Original subtitles

In the center of a crowded capital city,

a team of archaeologists digs down into the past.

Okay, get Felix.

Out of the earth appears a face

hidden for 2,000 years...

Be very careful.

...an incredible treasure...

Oh, wow, wow.

...from a lost biblical kingdom.

It's intact!

The stories in the Bible

are famous across the world.

They tell of great battles between good and evil,

earth-shaking catastrophes, and heroic characters.

One of the most famous names is King Solomon.

In the Old Testament,

Solomon was king of ancient Israel,

a mighty ruler in a golden age,

wise and wealthy beyond any other king.

In Jerusalem, he built a mighty temple

to house the Ten Commandments given to Moses.

The Ark of the Covenant

held the central rules of the early Jewish nation,

marking a promise between God and his people.

The period in which Solomon would have lived

is known as the biblical Iron Age.

It lasted from 1200 to just after 600 BCE

and was a time of mystery and great change.

Excavation of Jerusalem's Temple Mount

is difficult and controversial,

and archaeological evidence for Solomon's temple,

and even the man himself, are lacking.

When most people think about

this region, they think about the kingdom of Solomon.

But there's a lot of other things going on.

Multiple kingdoms, multiple kings,

gathered on all sides of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River.

To the east of Solomon's Israel

lay three other Iron Age kingdoms that appear in the Bible:

Ammon, Moab, and Edom.

They're all experiencing their own growth,

their own development.

We've only scratched the surface about what's going on.

This season, archaeologists are leading

new investigations into these kingdoms.

What can they tell us about the golden age

of the legendary biblical ruler?

It's absolutely exciting, I mean,

this is something you dream of.

Using cutting-edge technology,

they reveal the lost world of King Solomon.

In the modern city of Amman...

dawn breaks...

as archaeologist Katharina Schmidt and her team

arrive at their dig site in the very center

of Jordan's capital.

I love Jordan.

I mean, look around you.

It's probably my most favorite place.

Particularly now, starting the first season here in Jordan.

This year, the team is embarking

on a ground-breaking new project,

hoping to reveal a lost Iron Age kingdom.

3,000 years ago, the region around this city

belonged to the ancient biblical kingdom of Ammon,

one of Israel's neighbors,

and is reflected in Amman's name.

Waking up with the city every morning,

it's just absolutely fabulous.

And being able to work at that site is a dream really.

Four million people

crowd the steep slopes of this city,

but at its center is a nearly untouched hill

known as the Amman Citadel.

We are right in the busy capital of Jordan,

and we are lucky because the citadel of Amman

has not been overbuilt over the years.

Exploratory digs from the 1960s

found evidence of a mysterious ancient structure

that seemed to be from the Iron Age,

ensuring the land here remained undeveloped.

Now, Katharina has the chance to continue that investigation

and discover precisely what it is...

this time, with all the high-tech tools

of the 21st century archaeologist.

We can use what they have uncovered,

so we don't need to dig down for, you know, four years

to reach the layers we are particularly interested in.

We can immediately start where we want to start,

and apply all these methods.

One of the most useful modern tools

is drone photogrammetry.

So, I think we can start here

on the top of the site.

Elevation will be great.

Imaging specialist Felix Wolter

wants to create a digital map

of the whole area of the citadel.

This will help him find any structures

that were missed first time around.

The drone obviously gives us

bird's-eye view of the site, so we are able to see the site

from a completely different perspective

and much more distance, which will allow us to see

certain structures in a 3D model.

Felix photographs the entire

eastern end of the citadel...

Hey, perfect landing!

...and heads to the site office

to stitch the high-resolution images together.

We see here, this is our excavation

from the bird's-eye view, and we can zoom out now,

and we see actually all this eastern part of the citadel.

I can see that there's also some other structures,

possible Iron Age city-wall structures.

And if I zoom in, I see actually rows of stone put together.

A wall surrounding the hill

suggests the structure within was important.

Katharina walks down into the building

to try to discover its purpose.

What is very, very useful

is to get structures in situ,

having a wall and a floor together,

in order to really define a building.

The sheer scale and layout of this building

indicates to Katharina that this is not an ordinary dwelling.

Right in the south, in the far back,

we have a set of rooms.

We have a huge courtyard

which comes right after that set of rooms.

And we have a set of rooms here, right next to me,

where sort of a storage area must have been.

This is already really large, but we haven't even reached

the boundaries of that... of that entire building yet.

The thick walls and vast spaces,

and the discovery of a stone toilet seat in one room...

are evidence this was a royal building.

