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King Solomon, son of David, ruler of the first great Israelite kingdom,

builder of the first temple in Jerusalem.

The Bible tells us Solomon was not only the wisest, but the richest of all

kings.

But where did his wealth come from?

Legends tell of fabulous mines of gold and copper. But where were they?

Archaeologists have searched for evidence of Solomon and found nothing.

So far, there is absolutely no evidence for Solomon outside the Bible.

Now, in the deserts of Jordan, mine shaft carved from bedrock a hundred feet

deep and the remains of ancient smelting.

We have industrial scale metal production, layer after layer.

Are these King Solomon's mine?

Are these the bones of his miners?

At last, new finds from Solomon's era, ancient cities, and the first evidence

early Hebrew writing, clues to the real world of the great biblical king.

The quest for King Solomon's mine, right now, on this Nova National Geographic

special.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following.

ExxonMobil, taking on the world's toughest energy challenges.

And by David H. Koch.

And... Discovering new knowledge.

HHMI.

And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And by contributions to

station from viewers like you. Thank you.

Solomon, in the Bible, the wise ruler of a magnificent Israelite kingdom.

a star on the stage of the ancient Near East.

All the world came to pay homage to Solomon and to listen to the

wisdom which God had put into his heart.

The kingdom created by his father, the warrior King David, under Solomon

new heights of power and prosperity.

King Solomon surpassed all the kings of the earth in wealth and wisdom.

They brought him tribute, silver and gold objects, robes, weapons, and

In addition to his vast wealth, the Bible tells us Solomon was a great

In Jerusalem, He built the famous Temple of Solomon to house the Ark of the

Covenant, spiritual focus of the newly unified Israelite kingdom.

Three thousand years later, he is still revered by all three of the Holy Land's

great faith.

The Jewish people love Solomon.

Because he built the first temple.

To Christians, he is the wisest of Old Testament kings.

Muslims, too, claim him as one of their own. The great prophet, Suleiman.

But no conclusive archaeological proof of Solomon or his great kingdom has ever

been found.

Few traces of his palaces.

Temple, or the sources of his vast wealth.

His century, the 10th century BC, remains a mystery.

In the 10th century BC, there are things which we know, but it's like a puzzle.

Much of the puzzle is dark, and here and there you have light in the puzzle.

Many scholars have questioned whether Solomon was a great king at all.

Archaeologists and biblical scholars have been arguing about whether or not

David and Solomon were magnificent kings or simple chiefs.

If they were great kings, where did they get their wealth?

Now, for the first time, a provocative find may help answer this question.

Ancient minds.

Their shafts disappearing deep beneath the sands of Jordan.

And bodies.

Were these the miners?

And who was their master?

King Solomon's mines were never mentioned in the Bible.

But over the centuries became the stuff of legend.

Popularized by a 19th century adventure story.

and no less than three Hollywood movies.

Are these the real King Solomon's mines?

Were they the source of the wealth the Bible chronicles?

New finds are reshaping our image of the ancient world, giving credence to some

of the Bible's historical accounts, but also casting an entirely new light on

Solomon's era.

Our quest for Solomon's world begins not in Israel, but far to the east.

Petra, an ancient trade center built over 2 ,000

years ago in the highlands of Jordan.

In the mountains around Petra lie the ruins of an ancient kingdom called Edom.

For over a decade, archaeologist Tom Levy has been researching the evolution

of that Edomite kingdom.

According to Genesis, the Edomites, descendants of Jacob's brother Esau,

a kingdom even before ancient Israel.

The remains of Edomite settlement cling to the mountaintops and plateaus high

above Petra.

Tom wants to know about the sources of wealth behind the Edomite kingdom.

His search has led him down from the highland into the baking desert cauldron

the Dead Sea Rift Valley.

It was here in the no -man's land between ancient Israel and Edom, that he

discovered the clues he was looking for.

