The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
The Central Timna Valley Project & Rethinking Iron Age Nomads
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In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Erez Ben-Yosef who is an Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University. He’s the director of the Central Timna Valley Project and the excavations that he has been leading in the Aravah Valley have raised the possibility that we need to rethink the social complexity and impact of Iron Age nomadic societies. You can learn more about the Central Timna Valley Project by visiting its website.
Welcome to the Forincy Podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sorin. Forensic is a podcast about Near Eastern history, language, and culture, and is brought to you by forency.us, the premier language learning website for intermediate to advanced learners of Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian. On this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Eres Ben Yosef, who is an associate professor of archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University. He's the director of the Centra Timna Valley Project, and the excavations that he has been leading in the Arava Valley have raised the possibility that we need to rethink the social complexity and impact of Iron Age nomadic societies. Thanks for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00Before we dive into the Central Timna Valley Project and the excavations you've been leading there, I'd like if we can just go back to what initially sparked your interest in studying metallurgy in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_01Well, metal and humans have a long history together. Me personally, I started my academic career by studying geology, and then I also fell in love with archaeology. So I think studying ancient metal technologies and the role of metal in human societies is something that combines both of my interests in geology, earth sciences, and archaeology. So it's a great field to explore, and it's since the metal revolution, like 7,000 years ago or even more, we are using metals even today. It's a very important aspect of the human experience. That's how I got to work on ancient metals.
SPEAKER_00Going off of that, what was the role of copper in the ancient Near East and how did Timna fit into that?
SPEAKER_01Well, copper was the first real metal to be invented, or the production of metal of this metal was a major step forward in human technology. But surprisingly, the first 1,000 years is all about this metal being so rare, so precious, that it was mostly a cultic item or a symbol of status in ancient societies.
SPEAKER_00I'd like to stop you there and just when you mention the cultic item aspect of it, it's a really strange-looking metal, and so you can kind of understand how it played a role in cultic activities. It's this weird green shade.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the color. It's like you find a rock, a mineral whose color is green or a little bit bluish, and then you make it into a completely different material, and they they knew how to do it. And as part of this magic, it was sort of putting some values into this man-made material. And you know, it's the color, it's a shining material, you know, and it's also something that you can work into uh tools, into other things. We all know metal, so you can actually hammer it to produce new shapes. So you kind of take something that looks like stone and feels like stone, and if you hit it, it breaks. So it has a nice colour, and for thousands of years, people were collecting these nice stones. But then one day somebody realized that you can put this into a furnace and produce a new material, which is quite amazing. And at the beginning, the interesting thing is that it was not the invention, this new technology wasn't about producing some tools or some agricultural tools or weapons or anything like that. It's just playing with this rocks and producing a new shiny material, which, because it was so rare, had a very special status in these ancient societies of the ancient Near East. Only a hundred years later, and especially with the introduction of bronze, which is an alloy, a mixture between copper and tin, only then this was the next step, and they were taking this material and making strong, strong tools that replaced the stone tools that they had previously. So it was a gradual change, but at the beginning it was about this beautiful material that they were able to create themselves out of the rock. We know from archaeology that it had a very significant symbolic role of the chalcolytic societies, the first people that had metal as part of their material culture. So it's it's called the Chalcolithic period. Calcos is copper in Greek, and uh lithos it's stone in Greek. So the copper stone age is the first time we have copper as part of these ancient societies.
SPEAKER_00Who initially started or who initially dominated the copper production in the Engineer East?
SPEAKER_01It's an ongoing research, and there's a lot of debate and uh interesting discussions. But currently, I think the consensus is that it was invented somewhere in eastern Anatolia, a modern-day Turkey, and from there it's spread all over the Engineer East. So one of the interesting questions is if it was invented only once, or was it invented multiple times throughout human history? Basic assumption is that it is so unique and it is so complicated that it was probably invented only once, and then knowledge was uh the thing that transferred from region to region and spread throughout the ancient Near East. This is the main story. For many, many years, it was thought that in southern Israel, in the Timnah Valley that we are going to talk about shortly, this was the birthplace of copper metallurgy. When Otten, the excavator in the late 1950s, he believed strongly that Timna was the first place where copper mythallogy was invented. But since then we have had more and more evidence that it was not the South Levant, not Israel that was the birthplace of mythology. And so, as I mentioned before, it was probably in modern-day Turkey. But Timnah got into the picture quite fast, like a few centuries later, we already have ancient mythology in the Saturn Levant, in the Arab Valley, in Feynan and Timna, the region of modern-day Jordan and Israel. So this is kind of a you know a summary of a lot of many discussions of many different studies. We're talking about the sixth millennium BCE, so between 6,000 and 5,000 years BCE, or BC, whatever you prefer. So we're talking about uh 8,000 years ago more or less. So people started to understand how to smelt rock and make it into metal.