Multiple stories high and covered with fine plaster...

it would have sprawled across the hilltop...

with a huge wall around its perimeter.

Could this be a palace from the age of Solomon?

Archaeologist Zeidan Kafafi

is co-director of the project.

He's been excavating sites across Jordan for 40 years.

Archaeology, for me,

started as a study,

then as a career, then as a life.

Zeidan's expertise lies in pottery,

a crucial tool for dating this ancient megastructure.

He examines the sherds found at this site for their size,

material, and appearance.

Each period of time, it has its own pottery

which bears the characteristics for that period.

He believes the design on this pottery

identifies the century when this palace was occupied.

When I look at this, I see the decoration,

which we call it

typical Ammonite period decoration.

This means this could be 8th, 7th century B.C.

This evidence puts the palace's occupation

close to the age of Solomon.

We believe that we are actually dealing here

with the residence, the palace, of the Ammonite king.

Katharina and the team

could find precious clues here,

to what life was like in this neighboring kingdom.

And it's not the only site that could shed light on this period.

Thirty miles south of Amman

is the ancient site of Tell Dhiban.

Archaeologist Pearce Paul Creasman

is here to explore what other peoples and settlements

dotted this landscape in the age of Solomon.

Beginning of the Iron Age, sometime around 1000 B.C.,

is a bit of a messy period.

There's no one giant society that is kind of guiding

and overpowering all the others.

It gives an opportunity for different entities

to come into existence in their own way.

And here, we have a great example of one of those,

the kingdom of Moab.

Dhiban is associated with Dibon,

a place in Moab referred to in the Bible.

The layers of history preserved here

could provide an insight into the power of ancient Moab

and potentially its neighbor, Solomon's Israel.

For thousands of years, people have been occupying

this specific place.

And no one knows what's at the bottom yet.

We just haven't gotten there.

The accumulation of building material

and rubbish repeated over the centuries

creates a man-made mound known as a Tell.

At the base of Tell Dhiban,

Pearce Paul assesses the construction method

of the ruins to work out what period they're from.

What we can see here is at least the Iron Age,

so something like 900 or 800 BC.

This is a retaining wall from the Iron Age wall above it.

This helps make sure that all of this stuff

stays tucked up and safe.

It'd take you the better part of an hour

to walk all the way around it, so Tell Dhiban is a big tell.

The physical scale of the Moabite defenses

suggests this city was not only large, but important.

If all of that was enclosed in a huge wall,

this wall was two, three meters high

and two or three meters thick.

That's a lot of effort to build that to protect the city.

That means there's things worth protecting inside of it.

Pearce Paul heads up on to the tell

to search for what lies at the heart

of this biblical Iron Age city.

At the Amman Citadel,

Katharina believes this palace was occupied by the Ammonite king

during the biblical Iron Age, the age of Solomon.

Now, the team needs to find evidence

of what life was like then.

Gradually, more pieces of the palace emerge.

That's part of a floor.

It's quite a, you know, thick layer of floor.

The team is piecing together a puzzle

with the smallest of clues,

such as pottery sherds and fragments of plaster.

So, Haitham is digging down towards the edge of the wall,

and then we can also remove the stones on top of it

to have a look.

- We can... we can move it. - Come on.

No way.

But as Katharina monitors the work...

No way. You know what that is.

...excavator Haitham Al-Adwan

uncovers a mysterious piece of carved stone inside this wall.

It looks different to the other blocks around it.

That's really nice.

Be very careful.

Katharina thinks she recognizes what this could be.

It's absolutely... I mean, it's... I don't know,

I can't, you know, I can't describe it.

It's... it's basically the top part

of a double-faced female head.

You're looking at the top bit of the head.

So, it's basically the hairline, the midline of the hair

and, uh, the side locks.

So, it's exactly that part.

This Iron Age carved stone head

has been reused in a later century

as a mere building block.

If the team can get it out in one piece,

it will be a monumental discovery...

offering invaluable insight into the people

of the biblical Iron Age kingdoms.

Iron Age sculpture, stone sculpture are really rare.

And so, this is, um, yeah, something you dream of

before you start an excavation.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Local team member Amany Al Dabouki

excavates the soil around the head

one brushstroke at a time.

I just need to clean it to see the edges so I will not harm it.

That why I'm doing it so carefully.

We need to remove all the soil and stones from around it.

Then, we will pull it out.

Once enough soil is removed,

the team gathers round to reveal the head.

Let's see, let's see!

Oh, wow, wow.

