Mudbrick Gate of Tel Dan

In the Middle Bronze Age, around the eighteenth century BCE, the occupants of Dan constructed a massive city gate on the eastern side of the city. Built entirely of mudbricks surviving today as high as 47 courses, the gate featured three enormous arches framing the entryway into the city. Classical archaeologists once boasted that it was the Romans who invented the arch sometime in the mid-first millennium BCE. We now know not only that the arch originated in the Near East, but that the so-called Canaanite gate at Tel Dan preserves the earliest intact archway in the world at almost 4000 years old!