Copper mine in Jordan could be King Solomon's

ByABC News
October 27, 2008, 11:01 PM

— -- The real King Solomon's mine? Archaeologists Monday reported finding a desert site not full of gold or diamonds but loaded with copper and offering a new glimpse of Bible-era industry.

Jordan's Khirbat en-Nahas site has intrigued archaeologists since the 1930s, when they first linked ruins there, including a fortress, copper mine and smelter, to the Bible's Edomite kingdom. Debate has ensued ever since over whether Edom really existed in the 1000 B.C. era of King Solomon described in the Old Testament.

The Victorian author Henry Rider Haggard made the legendary mines famous with his 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines, in which adventurers find a treasure of gold, diamonds and ivory.

Now, a team led by anthropologist Thomas Levy of the University of California-San Diego, which has excavated Khirbat en-Nahas since 2002, suggests the biblical Edom has a real basis.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Levy and colleagues detail dating materials from a copper slag pile 20 feet deep at the site, as well as the discovery of Egyptian artifacts, a scarab and lion's head amulet dating to the time of the Pharaoh Sheshonq I, around 940 B.C. Carbon dating of charcoal from the slag pile also pushes the copper work there back to that time.

"Sheshonq is one of the few Pharaohs actually named in the Old Testament, where he is called Shishaq," Levy says. Sheshonq I's military conquests in the region are described in markers still preserved in the Egyptian city of Thebes and in the Old Testament after the death of King Solomon. With the study's findings, "the question of whether King Solomon's copper mines have been discovered in (Jordan) returns to scholarly discourse," the study concludes.

The find generally supports a picture of Egyptian raids on Edom and ancient Israel after the era of Solomon, Levy says.

Not every scholar agrees.

"Taking the biblical description of King Solomon literally means ignoring two centuries of biblical research," archaeologist Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University says by e-mail.