In an area called Wadi Feinan was an entire valley covered with a mysterious

black rock.

This was solidified slag, the waste product of metal smelting, and on a

massive scale.

Nearby, multiple shafts dug through rock. And far underground, tunnels

stretching deep inside the hills.

And everywhere, a striking blue -green rock.

The unmistakable evidence of natural copper.

The slag, the mines, the copper. It all added up. This was an ancient

copper mining and smelting complex.

Perhaps the source of wealth behind the Edomite kingdom.

Most scholars had assumed that it was trade routes that stimulated the rise of

the Edomite kingdom. But I thought that metal production and mining might be a

key factor.

The local people called it Kirbit and Nahas.

Kirbit and Nahas.

In Arabic, it means the ruins of copper. As you can see around us, the site is

just covered with heaps of black industrial slag.

Tom has been excavating this site for almost 10 years.

He has shown how ancient smelters separated pure copper from the ore in

it's found, then spewed out slag, the molten waste product of the process.

The layers of slag reveal an astonishing record of hundreds of years of ancient

copper production.

I'm really excited about this.

Look, right before us, we have industrial -scale metal production,

layer, almost like a book, that page by page would reveal the history of metal

production at this site.

Tom believes that metal production played a key role in the evolution of

only Edom, but of ancient Israel too.

For ritual and prestige, weapons and tools, metals helped turn simple

agrarian societies into kingdoms.

Ancient people discovered that from blue rocks like these, a mysterious new

substance could be created.

When heated, it was soft and malleable. When mixed with tin, cooled and

polished, it had a magical luster.

The Stone Age was over. The Age of Metals had begun.

has been trying to find out how those first copper producing techniques

it's really as you see a pit in the

ground and we have the copper ore here we need to crush it and then we need to

sort out the copper rich fragments you will see it's not easy

Ancient metal workers needed a way to raise the temperature of their charcoal

fires to over 1 ,200 degrees Celsius, the point at which copper separates from

ore.

They did that with blowpipe.

We need three people constantly blowing.

It takes Perez and his friends two hours of constant blowing before they see the

first sign of smelting.

Can you see the blue flame?

This is a good indicator that a smelting process is actually taking place.

When they finally take the crucible out of the fire, they hope to find tiny

droplets of copper in the bottom.

All right, yes.

That's how it looks like.

Look, it looks like very few.

There's another one here.

Yeah, tiny, tiny, but it's metal.

Copper color.

That's an awful lot of work for very little metal.

But for thousands of years, this is how people smelted copper.

The difficulty of producing it may have been why it was largely used for ritual

objects and ornaments.

But that small -scale village production is not what Tom has discovered.

at Kirbit Ennahan.

Over years of excavation, his team from the University of California at San

Diego has revealed the remains of a massive operation.

A copper producing factory.

The site is so large, they send up cameras attached to helium balloons to

better sense of its scale.

The aerial photos clearly reveal the structures of the ancient factory.

A fortress and gatehouse.

An administrative building.

A tower.

A temple.

The site was enormous Its massive walls buildings

and slag covered an area of 25 acres

Up to a thousand men worked here day and

night feeding the furnace where the copper was not

Erez Ben Yosef is excavating one of those smelters.

It's like a treasure for us to try and actually reconstruct the technology step

by step.

At the moment, Erez is unearthing the business end of the smelter, the

called tuyeres, where the air from the bellows blasted into the smelter.

This is the nozzle of the bellow pipe.

It's just one of the best.

preserved tree area we have seen in this area.

The nozzle of a bellow pipe may not sound like a great find, but to Erez,

crucial evidence for the technological innovations that made large -scale

smelting possible.

We will try to take it out.

We can help him from this side.

Try not to break them.

All right.

Okay, that's a nice one.

You can see the nozzle, but it's all covered with slag.

This was the hottest place in the furnace.

You can see even some copper pills in the slag, some actual copper metal.

