again overtook the site. Callaway has proposed that a local Canaanite ruler may have managed to conquer the city away from the Egyptians, following which it was destroyed in an Egyptian counterattack. Iron Age After the destruction of the "Urban C" layer, et-Tell was abandoned and lay in ruins for over a thousand years. The next settlement period did not begin until the Iron Age I, about 1200 BC, when a wave of settlers came and peacefully began a new occupation there. This new village was unfortified and took up only a small region of the mound, smaller by far than the Early Bronze cities. This level is marked by the digging of rock-cut cisterns into the hill to catch rainwater and the use of terrace farming on the slopes of the mound. The discovery of farming tools and great quantities of animal bones in every house suggests that these people were both farmers and shepherds. About 1050 BC, this village was abandoned without burning or destruction. Comparisons with biblical Ai Edward Robinson suggested in 1838 that et-Tell could be the location of the biblical city of Ai, as did Charles Wilson in 1866, on the evidence of biblical references and nearby topography. This identification was backed by the American scholar William Foxwell Albright, who further argued in a 1924 paper that the site of et-Tell held the ruins of a great Canaanite city, corresponding with the biblical tradition that the Israelite commander Joshua "burnt Ai and made it a heap for ever" (Joshua 8:28). Another point in favor of this hypothesis is that the Hebrew word "Ai" means "the ruin", which is more or less the same meaning as the modern Arabic name, et-Tell. Albright's identification has been accepted by the majority of the archaeological community, and today et-Tell is widely believed to be one and the same as the Biblical Ai. If et-Tell is indeed Ai, this poses a problem for defenders of the literal historicity of the biblical accounts concerning the origin of ancient Israel. The reason for this is that traditional dating schemes place the Exodus from Egypt and Joshua's conquest around 1400 BC. In this version of events, Joshua and the invading Israelites are depicted as conquering Ai, killing its residents and burning the city; however, et-Tell was unoccupied at this time according to the established archaeological chronology, and the later Iron Age I village