Kingdom of Edom, thought a myth, found to be real

A piece of scientific detective work has found evidence of a state dismissed by many historians as a myth.

Scientists excavating in ancient copper mines found proof to back the Bible’s stories of the kingdom of Edom. Picture: The Central Timna Valley Project

In the days before the Israelites ruled their ancient lands another mighty kingdom held power in its hands.

According to the Book of Genesis, Edom was the state that existed “before kings ruled the children of Israel”. Its people resisted and fought the Israelites, becoming their avowed foes. But now, it is not just the Bible that tells us so.

A remarkable piece of scientific detective work has found evidence of the state of Edom that flies in the face of many historians who have dismissed the idea as a myth.

Scientists and archaeologists have analysed slagheaps left by the copper mines in Edom, an area encompassing parts of what is now southern Jordan and Israel.

They found signs that mines in different parts of the region made the same advances in smelting techniques at the same time in the 11th century BC, just before the age of the biblical Kings Saul, David and Solomon. They argue that these simultaneous innovations mean the mines must have been run by one central authority — the state of Edom.

Just as the Bible claimed, the team of Israeli, Jordanian and US archaeologists said, there was a powerful and technologically ­advanced rival standing in the way of the early Israelite kingdom.

The Edomites by tradition are descended from Esau, the son of the patriarch Isaac, whose other son Jacob was the father of the Jewish race. In the Bible, they regularly occupy the “bad guy” role. In the First Book of Kings, Hadad the Edomite fights King Solomon, after being brought up in exile by Egyptian pharaohs. Later on, the Edomites cheered the Babylonians when King Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and took the children of Israel into slavery.

The word “Edom” means red in Hebrew, and by tradition Esau had red hair. But the Edomites also lived in a land still famous for its landscape’s red hues.

The most famous ancient site in what was Edom, though it dates from centuries later, is Petra, the “rose-red” city of antiquity. Some of its colour comes from copper deposits, which have been exploited for millennia and particularly when the pharaohs took control in the 13th century BC.

In the following 100 years wars and political crises wracked the eastern Mediterranean, and gave rise to a series of new civilisations, from ancient Greece to the Israelites. The Egyptians withdrew from Edom around 1140BC.

However, copper smelting continued, and the research paper, presented in the online journal Plos One on Tuesday, argues that analysing how much copper is left in the ancient slagheaps can show how efficient the smelters were.

These slagheaps suggest that the native population continued using Egyptian technology but improved it. This happened simultaneously everywhere in the region, including in the two main centres of production, 100km apart, in the mines at Timna and Faynan.

“The striking synchronous agreement between the technology in Timna and Faynan, evident as early as the 11th century BCE, suggests that an overarching political body existed in the region already at this time,” the paper says.

The sites also began to have fortifications at that time, suggesting that the Edomites had a new enemy. Professor Tom Levy of the University of California, San Diego, a lead archaeologist on the project, told The Times his team used “cyber-archaeology”, which melds scientific disciplines including computer science and engineering. “The data has taken us to a place where the archaeological record does indeed coincide with many aspects of the Hebrew Bible and biblical Edom,” he said. “This was a surprise to us.”

The Times