Beneath the slag, the nozzle has been carefully made from layers of fired

This was necessary for it to withstand the 1200 degree temperatures of the

furnace This

new shaft furnace was powered by foot bellows providing a steady stream of air

into the smelter

During the second millennium BCE, we have the introduction of this amazing

furnace that made this all copper production process much more efficient.

With men working day and night, copper could be produced on an industrial

And it was.

Environmental scientist John Gratton is discovering ancient pollution, a measure

of just how intensive this copper production was.

I'm using this instrument, which measures metals in the environment, to

map where the pollution actually is. It says there's nearly 7 ,000 parts per

million copper just in the small sample I've taken.

That's really nearly 7 ,000 times more than is safe to be in the soil.

If copper wasn't bad enough, looking down here, I can see extremely high

dangerously high levels of lead, zinc, arsenic, and this is just on this one

tiny spot.

Using a state -of -the -art X -ray fluorescence device, John Gratton has

powerful confirmation of the scale of ancient copper smelting at Kirbet and

Nahar.

Copper was no longer an ornament. It was a commodity, vital for tools, weapons,

and buildings.

Demand for the precious metal exploded, turning the

Dead Sea Rift Valley into an industrial powerhouse.

We've got here the evidence of the earliest industrial revolution.

and what I see as the birth of the modern world.

But how did they get the tons of copper ore they needed to power this

revolution?

Over 15 mines have been found, cut into the copper -rich hills surrounding

Kirbit and Nahar.

Project co -director, Jordanian archaeologist Mohamed Najjar is

them. During our work here, we find out that the shafts

are from 3 ,000 years ago.

Many of the mines were over 100 feet deep to reach the copper seams far below

ground.

Even with modern climbing gear, the descent is perilous.

It's not easy to go down or up. We know that probably ancient miners were inside

the galleries, inside the mines for many months.

Mohammed and Tom both believe the miners were slaves.

This was not the kind of work that anyone would want to do, even for pay.

In order to mine on this industrial scale, some sort of forced labor system

must have been in existence.

Imprisoned in claustrophobic tunnels far underground, the miners hacked out the

copper -bearing rock that fed the smelters of Kirbit and Nahas.

Above ground, camel trains waited to transport the copper ore to the smelting

site.

Okay, guys, so we're going to take our ore.

To understand the copper ore supply system, Tom Levy is recreating

one of those camel trains.

We want to try and experiment what it would be like to actually take ore that

would have been mined in one of these mines.

We've got one right behind me here.

And by having these camels and our Bedouin friends helping us, we'll be

reconstruct that process.

They've discovered that a single camel can carry about 300 pounds of ore. But

usually that ore is only 10 % copper and 90 % useless rock.

So for every 30 pounds of pure copper, they needed at least a camel load of

That means that 3 ,000 years ago, ancient camel supply trains like this

probably made their way through these same desert wadis every day.

All heading for the largest copper -smelting site of the Dead Sea Rift

Kirbit and Nahaz.

The size of the slag heath indicates that over its lifetime, the site

,000 tons of copper, enough to supply copper.

to the entire region.

Isotope analysis of copper objects from sites all over ancient Israel has proved

that they came from the Wadi Feinan area.

Right now in Israel, a metallurgical study of copper objects that were found

context of 11th century, late 12th and 11th century BC, were proven to

from Feinan.

Perhaps this copper even reached Jerusalem, where Solomon built his

The Bible tells us that the temple would require precious metals, including tons

of copper.

And the closest source of copper for Jerusalem, it's about a three -day ride

from here, is this area of Fanon.

Then the word of the Lord came to Solomon, saying, Concerning this house

which you are building, if you keep all my commandments, I will dwell among the

children of Israel and will not forsake my people.

So Solomon built the temple.

In the outer room, he placed elaborately carved figures and massive pillars.

And according to the Bible, all were cast in gleaming copper.

