GASSÛL, TELL EL-. - Small group of barely perceptible hills situated in the Jordan valley, north of the Dead Sea, 5.5 km from the Jordan to the east, on the ancient road from the Jordan to Ma’in.
While passing through with a group of students, Fr. Alessio Mallon, S.J., had noticed an extraordinary number of fragments of ancient pottery and stone tools, and in November 1939, on behalf of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, began archaeological excavations at the site. The excavations continued and, after the death of Fr. Mallon (1934), were carried on by Fr. Roberto Köppel, S.J., until 1938. The excavations brought to light four superimposed layers of an ancient city about 600 m in length and 400 m in width. The lowest layer lies about 6 m below the surface of the hill.
In the different layers, many stone tools (flint), pottery vessels of very ancient forms, and remains of ancient paintings (a large star, a procession [q.v.], the image of a bird) were found; metallic objects, however, are almost entirely absent (a few metal objects [bronze, 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 early Bronze Age (A. Mallon, R. Neuville, A. Vincent); but today almost all archaeologists agree that it belongs to the earliest phase of the Chalcolithic or Eneolithic period (c. 4000–3400 B.C.), since “Gassulian” pottery was found in the Esdraelon plain beneath the (also Chalcolithic) pottery of Megiddo, akin to the type of Gendet Nasr (c. 3400–3100 B.C.). The Gassulian civilization thus appears to have flourished in the first half of the 4th millennium B.C. and was destroyed c. 3400 B.C. It then definitively ceased to exist.
It has not yet been possible to determine the origin or race of the population of T. G., which, as other excavations have shown, had spread almost throughout the southern part of Palestine before this was occupied by the Semites. The anthropological examination of the Gassulians has not yet been possible due to the lack of well-preserved human remains.