SPEAKER_00So for those of us who haven't heard of Timna before and never had the chance to visit, it'd be great if you could describe the scale of the copper production remains there, and if you remember the first impressions that you had as an archaeologist when you started excavating there.
SPEAKER_01Timna is an amazing place. As I said, Rosenberg, Ben Rosenberg excavated there already in the 1950s. And it is one of the best places anywhere to learn about ancient copper technologies. And this is for two main reasons. One is that, contrary to other places where copper was produced in antiquity, Timna was not exploited, at least not uh on a large scale, in modern times. So we copper is still a very important metal, and many ancient mines were completely destroyed by modern activity. Like Cyprus, even the mines in Anatolia were heavily exploited in the 20th century, and the ancient sites were destroyed before we realized the importance of these sites for human history, for cultural heritage and stuff like that. So, luckily, Timna and the nearby copper production area of Finan were not heavily exploited in modern times. So the sites are there, the mines are there, the furnaces are there, the remains of the furnaces are there, and this is quite unique in world archaeology, not even in the ancient Near East, anywhere, from Chile to Brazil. And the other thing is that it's deep in the desert. So it's not covered by vegetation. And copper and metal in human societies is something that is of interest for many researchers, many cultures, for anywhere on the globe. So my colleagues that are working in the jungles of South America, for example, for them to find ancient melting sites, it's a big challenge and it's really covered by vegetation. And now here in Timna, in the Timna Valley, deep in the deserts of Israel, of modern-day Israel, the sites are just there. So you visit the place, you go out of the bus for the car, and you just see remains of 3,000 and even 6,000 years ago, just there. So it's easily accessible, it was not destroyed by modern activity, and the desert environment also preserved really well the archaeological remains, including organic materials that you usually don't find in any site. There, it's just part of the archaeological assemblage or archaeological finds. So we are very lucky here to have this unique place. Rottenberg realized it really quickly. He was a part of early surveys there, and then he decided to start a systematic interdisciplinary research project. It was actually part of the establishment of what we call the discipline of archaeometallogy, of archaeometallurgical studies, which means the study of ancient metal production technologies and the role of metals in antiquity. This happened here in southern Israel. And today we have labs and institutions that are devoted to the study of ancient metals. Usually it's a collaboration between archaeologists, but not only archaeologists, also geologists and chemists and physicists, all of these experts are getting together in order to understand this ancient technology, which was actually in most periods the most advanced technology of humankind. Like it was the high tech of the Iron Age, it was the high tech of the Bronze Age. And then to really understand what was going on there, the level of technology, the level of craftsmanship, all of that, it's an effort of a team of experts. Back in the 50s and 60s, it was quite unique. Today, an interdisciplinary study is something that we encourage and it's really common. But back then it was more unique, and Ozenberg was a pioneer in this regard of getting some experts together to understand this ancient technology. So this is the Arabah Valley. This is the story of this specific region, and since his work, since the work of Ottemberg, there is always some new studies coming out from the field with new insights about copper production technologies and ancient societies that were engaged in this uh endeavor of making copper in the deserts of the Levant.
SPEAKER_00So, who did archaeologists originally believe operated the mines at Timnah and Feinan? And what's the accepted theory now?
SPEAKER_01In Timnah and Feinan, Timna is in Israel, Fenan is on the other side of the border in modern day Jordan. When you visit the place, you see a few major copper production sites. What do you see? Go there and you see huge mounds or piles of slag, which is the waste of copper production. When you do the smelting process, you actually take, as we said, rock, minerals, copper minerals, you put them in the furnace and you create like a small volcano. It's like you make this material liquid in order to separate the rock from the heavy metal that sunk to the bottom of the furnace. And all the waste, all the remains, what is not the metal itself, usually flowed out of the furnace and consolidated into something that looks like black rock. It looks like basalt, but it's not basalt, it's just a man-made rock, which we call slag. Slag is what you see, and people were reporting about this amazing slag mounds, ancient slag mounds, already in the 19th century. In 1845, it was the first time we hear about these ancient sites by a guy named John Petterick. He was the British consul in Khartoum and he was a mining engineer, so the local people in Aqaba told him that there are ancient cockroom furnaces there, and they took him to Timnah, which was called then Wadi Manayah. This is the Arabic name of the site, and he reported about this ancient smelting sites. But the first scholar that tried to give a date for these sites, Lerner Songlik, he was a Jewish American archaeologist who was doing major surveys in the South and Levante in the 1930s. And in 1934, he went to Timna and saw these major slag mounds. And by reading the pottery, back then there was no carbon-14, there was nothing. But there was the basic typology of pottery. He dated these slag mounds to the Iron Age, which is the biblical time, and claimed that this might be a source or the source of wealth of Jerusalem at the time of King Solomon. And very fast, it was called King Solomon's mines. We have engine mines, we have the time, correct? But this was in the early 20th century. But when Rothenberg started his project there in 1959, for 10 years he kind of accepted this dating. But then in 