First Person: Life Was Not So Bad for Smelters

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Mohammad Najjar and Thomas Levy have been excavating at an ancient copper mining and smelting site in the Faynan district of Jordan for more than 20 years. They describe it as “hell on earth.”a The mines are in the midst of an inhospitable desert, not far from the lowest spot on earth.b The heat can be intolerable, and water is scarce. People have been mining copper here for 12,000 years, and they have been smelting the extracted copper since the Chalcolithic period, 4,500 years ago. In the Biblical period, this area was part of Edom; later it was part […]

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Footnotes

Mohammad Najjar and Thomas E. Levy, “Condemned to the Mines—Copper Production and Christian Persecution,” BAR 38:06.

Thomas E. Levy and Mohammad Najjar, “Edom and Copper: The Emergence of Ancient Israel’s Rival,” BAR 32:04.

“Nelson Glueck and King Solomon—A Romance That Ended,” BAR 01:01.

Endnotes

Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, “The Socioeconomic Status of Iron Age Metalworkers: Animal Economy in the ‘Slaves’ Hill’ Timna, Israel,” Antiquity 88 (2014), p. 775.

Adolfo Muniz and Thomas E. Levy, “Feeding the Iron Age Metalworkers at Khirbat en-Nahas—Zooarchaeological Perspectives,” in Thomas E. Levy, Mohammad Najjar and Erez Ben-Yosef’s New Insights into the Iron Age Archaeology of Edom, Southern Jordan, vol. 2 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Press, 2014).