The inner sanctuary he prepared, setting there the Ark of the Covenant of the

Lord. And he overlaid it with pure gold.

If Solomon's temple and his palaces existed, they would have needed a lot of

copper.

So who controlled the burgeoning copper industry of the Dead Sea Valley?

One thing is for sure.

It had to be an advanced society.

Copper production involves many different activities.

Mining. then smelting, distributing.

You need management to do that. And that can be done only by a complex society.

It had to have been controlled by something as complex as an ancient

The question arises, what kingdom?

Kirbit and Nahas, within the no -man's land between three ancient kingdoms.

Any one of them could have had a hand in copper production.

To the west was ancient Israel.

To the east, Edom.

Far to the southwest, the great power of the region, Egypt.

While I was sitting over there, my colleague, Dr.

Najjar, was waving his arms furiously, said, we just found something.

It's an Egyptian scarab.

The scarab suggests that at one time, Egypt was an important player here.

Based on this and other evidence, like an Egyptian shrine at a nearby site,

clear that in the centuries preceding Solomon, Egyptians controlled the copper

industry of the Dead Sea Valley.

Undoubtedly, we had Egyptians here running the mines. They had the control.

during the 13th century.

But then, in the 12th century B .C., unexplained events shook the ancient

East. All of its great civilizations fell.

Around 1200 B .C., the entire political structure of the Bronze Age collapsed.

First, the Hittites on the north, the Mycenaeans on the west, and finally the

Egyptian Empire.

collapsed and left a great void.

In this political void, new powers emerged.

We basically have a vacuum.

This collapse took down the big empires and opened the way for something new.

In the area of Kirbit and Nahar, that something new was the rise of ancient

Israel and Edom.

Tom believes these are the only two candidates.

for control of the copper mine.

The more likely is nearby Edom.

And now, a new find near the smelting complex may confirm that.

It's an ancient cemetery.

These were circular graves with a cyst burial in the middle, which is like a

stone -lined box.

and capstones on top of it.

We're hoping that by the end of the day, we'll be ready to lift those capstones.

The moment of truth has arrived.

Yeah.

This is windblown sediment here.

All right, this tomb looks like it's...

It's going to be filled with sediment.

It seems they're in for a disappointment.

They're not the first to open this grave.

It looks like it's been disturbed in antiquity.

We had hoped that we would pop these stones and find a beautiful, pristine

grave. But let's wait.

Archaeology is about patience.

Okay, so this is five.

That's good. Maybe on this side.

But before long, good news.

They catch their first glimpse of bone.

It looks like we've got a skull.

There's a lot of pieces missing.

It's possible that we're going to have an articulated skeleton extending here.

So that's exciting.

Carefully, Tom's team starts the process of extracting the skeleton from the

sand which has encased it for 3 ,000 years.

Finally, the entire skeleton is revealed.

This is a fully articulated skeleton in a crouched position, almost a

fetal position.

So did this man have any connection with the mines?

If he did, his teeth and bones would contain copper and lead.

the telltale traces of copper smelting.

Samples are crushed and dissolved, then analyzed in a mass spectrometer to

reveal their chemical composition.

The results are compared to skeletons from before the copper revolution.

Well, the remains from the cemetery have four times as much copper and lead

content as the prehistoric remains.

That may mean that we've identified some individuals that were actually involved

in the smelting activity.

Even though this man was probably one of the copper workers, There was nothing

in the grave to suggest his ethnicity.

But artifacts from the cemetery and pottery found nearby provide the answer.

The people buried here were from this region.

We are talking about ceramics and different finds here.

What we have here is Edomite.

The discovery that the workers at Kirbit and Nahas were probably Edomite seemed

to confirm assumptions about the dating of the mining complex.

I assume, like the scholarly consensus of the time, that it must date to around

the 7th century BCE.

That 7th century BCE dating was crucial to Tom's first understanding of what

went on here.