1969, there was a major discovery of a small site which was full of objects. Below, in the center of the valley, they found a small temple dedicated to the goddess Khatchor. It was buried in an earthquake, so there was a wealth of archaeological finds that you usually don't find easily. And the amazing thing about that was the inscriptions that were talking about the new kingdom of Egypt. The new kingdom of Egypt that ruled in the 13th and early 12th centuries BCE. And based on this find, they were able to, or he decided that the main phase of production in Timnah should be dated and should be attributed to the new kingdom of Egypt. So after a few arguments with other archaeologists, he was able to convince everybody that the major story in Timnah is related to the new kingdom of Egypt. We're talking about the 13th and early 12th centuries BCE. So if we were talking about King Solomon, it's about the 10th century BCE. So Odenberg made all of that to be earlier than the days of Solomon. So the story of Solomon and Jerusalem was forgotten. Actually, this was the situation before we started our own project there. Our first excavation was in 2009. And then we understood that there is a major confusion with the dating of these sites. And we started excavating more and more sites. That said, I don't know if everybody at home knows that there is a huge debate about the historicity of King Solomon. There are many archaeologists and biblical scholars that doubt that King Solomon was even a real historical figure, let alone that he had a huge kingdom that was able to control all the way to the south. We're talking about more than 300 kilometers south of Jerusalem, so it's huge distances. So there is an ongoing discussion about that. But what we found was that these mines were at their peak at exactly the same time as King Solomon's reign is supposed to be. So this is a major thing. This is a real game changer in regard to the chronology of the site. And this is part of what brought me to the discussion about the role of nomads in the history of the biblical periods.
SPEAKER_00So who do you believe, or what's the accepted theory on who was operating the sites then? It's pretty accepted now that if there was a King Solomon, his kingdom, their capabilities wouldn't have extended that far south. So what what is the other polity that we attribute the Timna Mines to?
SPEAKER_01The best identification for the people, for the society that was working at the mines in the 10th century BCE is the Edomites, the kingdom of Edom, the ancient kingdom of Edom, which is also part of the biblical story. Because even by the Bible, it was not the Israelites or the people of King Solomon that were occupying this region. Even according to the biblical story, this area deep in the south was part of the Edomite kingdom. And we have other reasons to believe that these are indeed the ancient Edomites, because it's not only the Bible, which is really a very complicated source that tells us about the Edomites, it's also Egyptian sources of the 13th century BCE that talking about the Edomite region, the Edomite land in these areas of southern Jordan or the Arabah or the Negev. This general region was called Edom in very early sources in Egypt. And then later on, in Assyrian sources, we hear about the Edomite people, the Edomite kingdom, as early as then in the late 9th century BC. So we have not only the Bible to identify these people with ancient Edom, but also other sources, and it makes sense that the same people that were working there in the 10th and 9th centuries BC were those that later on settled down in Southern Jordan and built their capital in Potzla and other places that we know about from archaeology and other sources in the later part of the Iron Age, in the 8th, 7th, 6th centuries BCE. So these are the ancient Edomites. And now I have to say something about the nomadic question. So when I started working in the south, I think almost 18 years ago, back then it was accepted that the major activity at the mines of Timna were done by the Egyptians. Only an empire could have created this major operation, only an empire could have forced hundreds of people to work in the mines, and everybody accepted the Imperial Association of their archaeological remains. And the same thing was for Feinan, by the way. For Feinan, the copper mines there were attributed to the Assyrian Empire of the 7th century BC. So it was easy for everybody to accept that this was a major organization of imperial intervention in the region. Also, we have to say that according to the prevailing assumption regarding nomads of the biblical time, nomads always were considered to be like the Bedouins of today. The problem is it all starts with the big challenges in the archaeology of nomadism. It's very, very hard to detect remains of nomads in the archaeological record. Usually we just don't see them, they don't live much. And if we do try to find the encampments, the tents, the remains of where they were dwelling, we have to apply very specific surveys. And sometimes we are lucky and we are able to detect a remain of a tent camp. And then we have a big challenge of dating these remains, because usually what archaeologists are dealing with, in order to date or to understand something about the societies of these periods, is uh the accumulation of garbage. So we have to dig into piles of remains that are substantial only if people are settled and produce garbage, piles of waste, of materials that we can analyze. And usually in tents you don't find any any remains like that because it's it's ephemeral. It's like one year here, the other year, the other wadi, there is no accumulation of anything substantial. But let's say, even if you are lucky and you are able to date the tent remains to the Iron Age, even to the days of King David and Solomon, you found you were able to find the Israelite tents, then we are stuck with our ability to interpret their social organization. You understand that even if we find the presence of nomads, like the ancient. Israelite tribes, right? The biblical story is all about nomads creating uh complex social uh structures. So even if we are able to detect remains of tents from this specific period and we are able to date it precisely, it will be very hard for us to say what was