Oh, it's intact!

It's perfectly preserved.

Look at her. She's staring at you.

The pristine expression

of an Ammonite stone sculpture peers up at the team.

This lady sees sunlight for the first time

of, like, 2,700 years.

There is an incredible level of detail

on the delicately carved stone features.

See the eye, the left eye?

And you see there's still the remains of the white inlay

the eye was made of. So, this is interesting

that there's obviously something left over.

This is the largest and best-preserved object

the team has found all season.

Traces of paint or inlays could even remain on the sculpture.

We can take them to the lab and see

if they were colorful or not, but I... I guess they were.

But scientifically, we need to test that.

One of the team fetches a supersized sample box.

And when the head is fully clear...

Okay, be careful.

...they carefully lift the lady

from her millennia-long slumber.

Take your time.

Okay.

Good.

Well done! So, let's take it home.

Back at the site office

and out of the blinding sunlight,

Katharina can take a closer look.

Yeah, some small traces of red.

Tiny.

The first task is to make

a 3D computer model of the head.

Amani's our specialist.

She's scanned a lot of Iron Age statues

in the museum on the Amman Citadel.

And we are lucky that she's part of our team,

and she's also scanning the new lady.

Amani needs to do this as soon as possible

to ensure the object is still precisely as it was

when she dug it up.

Unfortunately, when you take things

out of the ground, the decay starts.

And, um, by... by scanning it,

you really also document the object,

in the best possible state.

The bright lamps and powerful camera

can achieve incredible definition

and perfectly capture the richness of the sculpture.

Katharina's next step is to take this to a national laboratory

and use the latest scanning technology

to gather all the clues this sculpture holds.

The Bible tells of King Solomon's

incredible wealth... riches of gold and silver.

Clues to what might have inspired these stories

could lie south of ancient Israel.

The valley of Wadi Faynan

lies in the Iron Age kingdom of Edom.

That's the site, you see the rocky mountain there.

Archaeologist Mohammad Najjar

is on the hunt for the source

of this biblical kingdom's wealth.

He's worked across the Middle East for 45 years,

and shows no sign of slowing down.

We don't stop. I mean, you cannot retire

from archaeology.

Whenever chance is happening, you just go there and doing things.

Mohammad is following a trail of clues

visible in satellite imagery...

dark patches scattered through the valleys.

Beside one of these dark patches,

he discovers a bizarre-looking well that runs deep into the ground.

We have this circular hole,

and there are three holes inside,

and this is manmade.

You can see this bigger hole is provided with steps

where people can move.

So, the hole here indicates that we are dealing with a mine.

These mineshafts originally descended

for more than 120 feet underground.

And Mohammad believes they're the source

of the nearby heaps of black stone and dust.

The dark heaps around are coming from deeper level.

So, this is waste. These heaps here are tailings.

They are very helpful

when you are doing the investigations here,

because you can see these tailings from

even a satellite picture, or from aerial picture.

And these are always indicators

that there should be a mine there.

Ancient mines were a source of valuable metals.

Rulers not only used these metals for currency,

but also to decorate their palaces

and show off their wealth.

Mohammad heads down the hill to investigate

which metal these miners were extracting.

At a laboratory just outside Amman,

Katharina wants to find more clues from the Ammonite head sculpture.

She's brought it to a facility that can detect chemical elements

without the need for destructive testing.

- Good to see you. - Nice to see you.

- We have one. - Really?

It's one of the double-faced heads.

- It's fresh... is it fresh one? - It's fresh from the field.

Finding ancient traces of paint

could help Katharina understand how elaborate

the Ammonite palace was, and how wealthy its king.

Measuring the eye and the whites around the eye

would be, of course, fantastic.

And possibly we see in the light inside some of the red traces,

and we can, um, we can try that.

The SESAME laboratory

is able to detect the presence of different metals

used as bases for different colors of paint.

To do this, they use a circular particle accelerator,

known as a synchrotron.

Magnets arranged in a 140-foot-wide loop

speed up subatomic particles to almost the speed of light.

Then, they're fired down this barrel

straight at the object being tested.

I wonder if we should put her upside down... poor her...

to give her a bit more stability?

Senior scientist Messaoud Harfouche

helps to place the stone head in the crosshairs.

Usually, they have really small samples

that would fit into the beam line without any problem.

But moving the lady in between the beam line

is a bit more complicated.

Messaoud and Katharina

carefully tie it into place.

It's a bit odd, because she was just buried

2,500 years, and now she's in this high technological lab!

