GASSÖL, TELÉLÌT. – A small group of barely perceptible hills, situated in the Jordan Valley, north of the Dead Sea, 5.5 km. east of the Jordan, on the ancient road from the Jordan to Ma'in.
While passing there with a group of students, Fr. Alessio Mallon S. J. noticed an extraordinary number of fragments of ancient pottery and stone tools, and in November 1929, commissioned by the Pontifical Biblical Institute, began archaeological excavations at the site. The excavations continued and, after the death of Fr. Mallon (1934), were directed by Fr. Roberto Köppel S. J. until 1938. The excavations brought to light four superimposed layers of an ancient city approximately 600 m. long and 400 m. wide. The lowest layer lies approximately 6 m. below the surface of the hill.
In the various layers, very many stone (flint) tools, pottery vessels of extremely ancient forms, and remains of ancient paintings (a large star, a procession [?], the image of a bird) were found; metallic objects, on the other hand, are almost entirely lacking (a few metal objects [bronze and copper] were found immediately beneath the surface and seem to belong to a more recent period). At first the culture of T. G. was assigned to the first Bronze Age (A. Mallon, R. Neuville, A. Vincent); but today almost all archaeologists agree that it represents the earliest phase of the “Chalcolithic” or “Eneolithic” (ca. 4000–3400 B.C.), since “Gassölian” pottery was found in the plain of Esdrelon beneath the pottery (also Chalcolithic) of Mageddo, related to the Jemdet Nasr type (ca. 3400–3100 B.C.). The Gassölian civilization therefore belonged to the first half of the fourth millennium B.C.; it was destroyed ca. 3400 B.C. and ceased definitively to exist.
It has not yet been possible to establish the origin or the race of the population of T. G., which, as other excavations have shown, had spread across almost the whole of the southern part of Palestine before that region was occupied by the Semites. The anthropological examination of the Gassölians has not yet been possible because of the lack of well-preserved human remains.