exactly the organization as a society. So this is why we always go to ethnography, to nomads that live today in the same geographic region as a parallel, as something to compare to the archaeological reality and to understand what is the meaning of being a nomad in the biblical time. So Bedouin model, what I call the Bedouin model, is the model to explain ancient nomads or biblical time nomads. And this means that Bedouin tribes, which are the modern Arab tribes in the region, they have a very specific social structure, and usually it's about simple society. They never created huge kingdoms. And imagine the early days of biblical archaeology or the early days of biblical scholarship, even. This was back at the time of the Ottoman Empire, and these early researchers, early explorers went to the region of the Bedouins, and for them it was a land without law. If they wanted to go from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, they had to pay Bakshish, they had to pay protection in order to survive in this hostile environment. And they were witnessing all of the fights between the different tribes and the instability of the region. And all of this reality was imposed on the interpretation of biblical era nomads. So this is the reason, for example, why it's really much an assumption that before complete sedentarization, before complete a settlement, like that the entire population of ancient Israel became settled, they couldn't have achieved any kingdom of any sort. Because as long as they were nomads, they couldn't create any strong political structures. This is a very, very basic assumption in the research of the period by biblical archaeologists and by biblical scholars. I'm talking about so much so that even if you, when we talk with each other in conferences, in the classroom, we talk about the Bedouins of the time. Like I invite a colleague, he's talking about Mesha, the king of Moab, as a king of a Bedouin origin. It's part of the language. So the interpretation of nomads of this time period is always as the Bedouins of the biblical times. And we couldn't even think about exceptions. Maybe we were not always correct about assuming that the Bedouin is the basic and the base model for understanding the biblical era nomads.
SPEAKER_00What would be a more appropriate comparison? I think everybody thinks of Middle Eastern nomads as Bedouins, but like you said, that's imposing a modern concept on an ancient reality. What are some other historical examples of nomads or nomadic confederations that we should be thinking of instead?
SPEAKER_01It's true that usually when we talk about the long durée, the big last 10,000 years, when we talk about nomadic societies, they are usually rather simple societies. And maybe, maybe indeed the Bedouin model is good in many respects for when we talk about common way of life of nomads in this region. After all, it's the same geographic location, it's the same environment, more or less. So maybe if the Bedouin model is indeed correct, but the question is if we are not missing exceptions. Exceptions like we do know from history that are rare, but indeed exist, from the nomadic empire of King Eshan in the 13th century AD to the Nabatean kingdom in its early days, and some other exceptions that we know from ethnography in certain places in Africa, but these are indeed exceptions. And the question is if we have had such exceptions also in the biblical times. And now I go back to the archaeology of Timnah and Finan and the archaeology of the copper production in these regions. And we already told the people at home that the big discoveries of recent years, but now let's talk about the implications of this change in the chronological framework. Let's go to Timna, and I'm saying again that until our project started, everybody accepted that the major smelting and mining sites should be dated to the kingdom of Egypt and should be seen as the result of imperial intervention. But now, after a few years of intense excavations and a lot of radiocarbon dates, this is the major change between us and Rottenburg. We applied radiocarbon dating and we were not only relying on the inscriptions in the temple, we excavated the actual furnaces and smelting sites and many of them and sent dozens of radiocarbon samples like organic materials to be dated precisely at the lab at Oxford. We worked with the radiocarbon lab at Oxford, and we got many dates that demonstrated nicely that the peak in production is the 11th and 10th century BCE. And the same thing happened in Feinan. Feinan, as I said, was attributed to the Assyrian Empire, but hundreds of radiocarbon dates done by the American expedition there, headed by Professor Tom Levy, these dates showed clearly that also there, the main story is 11th, 10th, 9th century, not related to the Assyrian intervention in the region. And who was the society responsible for this major operation? We just said, we think these are the ancient Edomites. But more importantly, is that these ancient Edomites were not settled yet. There were nomadic tribes that got together to operate the mines and create something on a huge scale that was part of the most lucrative industry of the time. They created a tribal coalition which was very strong and very important in the history of the region on a scale that we would never have been able to reconstruct if we would have been relying only on the Bedouin model. So we see here just by chance, and I will get to that in a minute, we see here an example for a nomadic society that was able to create an ancient kingdom. Remember that until recently, the same archaeological record was attributed to empires. So we don't say that we have now the Edomite Empire, but definitely it was some sort of an early kingdom of nomads. This is the main thing here, because until recently, based on the Bedouin model, nobody thought that nomads could have created kingdoms at that time period. And this is a game changer. And it is a big deal when you understand that our ability to recognize this or to reconstruct the existence of this kingdom is only because these idomines were engaged in copper production.
SPEAKER_00Right. So if they had been engaged in anything else, in agriculture, in other kinds of trade, there would be no trace of them or very Exactly, no trace of them.
