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 shafts 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 mines?
Are these the bones of his miners?
At last, new finds from Solomon's era...
Ancient cities and the first evidence
of early Hebrew writing...
Clues to the real world of the great Biblical king.
"The Quest for King Solomon's Mines"... right now
on this NOVA/National Geographic special.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following...
The David H. Koch Fund for Science.
Supporting NOVA and promoting public understanding of science.
And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by PBS 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 reached 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 spices."
In addition to his vast wealth,
the Bible tells us Solomon was a great builder.
In Jerusalem, he built the famous Temple of Solomon
to house the Ark of the Covenant...
Spiritual focus of the newly unified Israelite kingdom.
3,000 years later,
he is still revered by all three of the Holy Land's great faiths.
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 tenth century B.C... remains a mystery.
In the tenth century B.C.,
there are things which we know, but it's like a puzzle.
Much of the puzzle is dark
and here and there you have lights 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 mines...
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,
created a kingdom even before ancient Israel.
The remains of Edomite settlements
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 highlands
into the baking desert cauldron of 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 Feynan
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 Khirbet en Nahas.
Khirbet en Nahas in Arabic 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 ten years.
He has shown how ancient smelters separated pure copper
from the ore in which 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 after 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 not only Edom but of ancient Israel, too.
For ritual and prestige, weapons and tools,
metals helped turn simple agrarian societies
into kingdoms.
Ancient peoples 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.
Tom's student, Erez Ben-Yosef,
has been trying to find out
how those first copper-producing techniques evolved.
It's really, as you see,
a pit in the ground.
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 blow pipes.
We need three people constantly blowing.
It takes Erez and his friends two hours of constant blowing
before they see the first signs of smelting.
Can you see the blue flame?
This is a good indicator that the 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.
It looks like that.
Very few...
There's another one here.
It's tiny, tiny, but it's metal.
It's a 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 Khirbet en Nahas.
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 get a 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 heaps
covered an area of 25 acres.
Up to a thousand men worked here day and night,
feeding the furnaces where the copper was smelted.
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 nozzles, called tuyeres,
where the air from the bellows blasted into the smelter.
It's the nozzle of a bellow pipe.
And it's just one of the best preserved tuyere
we have seen in this area.
The nozzle of a bellow pipe may not sound like a great find,
but to Erez, it's crucial evidence
for the technological innovations
that made large-scale smelting possible.
We will try to take it out.
If we can help them 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 prills in the slag,
some actual copper metal.
Beneath the slag,
the nozzle has been carefully made from layers of fired clay.
This was necessary for it to withstand
the 1,200-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 B.C.E.,
we have the introduction of this amazing shaft furnace
that made this whole copper production process
much more efficient.
With men working day and night,
copper could be produced on an industrial scale, and it was.
Environmental scientist John Grattan
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 see and map where the pollution actually is.
It says there is 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.
And as if copper wasn't bad enough, looking down here,
I can see extremely high levels...
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 Grattan has found powerful confirmation
of the scale of ancient copper smelting at Khirbet en Nahas.
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 Khirbet en Nahas.
Project co-director,
Jordanian archaeologist Mohammad Najjar,
is exploring one of 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.
Mohammad 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 rocks
that fed the smelters of Khirbet en 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 re-creating one of those camel trains.
We want to try an 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 able to reconstruct that process.
They've discovered that a single camel can carry
about 300 pounds of ore.
But usually that ore is only ten percent copper
and 90% useless rock.
So for every 30 pounds of pure copper,
they needed at least a camel load of ore.
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 Valley... Khirbet en Nahas.
The size of the slag heaps indicates
that over its lifetime,
the site produced 5,000 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 Feynan area.
Right now in Israel,
a metallurgical study of copper objects
found in contexts of 11th century,
late 12th and 11th century B.C.,
were proven to originate from Feynan.
Perhaps this copper even reached Jerusalem,
where Solomon built his temple.
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 Feynan.
"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 rooms, 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?
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 kingdom.
The question arises, what kingdom?
Khirbet en Nahas was in 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, um,
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,
it's 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 Near East.
All of its great civilizations fell.
Around 1200 B.C.,
the entire political structure of the Bronze Age collapsed.
First, the Hittites in 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 Khirbet en Nahas,
that something new was the rise of ancient Israel and Edom.
Tom believes these are the only two candidates
for control of the copper mines.
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 cist 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.
This tomb looks like it's going to be filled with sediment.
It seems they are in for a disappointment.
They are 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.
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 Khirbet en Nahas
were probably Edomite seems to confirm assumptions
about the dating of the mining complex.
I assumed, like the scholarly consensus of the time,
that it must date to around the seventh century B.C.E.
That seventh-century B.C. dating was crucial
to Tom's first understanding of what went on here.
He knew that Egypt had collapsed in the 12th century B.C.,
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 tenth century B.C.
The rise of the Edomite kingdom has traditionally been dated
to the seventh century B.C.
