A study from Tel Aviv University dispelled long-standing myths about King Solomon’s Mines, revealing that ancient copper production in the Timna Valley caused minimal and localized environmental harm, posing no danger to the region’s inhabitants in the past or today. The research, led by Professor Erez Ben-Yosef and his team from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, was published recently in the journal Scientific Reports under the title “Pre-Roman copper industry had no polluting impact on the global environment.”
The research team conducted geochemical studies at copper mining sites in the Timna Valley in the Arava Desert. “Our study was extensive. We took hundreds of soil samples from both sites for chemical analyses, creating high-resolution maps of heavy metal presence in the region,” Ben-Yosef said, according to Sci.News.
Inspecting two major copper production sites—one from the Iron Age during King Solomon’s era and another nearby that is about 1,500 years older—the team sought to understand the environmental impact of ancient smelting practices. “We found that pollution levels at the Timna copper mining sites are extremely low and confined to the locations of the ancient smelting furnaces,” Ben-Yosef explained, as reported by SciTechDaily.
“The concentration of lead—the primary pollutant in metal industries—drops to less than 200 parts per million just a few meters from the furnace,” Ben-Yosef noted, according to Phys.org. He compared this to modern safety standards, stating, that “by comparison, the US Environmental Protection Agency defines industrial areas as safe for workers at 1,200 parts per million and residential areas as safe for children at 200 parts per million.”
The study challenges a series of papers published since the 1990s that suggested the ancient copper industry caused environmental pollution. “We demonstrate that this is not true. Pollution in Timna is very restricted spatially, and only those working directly at the furnace likely suffered from inhaling toxic fumes, while just a short distance away, the soil is entirely safe,” Ben-Yosef stated, according to Mirage News.
“Moreover, the match we found between the spatial distribution of copper and lead concentrations in the soil further indicates that the metals are ‘trapped’ in slag and other industrial waste—which keeps them from leaching into the soil and affecting plants or humans,” Ben-Yosef added.
The findings align with recent studies from the Wadi Faynan region in Jordan, which also indicate very low levels of pollution from ancient metal production. In Faynan, a team led by Professor Yigal Erel of the Hebrew University examined 36 skeletons of people who lived at the mining site during the Iron Age. “Only three showed any trace of pollution in their teeth. The rest were completely clean. We now present a similar picture for Timna,” Ben-Yosef said, according to Phys.org.
“There was a trend in the 1990s, which presented ancient copper production as the first instance of industrial pollution,” explained Dr. Omri Yagel, a member of the research team, as reported by SciTechDaily. “Moreover, the research literature tends to use the term ‘pollution’ to describe any trace of ancient metallurgical activity, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that metal industries were harmful to humans from their earliest beginnings—which is patently untrue,” Yagel said.
“Such statements grab headlines and attract research grants, but they unnecessarily project modern pollution problems onto the past,” Yagel stated, according to Mirage News. He added, “As modern researchers grappling with the consequences of climate change, we have an inherent tendency to seek similar shifts in the past, but we must be careful.”
“A 1990s study argued that traces of copper found in Greenland ice cores had traveled through the atmosphere from sites like Timna. This claim, however, has not been corroborated by any subsequent study,” Yagel stated, as reported by Sci.News. He concluded, “We may call a few pieces of slag lying on the ground ‘pollution’, but we should not confuse this local waste with regional or global environmental pollution.”
“Timna and Faynan are ideal sites for this type of research because they have not been disturbed by modern mining, as happened in Cyprus for example, and thanks to their dry climates the metals in the soil are not washed away,” Ben-Yosef explained.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.
This article was originally published at www.jpost.com