He knew that Egypt had collapsed in the 12th century BCE.

along with all the other great empires of the region.

Based on the timeline of kings laid out in the Bible, Solomon's Israel

flourished in the 10th century BC.

The rise of the Edomite kingdom has traditionally been dated to the 7th

BC.

So with the evidence from Kirbit and Nahath pointing to Edom, it made sense

smelting complex would be from the 7th century too.

To confirm that dating, Tom has brought radiocarbon specialist Tom Hyam from the

University of Oxford to help him.

At the guardhouse and the slag heap, they look for samples of organic

that can be dated.

Twigs, pieces of charcoal, date seeds spat out by the miners.

Well, in order to get really precise dates, we have to have a sequence of

samples. So you're saying we need samples from all these sedimentary

A sequence of samples allows them to create a chronology.

All the dates need to be consistent, or the whole sequence is called into

question.

Tom Haim takes the samples back to the lab at Oxford.

Radiocarbon dating.

combined with modern statistical analysis, will allow him to calculate

to an accuracy of plus or minus 30 years.

The result is really a surprise.

We've got the preliminary results here that you can see on the screen, and what

is immediately apparent is that the samples are all fitting in the 10th and

century.

This means the mines were operating not in the 7th century BC, but three to four

centuries before that.

We're able to say with a great deal of confidence now that these sites were

operating in the 10th and 11th centuries BC. There's absolutely no question

about it.

The dating has thrown the team a curveball.

According to the well -accepted archaeological chronology, there was no

kingdom in the 11th or 10th century BC that could have controlled these mines.

Is this evidence of an earlier Edomite kingdom?

If so, it might lend credence to the Bible's account of David's campaign

the Edomites.

The Bible tells us that David conquered Edom and established strongholds over

the area, like the fortress at Shebet HaNahat.

He stationed garrisons throughout Edom, and all the Edomites

became vassals of David.

The fortress that we found at Shebet HaNahat It's similar to other fortresses

found in ancient Israel.

Could it be that David invaded Edom to get hold of its copper?

If so, his son Solomon would have inherited these mines.

But was the kingdom of David and Solomon advanced enough to control the copper

industry of the Dead Sea Rift Valley?

The biblical account of Solomon's kingdom makes it sound so huge and

that controlling the Dead Sea Rift Valley would have been no problem.

And Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the

Philistines and to the border of Egypt.

But in the last 20 years, archaeologists have cast doubt on that story.

For decades, they've searched for evidence of the great 10th century BC

of David and Solomon and found almost nothing.

There are a few clues.

A carved inscription from the 9th century BC records the victory of an

king. over what it called the House of David.

Good evidence for David, but not necessarily for a great kingdom.

Ruins in Jerusalem, claimed to be the city of David, have still not been

conclusively dated.

Some archaeologists believe they're from a later period.

The same uncertainties surround the kingdom of Solomon described in the

Few doubt that David and Solomon existed.

There is just no proof they were great kings, capable of commanding a copper

industry like Kirbit and Nahar.

Some believe they were more like tribal chieftains.

If that is true, how did the Bible come to describe Solomon as ruler of a

magnificent kingdom?

Perhaps because the stories of Solomon were passed down by word of mouth for

generations.

In the process, they were embroidered.

King Solomon married many foreign women in addition to Pharaoh's daughter.

He had 700 royal wives and 300 concubines.

When we read the biblical tradition concerning Solomon, there is no doubt

the text is exaggerating to a huge extent.

The mansions of the kingdom, the prosperity, all those gold troves in

etc.

The fact that Solomon had 1 ,000 wives, there were almost 1 ,000 people living

in Jerusalem at that time, so to have 1 ,000 wives, it would be quite difficult.

So, David and Solomon, great kings or tribal chieftains?

The debate has raged for 40 years.

Finally, discoveries at an extraordinary new site may help resolve it.