What we really want to know is the colors.

We really want to know how she would stare at us.

Do we have different colors of the pupil,

of the surrounding part of the eye?

Messaoud places the fluorescence detector

into position.

The way in which the photons bounce off the stone head

will identify specific elements.

A camera trained on the head shows them

precisely where the particle beam will scan.

The beam line fires up,

and photons traveling at about 600 million miles per hour

interact with the ancient head

but leave its stone surface completely intact.

Readings begin to come through.

Each peak in the graph identifies a particular element.

So, all calcium, the iron.

That's copper. That's zinc.

- So, that's copper? - This is copper, yes.

The stone itself is made up of many elements,

so Katharina and Messaoud expect to see a number of these metals.

But crucially, this test reveals

different concentrations on different parts of the face.

This bit has higher copper elevations,

- or levels, than... - Than the... the body.

...than the white-ish surrounding.

These could be the first tell-tale signs

of what colors decorated the grand palaces and temples

of these ancient biblical kingdoms.

From the analysis, we have different elements

and most likely also have different colors or color tones.

The machine identifies metals

including lead, zinc, and copper

that could be used to make black, white, and red paint.

This statue was likely richly painted,

and the resources put into its decoration

suggest it was commissioned by a wealthy ruler.

Where did the metals to make these colors come from?

In the arid valleys of southern Jordan,

Mohammad searches for the metals that were a source of wealth

for the ancient biblical kingdom of Edom.

In a dried-up riverbed where water has worn a channel

right through an Iron Age mine, he hits pay dirt.

Okay, we have here one of the galleries.

Probably the shaft was somewhere here and is gone by erosion.

This gallery goes for about 25 meters deep.

One shaft probably has more than one gallery.

So, galleries were spreading out in different directions.

The target of all this digging

still glimmers from the exposed rock face.

The green color here everywhere indicates that we are dealing

with copper ores here.

So, this is copper.

The Iron Age takes its name

from the innovation in iron production,

a far more plentiful metal.

But copper was still a precious material,

important for coins and jewelry.

The Edomites turned the dirty business of copper mining

into a highly profitable industry.

They became expert smelters,

whose furnaces reached 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit

to melt the ore and extract the pure metal.

Each settlement produced tons of copper every year,

and shipped it all over the ancient world.

The metal was in high demand in the age of Solomon.

The Bible describes his fabled temple

as having columns covered in pure copper.

Mohammad walks the ruins of the Edomite town of Faynan

and finds that signs of smelting cover the landscape.

If we look around us, we can see heaps of slags everywhere.

It means that production here was at industrial scale.

It was a big industry.

Slag is melted rock and ore

that has run out of the furnace and solidified.

Thousands of years later,

this waste material is vital evidence

of when in the Iron Age this mining town was active.

Pieces of charcoal trapped inside the slag

can be used for carbon dating.

This particular site was dated

to about 11th to 10th century BC.

This places a thriving

Edomite copper industry at the same time as Solomon

and the tales of his elaborate temple.

All that remains of the mining boom here

is the melted waste of the copper furnaces.

Does evidence of the grand projects they fed

still exist elsewhere in the three kingdoms?

At Tell Dhiban in the ancient kingdom of Moab...

Pearce Paul continues his exploration of the mound

to find out how grand this city was,

and what made it worth defending.

The team clears a structure at the center of the tell.

It lies deep down in one of the city's earliest periods

of occupation.

If you look at the walls that look a bit whiter

than all the others, those are pretty old.

Those are probably the early part of the Iron Age.

Excavators have only exposed

part of the structure so far,

but it's still enough for Pearce Paul to get a sense

of how impressive this would have been.

I can walk most of this room,

this chamber in about 10 seconds.

To us today, that wouldn't feel like a massive structure.

But 3,000 years ago, our priorities are different.

Our technologies are different.

Having a room and a structure like this

doesn't serve your basic functions of life.

This is something more.

The construction of this building

at the heart of the city would have been a huge investment

of energy and resources for an Iron Age people.

All of these things put together... the location,

the size, the scale, and the age of it

tell us this belonged to the most important person,

or served the most important function of this time and place.

Usually, that's palaces, temples,

administrative structures.

In the case of Tell Dhiban,

archaeologists have been able to attach a name

to this structure.

This particular building in the past

has been dubbed Mesha's Palace.

Now, that has to do with a find, not here,

but here in Dibon, just over on the other hill.

Two-hundred feet from the walls of the palace...

a Bedouin tribe uncovered a huge slab of polished basalt rock...

bearing the longest Moabite inscription ever found.

