Timothy Harrison

Timothy P. Harrison is a Canadian archaeologist at the University of Toronto who has directed the Tayinat Archaeological Project at Tell Tayinat (the Amuq Plain, southern Turkey) since 1999. The project succeeds the earlier Oriental Institute (Chicago) excavations of the 1930s under Robert Braidwood and is one of the most significant Iron Age excavations in the eastern Mediterranean.

Tell Tayinat is identified with ancient Kunulua, the capital of the Aramean / Neo-Hittite kingdom of Patina (or Unqi) in the 9th-8th centuries BC and a vassal state of the Neo-Assyrian empire. The site is mentioned in Assyrian royal inscriptions of Shalmaneser III, Tiglath-pileser III, and Sargon II — the same kings who expanded Assyrian control over Israel and Judah and whose campaigns frame the prophetic literature of Amos, Hosea, and the early Isaiah.

Harrison's project has uncovered an Iron Age temple (Building II/XVI) of striking architectural similarity to the description of Solomon's Temple in 1 Kings 6 — a tripartite plan with portico, main hall, and inner sanctuary, and parallel scale and proportions. While direct historical relationship between the two structures is debated, the Tayinat temple offers the closest physical analog yet excavated to the Solomonic plan, and is now standard comparative material in studies of First-Temple architecture.

The project has also recovered a complete cuneiform copy of the Esarhaddon Succession Treaty (2009) from a temple context — one of the most important Neo-Assyrian textual finds of recent decades, with direct relevance to the political vocabulary and treaty-formula background of Deuteronomy.