Kirbit Kiatha, on the border of ancient Israel and the land of the Philistines,

in exactly the place where the Bible says the young King David slew the

Philistine giant, Goliath.

Here, archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel has been excavating a fortified ancient

settlement.

Its massive walls are testament to a highly organized workforce.

We have here the city wall of Rivet Kayafa, and we calculated that about 200

,000 tons of stones were needed to build the fortification of this city.

This is no tribal encampment.

These massive fortifications seem to be the sign of a political structure far

more developed than a highland chiefdom.

Other tantalizing clues include the handles of some pottery jugs, which bear

thumb imprints.

often used as an official state seal.

You see here a very nice impression. This is thumb impression made by the

before the jar went into the kiln to be fired.

They were marked so we know that they are not private jars, but jars belong to

the kingdom.

Further evidence suggests it was an early Israelite city.

Among animal bones found in the rubbish heaps of the settlement, Yossi and his

team have noticed an intriguing absence.

So these are animal bones, and you can see these are teeth and part of a

mandible. And this is sheep or goat.

In our site, we have only sheep, goat, and kettles. We don't have pig bones.

Philistine settlements are full of pig bones.

So could this be a sign that at Kieffa, the Israelite taboo on pork was already

being observed?

When Yossi and his team had organic remains from the site dated, their

excitement grew.

According to radio carbon dating, this is from the late 11th, early 10th

BC. So this is really from the time of King David.

If Jaffa was an Israelite city, it would be the earliest ever found.

Another discovery suggests an Israelite site in an even more dramatic way.

It was made by a teenager working here on a summer break.

When I found it, I thought it was just another piece of pottery.

Me and my friend Sanyo were digging up pieces of pottery, lots of them.

But among them was this one piece with writing on it, the ostracon.

The ostracon is a piece of pottery with writing painted on it.

It was a nice geometric shape.

It was quite strange because usually pottery sheds are much smaller and they

don't have a geometric shape.

Only in the afternoon when it was washed in water, suddenly we saw that it had

inscription on it.

And then the question is, what is the language?

The ostracon is faded and almost illegible.

Before Yossi can decipher it, he has to be able to read it clearly.

That means sending it to Greg Bierman in Santa Barbara, California, who uses a

unique imaging technology.

The reason you're unable to see things on pottery or papyrus or any kind of

thing like this at the eye is the substrate has somehow gotten faded. It's

And so you're looking at a dark background with dark text. It's very

the human eye to see. It's, you know, looking for the black cat at midnight

situation.

The photospectroscopy system takes hundreds of pictures of the octagon at

different wavelengths to find out where the contrast between writing and

background is highest.

Here's an example taken with 365 nanometers. It's blank.

It may as well not even be anything on there. So this shows that in this

wavelength, the powder and the ink basically reflect the same amount of

and you don't see anything.

As you go up in wavelength, we're stepping into the blue, and we're now

about 500 nanometers. And you see text is starting to show up.

By combining and processing photos taken at many different wavelengths, Greg

finally arrived at a clear image of the text.

A replica of the ostracon was sent to Bill Schneiderwind at UCLA.

This is really the most important early alphabetic text that we have.

You know, frequently when we talk about text from this time period, there are

three letters, four letters, five letters.

Here you have five lines.

The letters are Canaanite, the first alphabetic writing system that would

rise to many others, including Hebrew and our own.

But deciphering what the script says is a challenge.

To the ancient writing experts working with Yossi in Jerusalem, they seem to be

written in a haphazard way, sometimes upside down, sometimes standing up,

sometimes on their side.

The A, the Aleph, which is the same as the A,

Stand here three times. One on the legs, the other time on the head, which is

the original one, and then on the side.

Struggling to piece together the words which the letters form, the expert can

hardly contain their excitement.

This is definitely a Hebrew word.

Altas, don't do. It started with don't do.

They can make out other Hebrew words too.

Evis, worship.

Shaphat, judge.

Nakam, revenge.