SPEAKER_01And even if we were to conduct very specific surveys, maybe we were able to find their tent remains, as I mentioned. But then we would say, well, some Bedouin tribes were wandering in the desert, and that's it. The entire interpretation was that some bedroom tribes were in this region wandering around, doing their business. Nothing big, and for sure, not a kingdom, not an Edomite kingdom. And this is because of the uniqueness of copper exploitation, the archaeological uniqueness of copper exploitation, because what we see as archaeologists is actually not their houses, not their tents, not their dwelling sites, not their habitation. What we see is thousands of mines that are all over the landscape, and industrial sites, furnaces, the slug, and in between these piles of waste, of kind of garbage, industrial garbage, we have a mix of also domestic garbage, a little bit like garments, clothes, textiles, leather. I told you that Timna is also a great place of preservation of organic materials. So it's actually the only place where we have the cloth of the period of the Bible. So if you want to know what was the fashion at the time of David and Solomon, that's the only place where we can see some of these materials, the physical remains of what they were wearing, this is there. But all of this accumulation of waste, of garbage, it's only because industrial camps, it's the smelting sites that they were coming back to them year after year after year, and then we have this unique window into this nomadic society.
SPEAKER_00So how do we know that? Is it accepted, generally accepted, that the Edomites were nomads? How do we know that they were nomads?
SPEAKER_01This is archaeology. We have this major activity, and we don't have any cities, any walls, any villages, anything that these Edomites could have dwelled in as a sedentary society. And this is important because people say maybe they came from far away. Maybe they came from, I don't know, a city in Philistia. But all of the material culture is local. So what I'm saying is that the pottery was produced locally in the oasis of the Araba of this region. They produced the pottery there, so it's not people coming from the outside. It's local people, local tribes producing their own stuff in this region, and we don't have any settlements for them. We do have a cemetery in Finan, we found a huge cemetery of these nomadic people, but again, with no city, with no villages. So the archaeological evidence itself tells us that we are talking about nomadic tribes. And when we talk about nomads, we have to think about it as a complex type of nomadism because it's probably a semi-nomadism with what we call transhumans. First, they were probably, or for sure, we have evidence that they engaged also in grazing, like in pastoralism. So they had sheep, they had goats. So of course, this was part of their economy. We have good evidence to assume that they were also engaged in agriculture to a certain degree. In Feinan, where near the water sources, we have evidence of ancient fields in the Edomite Plateau, which means the highlands of South Air and Jordan, we also have evidence of agriculture without villages and settlements. And Normans could have engaged also to a certain degree in agriculture of barley and wheat, and we know that also from ethnography. So it was not either all. They were mostly dwelling in tents. Sometimes they did build a pen or corals made out of stone.
SPEAKER_00They built defensive structures from stone?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. For in a certain period, surprisingly or interestingly, exactly when the Bible is telling us about the tension from between Jerusalem and the south. At a time, early 10th century, we have fortifications. So for a generation or two, they did use some stone structures in order to build some defensive places, like a wall on a mesa surrounded by cliffs in Timna, a very romantic place that Nelson Glick called Slaves Hill. So it has a defensive system around it. And in Feinan we have a fortress of 73 by 73 meters. It's a huge fortress and it's dated to this specific time. So of course that they could have built some stone structures if they needed to. But in essence, this society, for a few centuries, many generations, continued their way of life as nomads. And they left behind this amazing record of copper exploitation, which actually tells us that we were missing a big deal on the picture of the nomads of the early biblical times.
SPEAKER_00But to go back real quick to the organic materials that you found there, I'd like if you could talk a little bit about that, but how that displays the complexity of this nomadic civilization.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. First, I have to say for in itself, just the amount of mines, their extent and the sophistication, some of the mineshafts in Finan from this time period are more than 70 meters deep. So we have the mines and we have tens of thousands of tons of slug of this furnace waste. This in itself is very strong evidence for a complex social uh society, the strong social organization of these tribes. It was something that's a supra-regional organization that we think reflects the early days of Edom. But as you just said, in Timna, especially in Timna, when we excavate these slug mounds, we find organic remains that also open a window into the life of this ancient Edomites. And they actually add more information to the complexity of this society in the 11-10th centuries BCE. What am I talking about? So, first we have their diet, what they ate. So this is first animal bones, so they ate really good meat of goat and sheep and cattle, but they also ate fish. And these fish were not as we expected it to be, the local Red Sea fish assemblage, but there were fish coming all the way from the Mediterranean Sea to this desert area in Timna. So probably as part of their trade in exchange to the copper ingots, they also got good high-quality fish from far away. And this is the same with the botanical remains. We have plenty of good stuff that are not local. We have barley and wheat and dates, but we also have grape and olive and pomegranate and almonds, pistachio, and other things. All of them are not local, and they demonstrate the effort of procuring good food for the elite of the population of the society in the region of Timna. And another aspect is, of course, the garment, what we find as remains of cloth. And it is again quite amazing. We found some textiles, beautiful things. I'm not an expert on weaving, but I work with experts on ancient textiles, especially with Dr. Wit Shamir and Dr. Nahmas Sukhenik from the Israel Antiquities Authority. And when I gave the physics from the excavations to Owit, she was arguing that this has to be of some Roman official, some important person from the Roman period, because it was so elaborate, so intricate that she said it has to be something that is much later than the Iron Age and therefore an important person. So, of course, organic material you can date directly by radiocarbon. We sent pieces to the Oxford lab, and we got, as I expected, because of the context, we got dates that demonstrate clearly that these are 10th-century garments. And the presence of these materials in these sites is also strong evidence for the existence of elite, of some people that had access to luxurious materials.
SPEAKER_00And some of the garments are colorful too, it's not just plain brown cloth.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's actually the earliest evidence in the Levant of a very sophisticated dyeing technique or dying technology that, based on a study by Dr. Namasik, we were able to show that this was done by using Mediterranean plants like Mada, Mather for the red and pisatis or wood for the for the blue. And this in itself is a craft specialization. Like people somewhere, not in the desert, were investing a week or more to dye the textile, and then of course there's uh all of the weaving and producing beautiful textiles that we usually don't find in the archaeological record. And probably also these textiles were part of this exchange in return to copper and uh what they got as part of the uh trade systems. This helped them to the status of elite in the Edomite society, and we just see it in their archaeological uh record, and this is in addition to the basic evidence that tells us that we have something of an early kingdom as early as the 11th century BCE. So, actually, what happened is if we want to talk again about the big picture here, so we have in the 13th century indeed a phase of a minor copper production initiated and conducted by the Egyptians. So it was actually controlled by the Egyptians. We do believe that even in this early phase, the Egyptians took advantage of the local tribe. They harnessed the local population to work in the mines under their control. So this indeed was a major trigger for the local tribes to see the importance of this natural resource that they have in their own land. And after the Egyptians left, and they didn't leave because they just wanted to, there was a major collapse in the mid-12th century BCE of all of the great empires of the ancient Near East. It's a very famous event. There were books and papers, thousands of papers written about that. The Bronze Age collapse in the mid-12th century BC. Egypt became weak. Egypt couldn't send any more expeditions to the Canaan, couldn't send any more expeditions to Timnah. So they disappeared from the landscape. And this was the opportunity of people that were usually marginal, that were usually not very important historically. This was exactly the time for these kind of societies to gain power, to get together, build black social structures. And we see it in the early Edomites. So it was actually the same people in the same region just doing the thing themselves without the Egyptian control, probably emulating the same political structures of the Egyptians. So the kind of the elite of these tribes got some trained under the Egyptian during the Egyptian time, but then after the Egyptians left, they were left alone to organize it themselves, and this was the beginning of the process of creating a kingdom.
SPEAKER_00You beat me to it, because that was the one piece that I think was missing from the story was the Bronze Age collapse, which, as you noted, was a major event in world history. So for whatever reason, I think there's various theories of why that happened and how it happened, but the major powers of the region left or ceased to exist. But the Egyptians left the region, and then that kind of left fertile ground, as you describe it, for a nomadic confederation like the Edomites to start forming, and the same story for the ancient Israelites, correct?
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And if we can take it one step further, it's more and more accepted by scholars that the main reason for this collapse, it's a major collapse from the Egyptians in the south to the Hittite Empire in the north. It is more and more accepted. There is more and more evidence that the main reason for this collapse, it's something that is very sexy nowadays. Everybody's talking about it, it's climate change. Climate change. We have more and more evidence that we have 150 or almost 200 years of a serious drought in many places of the Engineer East, including Canaan, including the area of modern-day Israel, Southern Levant. And for me, it's another advantage of the nomadic people to create something that is exceptional. Because who, if not the nommans of the desert, is better to cope with drastic desertification. So, first the collapse itself and the disappearance of the Egyptian hegemony on this part of the world is a major game changer. But then also, if the main reason for that is a climate change and the desertification process, this is another reason, this is another background for the nomadic people having an advantage in creating strong political entities. And this is what we see in the Arabah Valley. And what you just hinted to is the big question about the neighboring politics. Because in the Arabah and Timna and Fenan, Timna and Fenan both are copper production regions within the Arabah Valley or the Aravah Valley. So there we do have the archaeological evidence because of the copper story. But the big question is if we can draw some conclusions regarding the neighboring polities that we know from the biblical story and also other types of evidence that it is the story of nomads. Can we say that also? Ancient Israel, the ancient Moabites, the ancient Ammonites, did they create strong nomadic polities without leaving behind significant archaeological evidence? Maybe, maybe not. The main thing here is that we cannot rule out this option as we did until recently. Until recently, I remind you, the basic interpretation of nomads, nomadic tribes of the region was like the modern Bedarins. So, for sure, the basic interpretation was that until all of the Israelites were settled, there was no chance for any kingdom of any sort to be part of the history of the region. But now we know that these political structures could have existed, existed in the case of the Edomites, but they could have existed in the case of the Israelites, Moabites, Ammonites. And this is a very significant change. Because when we go back to the biblical text, the story is all about nomadic tribes getting together. And if until recently, for example, some biblical descriptions of tent dwellings, during the time of King David and King Solomon, we hear quite often about the people of Israel dwelling in tents. After the split between Judah and Israel, after the death of King Solomon, we hear about the Israelites going back to their tents. So until recently it was accepted that it's figurative, they couldn't have still dwelt in tents because, of course, tent dwellers cannot be part of a kingdom. But if you read the text literally, you hear about tents. And the recent evidence from the copper mines does tell us that tent dwellers indeed could have been part of a kingdom. So there is a lot of preconception in the modern research of the Bible, biblical scholarship and biblical archaeology that we have to rethink about really carefully. And in a way, it gives more credibility to the biblical description that is usually given. Because there is no archaeology of nomads, and in the early days, we don't have major cities and walls, and people were using this lack of evidence to say that the biblical description is not historical, it's just a myth. But if we understand that even without big walls and big cities and even uh settled villages, there could have been something significant in the area. So we understand that the biblical depictions can be of historical significance, and that archaeology cannot help with being the supreme judge regarding the historicity of each story that or that, because of the basic challenges in the archaeology of nomadism, as we just talked about. Because archaeology can say a lot of things, usually almost always, only for settled people.