It refers to Mesha, a leader of the Moabites,

who the Bible describes as mortal enemies of the Israelites.

The inscription is the single biggest source of text

to come direct from that age,

and is full of detail of Mesha's deeds.

It reads, "To add to Dhiban,

"I built the walls of its parks,

"the walls of the citadel.

"I built its gates, its towers, a royal palace.

I made the retaining walls of the water reservoir within."

There are other lines that talk about

how he's vanquishing his enemies,

how he's taking the spoils of war from them

and bringing them back here.

It's clear to Pearce Paul

that this list of great feats,

and the language used in the inscription,

are intended as nothing less than the boasts of a king.

This is part of Mesha's greatest hits.

He says, "I'm King Mesha the king of Moab, of this place,

"and these are the things that I have been able to do

with and for my people."

This stele was written

only a century after Solomon might have lived.

The wording indicates that Moab

was more than a spread-out clan or tribe.

It was a fully-fledged nation.

There is another key feature mentioned throughout...

a Moabite god.

In all these feats, he is attributing the success

and the previous inability to do so, to the primary deity.

The foremost god, the one above them all is Chemosh.

Throughout human history,

the worship of many gods has been the norm.

Pearce Paul thinks this begins to change

in the age of Solomon.

During this time, there's something

different happening culturally, spiritually,

socially around this part of the world,

and you start to see societies leaning more heavily on one God.

So, it wouldn't be a stretch to think that these practices

that we see in this one very detailed record,

might be repeated in these other societies.

How different were these nations in their beliefs?

As work continues to reveal more of the Moabite palace,

Pearce Paul searches for further links

between these kingdoms and the biblical age of Solomon.

At the dig site in Amman...

the team continues to search for clues to how the Ammonites lived.

In the spot where they found the carved head...

lightning strikes twice.

Guess what? We actually... we found a second one.

Katharina's team has uncovered another stone head.

This one is similar in appearance, but crucially not identical.

The beauty of these heads is that they are all individual.

Katharina believes it shows

they weren't representing one specific person or god.

These heads next to each other

adoring the person who would enter the palace,

that's how you have to imagine these heads.

These female heads were really the good spirit of the building.

They are supernatural beings, in between humans and gods.

They symbolize beauty and surplus of everything.

Good spirits.

And it's beautiful. You feel it!

These heads were intricately carved

and richly decorated...

with inlaid eyebrows, eyes, and necklace beads.

Dozens of these heads, each one unique

and brightly painted...

would have slotted between two stone dowels...

and formed a striking decoration for a royal palace.

These sculptures were for decoration, not worship.

However, there is evidence of an Ammonite deity

elsewhere on the citadel.

If you want to look for the gods,

or at least the major god,

you would have to go to that side of the citadel.

Nine-hundred feet from the dig site

stand the columns of a Roman temple.

Beneath the Roman ruins, archaeologists discovered

a much earlier monumental Iron Age structure.

This is, in fact, the highest place

on the Amman Citadel.

So, you either expect there to be a temple,

or a palatial structure.

Since the palatial structure was actually here,

the only other building that could sit there

is the major temple of the kingdom of Ammon,

which would be the temple for the major deity, Milcom.

The Ammonites built large stone statues

to the god Milcom, and worshipped him

much like other kingdoms did with their state deities.

But biblical texts accuse them

of sacrificing children to Milcom,

burning them in fires,

accompanied by drumbeats to drown out the screams.

Why does the Old Testament depict the Ammonite religion

in such a diabolical light?

In ancient Moab, at Tell Dhiban...

Pearce Paul examines the rest of the mound

to learn more about the real relationship

between the different kingdoms of the Bible.

A thick stone wall surrounds a bowl-shaped depression

on the side of this tell.

There's an interesting feature

on the inside of this wall. It's a thick plaster.

And if this is down here with the bowl here,

this could be a kind of waterproofing

to help retain anything coming off the tell.

This is almost certainly a reservoir

for that Iron Age settlement on the top.

This enormous reservoir

would've been a huge infrastructure project

for an Iron Age city.

On the Mesha Inscription,

the king brags about being able to develop cisterns

and prepare his people and save more water.

The pool itself could also reflect

a reference from the Bible.

Another settlement here in Jordan

is ancient Heshbon. And so, the pools of Heshbon

are mentioned in historic scriptures and texts.

And this is the kind of thing that could inspire that.

