Deir Alla is the site of an ancient Near Eastern town in Balqa Governorate, Jordan, thought to be the biblical Pethor. The town was a sanctuary and metal-working centre, ringed by smelting furnaces built against the exterior of the city walls, whose successive rebuildings, dated by ceramics from the Late Bronze Age, sixteenth century BCE, to the fifth century BCE, accumulated as a tell based on a low natural hill. The hopeful identification of the site as the Biblical Sukkot is not confirmed by any inscription at the site. However, in Jerusalem TalmudZeraimShevi'it 9:2, Sukkot is referred as 'Darʿala or Tar'ellah' hence maybe deformed later into Deir Alla. Deir Alla was the first Bronze Age city excavated in Jordan. The initial expectations were of establishing a relative chronology of Palestine pottery in the transition between the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, established through meticulous stratigraphy. It was intended to span a gap between established chronologies at Jericho and Samaria. The oldest sanctuary at Deir Alla dates to the Late Bronze Age; it was peacefully rebuilt at intervals, the floor being raised as the tell accumulated height, and the squared altar stone renewed, each new one placed atop the previous one. The final sanctuary was obliterated in a fierce fire; the blackened remains of an Egyptian jar bearing the cartouche of Queen Twosret gives a terminus post quem of ca 1200 BCE, a date consonant with other twelfth-century urban destruction in the Ancient Near East. Unlike some other destroyed sites, Deir Alla's habitation continued after the disaster, without a break, into the Iron Age; the discontinuity was a cultural one, with highly developed pottery of a separate ceramic tradition post-dating the destruction. On 20 August 2010, it recorded a scorching temperature of 51.1C, the new official highest temperature in the history of Jordan.
Archaeology
A series of Dutch excavations sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for the Advancement of Pure Research began in 1960, under the auspices of the department of theology, University of Leiden. These excavations continued for five seasons until 1967. The excavation made its most dramatic discovery in 1967, an ink wall inscription relating a hitherto-unknown prophecy of Balaam, who thereby becomes the first Old Testament prophet to be identified in an inscription. At the end of the 1964 campaign, 11 clay tablets, 3 inscribed in a hitherto unknown possibly alphabetic script, 7 bearing only dots, and one uninscribed, were discovered.
The 1967 excavation revealed a many-chambered structure that had also been destroyed by earthquake, during the Persian period at the site. On a wall was written a story relating visions of the seer of the gods "Balʿam son of Beʿor", who may be the same Balʿam son of Beʿor mentioned in Numbers 22-24 and in other passages of the Bible. The Deir Alla Balaam is associated with "a god bearing the name Shgr, 'Shadday' gods and goddesses, and with the goddess Ashtar." The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies describes it as "the oldest example of a book in a West Semitic language written with the alphabet, and the oldest piece of Aramaic literature." The Deir Alla Inscription is datable to ca. 840-760 BCE; it was painted in inks on fragments of a plastered wall: 119 pieces of inked plaster were recovered. The wall, near the summit of the tell, was felled by yet another tremor.
Tourist attractions
As well as being the site of the Deir Alla Inscription, Deir Alla is also the site of Battle of Fahl between the Muslim Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. There are several tombs of Sahabah in Deir Alla:
