Kids in mind land of mine
So his findings have been a surprise even to him.Ĭharcoal from smelting furnaces at Timna. This conclusion was so firmly established that the local tourism board, in an attempt to draw visitors to this remote location, had put up kitschy statues in “walk like an Egyptian” poses.Įrez Ben-Yosef, who leads the Timna excavation, is a self-described agnostic when it comes to biblical history. The site had already been conclusively dated by an earlier expedition that had uncovered the ruins of a temple dedicated to an Egyptian goddess, linking the site to the empire of the pharaohs, the great power to the south. They began to extract pieces of organic material-charcoal, a few seeds, 11 items all told-and dispatched them to a lab at Oxford University for carbon-14 dating. With that in mind, Ben-Yosef and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego unpacked their shovels and brushes at the foot of a sandstone cliff and started digging.
His field was paleomagnetism, the investigation of changes in the earth’s magnetic field over time, and specifically the mysterious “spike” of the tenth century B.C., when magnetism leapt higher than at any time in history for reasons that are not entirely understood. It was the kind of place unimportant enough to be entrusted to someone with fresh credentials and no experience leading a dig.Īt the time, Ben-Yosef wasn’t interested in the Bible. It wasn’t the Jerusalem of Jesus, or the famous citadel of Masada, where Jewish rebels committed suicide rather than surrender to Rome. The site wasn’t on Israel’s archaeological A-list, or even its B-list. When the Israeli archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef arrived at the ancient copper mines of Timna, in 2009, he was 30 years old. Egyptian temple at the base of the cliffs upended historians’ understanding of the site. This article is a selection from the December issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪ rock formation known as Solomon’s Pillars. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12