SPEAKER_00And you call this the architectural bias of archaeology, correct? That the idea being that strong political entities can't establish themselves without monumental architecture, essentially, that without the existence or the findings of monumental architecture or major architecture of any sort, that these were simple confederations or close to what we would call, you know, warlords or something, as opposed to actual political entities that stretched over what would be considered major distances, but you argue that we have to rethink the way we think of these entities. Just because they didn't have monumental architecture doesn't mean that they weren't organized.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. I call it the architectural bias in current biblical archaeology. And it's easy to understand now after all of this background of what we know today about the ancient Edomites, etc. Because biblical archaeology, even today, in order to understand better the united monarchy of David and Solomon, of all of the Israelite tribes. So people are looking in the hill country around Jerusalem for cities, for walls, and the size of the wall is kind of the size of the kingdom. And if there is no wall, there was no kingdom. It's too much emphasis on stone-built structures as the key to understand the entire history of the period. And it's all based on the assumption that mobile people could not have created any kingdom, only sedentary people that build villages and cities could have been part of a kingdom. And then also we can assess the strength of the kingdom based on the size of the wall. So it's kind of very simplistic interpretation of social complexity in a period when we know from the Bible and from external sources that the big players are nomads. And if you are able to break free from the Bedouin model and understand that even mobile people could have created something significant, could have controlled Edom for that sake. What do we mean by control? It doesn't mean that they have to build a huge stone structure or fortress in the middle of Edom in order to control the copper production. They just had a pact, an agreement, some taxation of this lucrative trade, and they get some of the wealth of the copper industry. That's something that doesn't leave any physical evidence in the shape of stone and walls. Could have been a tent of the people of David on the trade route that made Jewel to collect taxes in order for Jerusalem to uh benefit from this lucrative trade. And we won't be able to find this tent remains forever. We just need to accept the limitations of archaeology in all of that reconstruction of this particular period. And it is very significant just because we know that this is the time of these tribes, tribal and nomadic society. And this coupled with the real limitations of archaeology in dealing with nomads, together with the new understanding of the potential of nomads to achieve strong political structures, kind of tells us that archaeologists should be much more modest about their conclusions regarding the society, the complexity of the society, or the existence of a kingdom, yes, no, only based on architecture made.
SPEAKER_00It's not even the the focus of your excavations at Timner aren't this. You know, you're focused on studying the coppers, studying that society, studying the metallurgy of the region and its significance. But you wrote a paper not too long ago where you simply suggested that people should rethink the role and the impact of nomads in the ancient Near East, and the establishment kind of came after you pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's what happens after people are getting used to a certain way of interpretation. They are kind of there is a it's biblical archaeology has really uh been around for almost 100 years, biblical scholarship for much more than that, even, and there is a very specific way for interpreting the archaeological record in which no manstar are always, as I said, they are always compared to the Bedouins. And there were there was actually not other possibilities were never even on the table as part of the major of the discussions.
