the tahrir defters — which record villages, households, crops and tax yields across the Gaza district in detail. For the argument this site is making, these registers are among the most useful documents that exist: they name the Palestinian Arab villages of the coastal plain, and their inhabitants, four hundred years before the events of 1948.

For over a century Gaza is ruled by the Ridwans, a local family who held the governorship almost hereditarily and used it to build mosques, baths and a palace, and to make the city the most important centre between Cairo and Damascus. This is worth more attention than it usually gets. It is a documented century of Gaza governed by a Palestinian family with its own patronage, architecture and foreign correspondence — direct evidence against the claim that no distinct local society existed here before the twentieth century.

Bonaparte passes through Gaza on the march to Acre and stays several nights in the Mamluk fortress, which by then had served Mamluk governors and Ottoman ones and would later serve the British as a police post and a girls' school. The building opened as Gaza's principal archaeological museum in 2010, holding the largest catalogued collection in the Strip. Every power that has administered Gaza has done it from this one building, which is a reasonable place for the first band of this chronology to end.