For the Xanth character, see Dor (Xanth). For other uses, see Dor (disambiguation).

Dor (Kh. el-Burj), is a large mound located on Israel's Mediterranean coast, about 30 km south of Haifa.

The Site

It is identified with D-jr of Egyptian sources, Biblical Dor, and with Dor/Dora of Greek and Roman sources. The documented history of the site begins in the Late Bronze Age (though the town itself was founded in the Middle Bronze Age, c. 2000 BCE), and ends in the Crusader period. The port dominated the fortunes of the town throughout its 3000-odd year history. Dor was successively ruled by Canaanites, Sea Peoples, Israelites, Phoenicians, Persians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans. Its primary role in all these diverse cultures was that of a commercial entrepot and a gateway between East and West.

Written Sources

Dor (Hebrew: דוֹר, meaning "dwelling"), known as Dora to the Greeks and Romans, was an ancient royal city of the Canaanites, (Joshua 12:23) whose ruler was an ally of Jabin king of Hazor against Joshua, (Joshua 11:1,2). In the 1100s the town appears to have been taken by the Tjekker, and was ruled by them at least as late as the early 1000s BCE.

It appears to have been within the territory of the tribe of Asher, though allotted to Manasseh, (Joshua 17:11; Judges 1:27). It was one of Solomon's commissariat districts (Judges 1:27; 1 Kings 4:11). It has been placed in the ninth mile from Caesarea, on the way to Ptolemais. Just at the point indicated is the small village of Tantura, probably an Arab corruption of Dora.

The city was known as Dor even before the Greeks arrived or had contact with the peoples in Israel. When the Greeks came to the city and learned its name to be Dor, they ascribed it the identity Dora, the Hellenization of the name. The "a" is merely the noun ending to the word. The God/cult of Dor, where the term Doric, as in the column, comes from, was ascribed to the city. Hence, in Hebrew, Dor, in Greek/Latin, Dora.

Excavations

Dor was first investigated in the 1920s, by John Garstang, on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. J. Leibowitz excavated in the lower town around the tell in the 1950s. From 1979 to 1983 Claudine Dauphin excavated a church east of the tell. Avner Raban excavated harbor installations and other constructions mainly south and west of the mound in 1979 - 1984. Underwater surveys around the site were carried out by Kurt Raveh, Shelley Wachsman and Saen Kingsley. Ephraim Stern, of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University, directed twenty seasons of excavations at the site between 1980 and 2000, in cooperation with the Israel Exploration Society and several Israeli, American, South African and Canadian academic institutions, as well as a large group of German volunteers. With 100–200 staff, students and volunteers per season Dor was one of the largest and longest-sustained excavation projects in Israel. The eleven excavation areas opened have revealed a wealth of information about the Iron Age, Persian, Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.

Current excavation is being conducted by the Hebrew University and Haifa University in cooperation with University of California, Berkeley , University of Washington (Seattle), Weizmann Institute of Science, UNISA (South Africa), and other institutions. It's a broad international consortium of scholars, jointly pursuing a wide number of different but complementary research objectives.

Museum