SPEAKER_00One of your the things you say is that we're lucky at Timna because they left, you know, the copper mines are there, so we can see how these people lived. But if they had an economy based on anything else besides copper, then there would be no trace of them. But is that hard for Near Eastern archaeologists to accept that essentially you're saying when you're looking back at this period, we're pretty limited in what we're gonna find. You know, you're not gonna dig and find monumental architecture or walls that are gonna tell us more about these ancient kingdoms. But I guess that's what they're looking for. And is that is that hard for them to accept?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for some of them it's very hard to accept that the archaeology cannot provide the answer. It's really pretty hard to, after promoting archaeology as the solution for all of the debates about the historicity of biblical descriptions, it's quite hard to accept that archaeology might not be able ever to provide a definite answer about these early stages of the emergence of ancient Israel. This is one thing. The other thing is that these major changes in the chronology and archaeology of the Arabah, it's new. Although it's very hard to argue about the dating. I think everybody accepts the new dating of the copper mines to the time of King David and Solomon. Now there is some attempt by some to now when we understand it's the nomadic story, some scholars try to belittle the social implications of the archaeological record. So suddenly, instead of being uh remains of imperial intervention, now it's like a few Bedouins trying to do some opportunistic copper production. But this is another thing that we cannot accept at all. If anything, we have more and more evidence for the complexity of what was going on there. So uh I didn't mention it previously, but it was not local. The trade with copper was not only local, it was not only for the Edomites or for the neighboring kingdoms. It's huge quantities that got all the way to Greece. A German team led by uh Dr. Moritz Kiderland found that the copper in Delphi and Olympia, it's all copper from Timan Fena in this particular period. And we have new results not published yet, that the copper from the 21st dynasty in Egypt, it's all the Arabah. So it's kind of a big deal here that was organized by these tribes of the south. So, as part of this, every time that there is something new, it takes time for everybody to accept the implications of the new dating. And as you said, there is like a lot of discussions, and not everybody is happy, but I do think that we have quite convincing evidence that, at least in the case of the Edomites, the nomads are completely different from the Bedouin model. And I do think that even if we don't have direct evidence that this is the case also for the ancient Israelites, at least it has to be part of the options that we have to discuss when we try to understand the history of the neighboring Israelites. And not always when we say, okay, this is their nomadic phase, so it's like a few bedroom tribes, blah blah blah. This cannot be part of the discussion anymore, and we have to remember this another option, especially in this exceptional period in the history of the land, and uh this is a major methodological contribution of the studies in the Arabah Valley. Kind of a there is one thing we understand better the Edomites, we understand better what was going on in this land in the 11th, 10th, 9th centuries BC, but more than just adding to the history of the region in this particular time, the big deal is methodological, even if you want etymological, how we create knowledge out of the archaeological remains. How can we transfer or transform the archaeological remains into knowledge about the past? And I do think that until recently there was a serious flaw, which is related to the history of the discipline and many other things that uh in the paper I wrote a little bit about. All of that should be part of the past and we should move forward with especially younger scholars that have an open mind. We have to move forward and think about nomadism as a multidimensional phenomenon that could indeed have created sophisticated and complex social structures, including kingdoms in the biblical sense for sure, that uh left very little, if anything, in the archaeological record. So it's kind of a maybe it might sound disappointing for archaeologists that want to see the entire picture in the ground, but if we are honest, we have to admit that everything to do with the nomadic stage or the stage where we have nomadic components in these societies is the very, very limited in its ability to contribute to discussions about these ancient societies and for sure about the texts related to this phase in the ancient Israelites and its neighbors. So all of that I think is really fascinating when you take it one step farther from the specific historical reconstruction of the Edomites and the copper production to methodological questions. And I, you know, witnessing in my career the change in the interpretation of the archaeological record from imperial control to uh the local nomads, and now we have this discussion about what all of that means. I think that the archaeology is quite convincing. And this, together with what we know about the exceptionality of this period in the long duvet of the region, it all makes a lot of sense. And of course, it gives more credibility to the biblical account in a way, but it does not replace biblical criticism, which is a whole discipline in itself that is related to when the text was written, if at all we have a grain of history, but not from archaeology, from philological and other considerations that are related to the text itself. They want to find the evidence of David and Solomon, because I'm not saying that the archaeology has any proof for the existence of them, or even for them being a strong kingdom, but what I'm saying is that archaeology for sure cannot be used to disprove any of these accounts. And the most disappointing is maybe that it probably will never be able to provide a decisive answer as long as we are talking about this period of transition between nomadism and uh sedentarization. And again, it's a specifically this period. If we're talking about Hezekiah and the late Iron Age, this is a different story, and the archaeology is much more potent in its role of aiding historical reconstructions.
SPEAKER_00I look forward to following your work. I'm sure there's gonna be some more rebuttals coming out and then your answers to them. Please keep me informed and I look forward to your work.
SPEAKER_01We are going back to the field this February. We're always excavating the winter when it's not too hot. We welcome volunteers from all over the world. Every season there is no surprise. Last season we had uh human remains for the first time, with interesting results, and every year we have another piece of the puzzle. And the discussion continues, and we had a big conference a few weeks ago in San Diego, and next year it will be in Boston, where quite uh emotional discussions are taking place. And for me, it is the most interesting aspect of it is related to the methodology, and not precisely if David was a historical figure or a big uh guy or a small guy. I don't have any stake in that. But I do think that uh the role of archaeology was overplayed by the archaeologists in the last generation or two. So that's it. Archaeology has its merits, and it's not all about reconstruction of history. And if we do want to use it for reconstructing history, we have to be extremely careful when we talk about nomads in particular.
SPEAKER_00Thanks again for being here, and I look forward to following your work.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much.