The biblical poem Song of Songs,

supposedly written by Solomon, compares his lover's eyes

to Moab's famous pools of Heshbon.

Solomon took wives from all the kingdoms around.

He had a child with an Ammonite princess,

and another with the Queen of Sheba.

He even built temples in Jerusalem

for his wives to worship their gods,

and angered his own god as a result.

These accounts paint a picture of a cosmopolitan king of Israel,

an attitude also seen in daily life in this region.

People are bumping into each other.

You're trading with each other, there's intermarrying.

There's all kinds of social engagements.

So much of it is incidental and unrecorded.

The kingdoms next door to ancient Israel

provide clues to what Solomon's own realm might have been like.

Just as the Mesha stele describes the Moabites' reward

for honoring their god,

the Bible describes Israelites suffering for Solomon

insulting Yahweh, the god of Israel.

With every story that people write about,

where they came from, and how they came into existence,

they talk about the trials and tribulations

that they have encountered.

And they paint anyone who's not them as the other.

These other groups, these other societies...

the Moabites, the Edomites, and the Ammonites...

are the other in the biblical histories.

But just because those documents reflect them as other,

doesn't mean that's how they were.

When the Bible texts were written,

many centuries after Solomon,

they berate him for his outward-looking approach.

Why do these later texts look so harshly on Israel's neighbors?

Instead of taking the much-later biblical literature

and scriptures as a writ of how these things happened,

the responsible thing to do is to take them

as a piece of evidence,

try and evaluate them against what we can prove

through the physical record.

What separated these biblical kingdoms

at the end of the age of Solomon?

How did their paths diverge?

At the Amman Citadel,

the dig team continues its investigations.

Katharina examines how this period

of flourishing independent kingdoms came to an end.

The excavation here is so exciting,

because we hope on the long run

that we can say a little bit more

about what happens here in Amman.

We hope to find different layers

where we can say a little bit more about this transition...

if there is a continuity, if there's a pause,

if there's a destruction, question mark.

Discoveries from around the citadel

could also hold clues to what came next.

Among the ancient riches of the Archaeological Museum of Jordan,

museum director Taher Gonmin

tracks down a very small object

that could tell a much bigger story.

This is the seal we found in the Ammonite kingdom

in the southern slope in Amman citadel

across from the Roman theater.

Stamp seals are common ancient objects.

They were used to make a unique impression in wax

as a way to seal official documents.

This particular stamp seal has a curious design.

This seal, we can see it's very pure.

Very pure Assyrian influence.

The Assyrians were a mighty empire

that dominated the region to the north.

This seal could indicate their presence here in Ammon.

This inscription is Ammonite language.

This is an Ammonite stamp seal,

but in the Assyrian style.

A symbol in miniature of the period

when Ammon had become part of the Assyrian empire.

Faced with the brute force of the Assyrians,

the Ammonites chose to submit rather than face annihilation.

The Assyrian overlords allowed local rulers to stay in power,

provided they remain loyal and paid their dues.

In the ancient kingdom of Israel, Solomon's heirs

refused to bow to Assyria...

...and its cities were raided and destroyed.

Many Israelites were deported and scattered,

marking the end of a golden age.

The Iron Age was a period,

this entire region was split up

into these independent kingdoms,

and it's something very special in that period.

I think it's also important, however, to see that,

especially with the example of the kingdom of Ammon,

there's always a certain way to react towards these empires.

For a while, at least,

it seems Ammon made the right choice.

It was peace and prosperity, like, Ammon was blossoming.

And it was a period of a peaceful and good life, probably.

The same cannot be said for the ancient kingdom of Israel.

Crucially, these events of the late Iron Age

were close to the time when many scholars think

parts of the Old Testament were written.

By then, Solomon was a legend centuries-old,

but the destruction and turmoil of invading empires

was all too real.

The contrasting fates of Israel and its neighbors across the Jordan River

spurred the writers of the Bible to create an image of Solomon's kingdom

standing mighty and alone in a golden age of its own making.

The biblical texts and scriptures for any religion

are trying to tell us a specific version of events,

the version of events that are most important to the people

when they wrote them down.

That's useful information because it gives us a perspective,

but it is not the perspective.

What we do is weave all of the data together,

and come to what actually happened.

Evidence found today by archaeologists

across the region

is shedding light on a lost age,

a time of evolving religions...

of great industry and trade...

and a landscape of competing kingdoms...

that culminated in grand palaces,

decorated with incredible finery.

Each new discovery uncovers the reality behind the legend

to reveal the truth about the lost world of King Solomon.