So with the evidence from Khirbet en Nahas
pointing to Edom,
it made sense the smelting complex would be
from the seventh century too.
To confirm that dating,
Tom has brought radiocarbon specialist Tom Higham,
from the University of Oxford, to help him.
At the guard house and the slag heap, they look for samples
of organic material 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 layers.
Yes.
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 Higham takes the samples back to the lab at Oxford.
Radiocarbon dating,
combined with modern statistical analysis,
will allow him to calculate their age
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 tenth and 11th century.
This means the mines were operating
not in the seventh century B.C.,
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 tenth and 11th centuries B.C.
There is absolutely no question about it.
The dating has thrown the team a curve ball.
According to the well-accepted archaeological chronology,
there was no Edomite kingdom in the 11th or tenth century B.C.
that could have controlled these mines.
Is this evidence of an earlier Edomite kingdom?
If so, it might lend credence to the Bible's accounts
of David's campaigns against the Edomites.
The Bible tells us that David conquered Edom
and established strongholds over the area
like the fortress at Khirbet en Nahas.
"He stationed garrisons throughout Edom...
"and all the Edomites
became vassals of David."
The fortress that we found at Khirbet en Nahas
is 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 powerful
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 have searched for evidence
of the great tenth-century B.C. kingdom of David and Solomon
and found almost nothing.
There are a few clues.
A carved inscription from the ninth century B.C.
records the victory of an Aramean king
over what it calls "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 are from a later period.
The same uncertainties surround the kingdom of Solomon
described in the Bible.
Few doubt that David and Solomon existed.
There is just no proof they were great kings
capable of commanding a copper industry like Khirbet en Nahas.
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 that the text is exaggerating
to a huge extent
the dimensions of the kingdom, the prosperity,
all those gold troves in Jerusalem, et cetera.
The fact that Solomon had 1,000 wives...
I mean, there was almost 1,000 people living in Jerusalem
in this 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.
Khirbet Qeiyafa... 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 Khirbet Qeiyafa,
and we calculated that about 200,000 tons of stone
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 a thumb impression made by the potter
before the jar went into the kiln to be fired.
They were marked so you know that they are not private jars
but jars that 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, goats and cattle.
We don't have pig bones.
Philistine settlements are full of pig bones.
So could this be a sign that at Qeiyafa,
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 radiocarbon dating, this is from the late 11th,
early tenth century B.C.
So this is really from the time of King David.
If Qeiyafa 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 his 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 shards
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 has 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 Bearman
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 with the eye
is the substrate has somehow gotten faded.
It's dark.
And so you're looking at a dark background with dark text.
It's very hard for the human eye to see.
It's, you know,
the "looking for the black cat at midnight" situation.
The photospectroscopy system takes hundreds of pictures
of the ostracon 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 pottery and the ink basically reflect
the same amount of light and you don't see anything.
As you go up in wavelength, we're stepping into the blue
and we're now into about 500 nanometers,
and you see text is starting to show up.
By combining and processing photos
taken at many different wavelengths,
Greg finally arrives at a clear image of the text.
A replica of the ostracon was sent
to Bill Schniedewind at UCLA.
This is really
the most important early alphabetic text that we have.
Frequently when we talk about texts 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 give 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 sides.
The "a"... the aleph, which is the same as the "a"...
Stands 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 experts can hardly contain their excitement.
This is definitely a Hebrew word.
Al ta'aseh... "Don't do."
They can make out other Hebrew words too:
eved... "worship";
shofet... "judge";
nekama... "revenge";
and melekh... "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...
So far found.
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.
Hagai Misgav is cautious.
We can say very carefully
that it's a text and not just a list of names.
There are sentences there.
And there may be sentences with a judicial
or a moral meaning, and that's all.
The exact meaning of the Qeiyafa ostracon
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 Qeiyafa 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 tenth-century B.C. Israel we can be sure of.
The Bible notes that five years after Solomon died,
an Egyptian army invaded and 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 places 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
for 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 its upstart kingdoms.
And at Khirbet en Nahas, there may be evidence
that one of Shishak's targets was copper production
in the 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 of the tenth 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.
To put your 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 Khirbet en Nahas
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 Feynan
was traded throughout the region and probably reached Jerusalem.
I believe that if one day
we shall find the copper objects
of the temple in Jerusalem,
it will prove to come from this area.
One thing is certain:
The finds at Khirbet en Nahas and Qeiyafa have transformed
our image of the mysterious tenth 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.
N continues on NOVA's website,
where you can stream this program online.
See how NOVA reconstructed Solomon's temple
using clues from the Bible.
And learn how the Bible itself may have been written.
Investigate ancient worlds with interactives,
expert interviews, teacher resources and more.
Follow NOVA on Facebook and Twitter.
And find us online at pbs.org.
Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org
For more on Solomon and David,
see the December issue of National Geographic magazine.
This NOVA program is available on DVD at shopPBS.org.
Or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.