By Rivka Borochov
With 10 date pits and one olive pit, researchers at Tel Aviv
University have determined that Israel’s Timna Valley copper mines are
from the time of the Bible’s King Solomon. History books will need to be
revised.
In a dig led by
Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef,
archeologists sent organic remains from the ancient copper mine to the
world-renowned Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of
Oxford in England, for carbon dating. The unit dated the pits to the
10th century BCE. This is when, according to the Bible, King Solomon
ruled over the land.
The dig site at the copper mines
Previous archeologists at the site in Israel's Arava Desert had
dated the mines to the 13th century BCE and assumed they were under
Egyptian control at the time.
"The mines are definitely from the period of King Solomon," says
Ben-Yosef, a lecturer in the J. M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and
ANE Cultures at Tel Aviv University. "They may help us understand the
local society, which would have been invisible to us otherwise."
What makes the site particularly tricky to date is that the people
who worked there were semi-nomadic tribesmen living in tents; they did
not leave behind elaborate buildings or structures. Tents usually
disappear over time. Ben-Yosef looked into what the smelters did leave
behind: food remains.
Mystery of tent people revealed
So who were the people mining at this immense site?
Researchers like Ben-Yosef wanted clearer answers at Timna, located
near the Red Sea coastal town of Eilat. The area is now a national
park. Some mining picked up there about 50 years ago, but stopped as the
profitability of copper sank.
What Ben-Yosef found may help preserve the otherwise virgin region, tentatively slated for hotel development.
“Big hotels in the middle of the valley? The environmentalists
don’t like this at all. While development won’t destroy [the ancient
mines], it will destroy wilderness. It is a virgin land full of
archeology sites, and actually where they want to build a hotel there
are archeological sites,” says Ben-Yosef.
He and his team were able to show that the copper mining at the
site reached its peak some three centuries later than thought - during
the rule of the great biblical kings.“ We didn’t find anything in
particular that can connect the mines to the figure of King Solomon. The
big deal is that the mines are dated to the time that he was presumed
to be ruling this area,” explains Ben-Yosef.
Shaking off dusty hypotheses
His find lends support to the stories of the Bible. Could King
Solomon have been as wealthy as believed? Maybe he collected money and
products from the mining operation?
Ben-Yosef can only speculate, but he believes that the mines were
operated by the Edomites, a people who lived along the Jordan River and
were influenced by the Judean Kingdom to the north. Copper was an
important mineral used in the construction of the Jewish Temple in
Jerusalem.
Before Ben-Yosef, pioneering Israeli archaeologist Beno Rothenberg
drew a connection to Egypt after finding a small Egyptian temple at
Timna. Up until then, it was thought that King Solomon had controlled
the mines – hence their name. Rothenberg wasn’t a fan of carbon dating,
says Ben-Yosef, who scanned through the late researcher’s footnotes. He
decided to dig deeper into the truth.
Why now? “It is the first time that anybody cared to send some
samples to Oxford – that’s the thing,” he says. “Previously Rothenberg
worked there for 40 years but he didn’t believe in carbon dating. It was
much less accepted in the ’60s and ’70s as a credible form of dating.
But I was suspicious about it. He did send some samples in and found
that they were not matching his paradigm, so he just published the
results as a footnote, and didn’t consider them important.
“We now have a strong indication that the mines are not Egyptian, but from the days of the Iron Age,” says Ben-Yosef.
Glick, who suggested that a hill was built
around the mine so the slaves working there couldn’t escape. It was
previously untouched and served as a massive smelting camp. The mines
were eventually abandoned around the 10th century, says Ben-Yosef,
probably due to a military invasion from Egypt, or possibly export
competition from high-quality copper being produced in Cyprus.