And Melech, king. The writing is Canaanite, but the words are

Hebrew. So it's not quite Hebrew script yet, but eventually this script will

develop into Hebrew.

It makes the ostracon an historic find, a remarkable testament to the birth of

Hebrew writing.

in the process of being systematized.

I only can say that I hold in my hand the most ancient Hebrew text.

But what everybody really wants to know is what does it

say?

That question is not easy

to answer.

This is a very difficult inscription.

Hebrew was written without vowels.

So imagine a poorly preserved vowel -less text.

There's a lot of different ways to read a word. It could be a noun, it could be

a verb.

It's much more problematic than I think most people realize.

Haggai Mizgav is cautious.

We can say very carefully that it's a...

a text and not just a list of names. There is sentences there, and there may

sentences with a judicial or moral meaning, and that's all.

The exact meaning of the kiafa astrakhan may never be deciphered, but its

significance is undeniable.

It shows that in Solomon's century, in fortified cities, Texts were being

copied in a very early version of written Hebrew.

The finds at Keatha suggest a solution to the long -running debate about

Solomon.

Like Hebrew writing, Solomon's Israelite kingdom was in the early stages of its

formation. A small kingdom struggling to become a bigger one.

This may make sense of one of the few facts about 10th century BC Israel we

be sure of.

The Bible notes that five years after Solomon died, an Egyptian army invaded

Solomon's kingdom was crushed.

In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt marched against

Jerusalem with 1 ,200 chariots.

60 ,000 horsemen, and innumerable troops who came with him from Egypt.

Many scholars claim the biblical account of Shishak's invasion of Israel is

backed up by a giant relief in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes.

Figures containing images of bound captives and city walls represent the

Shishak ransacked.

We can see that this raid is intended to cross the central hill country, just

north of Jerusalem.

No pharaoh before him did this. They always just moved along the coast.

That means he in particular wanted to reach the area of Jerusalem.

Perhaps the Solomonic kingdom threatened some Egyptian interests in this region.

If that is the case, Shishak's raid is one last piece of compelling evidence

the rising power of Solomon's kingdom.

If ancient Israel was a land of tribal chiefdoms, why would Shishak bother to

invade?

Perhaps this was a Sherman's march through the ancient Near East to flatten

upstart kingdom.

there may be evidence that one of Shishak's targets was copper production

Dead Sea Rift Valley.

In a cross -section of a slag heap, Tom Levy sees layers of slag laid down

regularly year after year.

But then, there is a break.

What you see is this disruption in the metal production activities at the end

the 10th century.

The thin layers suggest a stoppage of work at the smelters. Levy believes this

corresponds to the time of Shishak's invasion.

While scholars debate the details of Shishak's campaign, they all agree on

one thing.

You know, to put a hand on the copper supply at that time was really critical.

Whoever controlled or tried to monopolize this was in power.

So were these King Solomon's mines?

I hope that in our excavations at Shebet HaNahas we'll ultimately find

inscriptions that can tell us about biblical characters, whether they were

Edomites or the early Israelite kings like David and Solomon.

But that's a hope.

Perhaps control of the mines changed hands as different kingdoms came into

power.

Whoever controlled the mines, we know copper from Wadi Feinan was traded

throughout the region and probably reached Jerusalem.

I believe that if one day we shall find the copper object of the temple in

Jerusalem, it will prove to come from this area.

One thing is certain. The find that Kirbit and Nahas and Kiyafa have

our image of the mysterious 10th century B .C., Solomon's century.

It was a time of walled cities and scribes, of rising kingdoms.

that could command a flourishing copper industry.

At last, King Solomon's Israel and the mysterious kingdom of Edom are

emerging from the shadows.

And along with them, the long -forgotten metal revolution which transformed

their era.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following.

ExxonMobil, taking on the world's toughest energy challenges.

And by David H. Koch.

And... Discovering new knowledge.

HHMI.

And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.