City, ancient Palestine.
It occupied a strategic location at the crossing of military and trade routes; it was also famous as a battlefield and is thought to be the biblical Armageddon . The first town was built early in the 4th millennium BC. It was captured by the Egyptian king Thutmose III с 1468 BC. It later passed to the Israelites, and King Solomon rebuilt it as a military centre. British Gen. Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby defeated Ottoman forces near the site in 1918.