hebrew scriptures with BENJAMIN LEON
King Solomon’s Mines (1885) is a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H Rider Haggard.
It tells of the search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party. It is the first English adventure novel set in Africa, and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre.
The book was first published in September 1885 amid considerable fanfare, with billboards and posters around London announcing: “The Most Amazing Book Ever Written”. It became an immediate best seller. By the late 19th century, explorers were uncovering ancient civilisations around the world, such as Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, and the Empire of Assyria. Inner Africa remained largely unexplored and King Solomon’s Mines, the first novel of African adventure published in English, captured the public’s imagination.
The “King Solomon” of the book’s title is the Biblical king renowned both for his wisdom and for his wealth. A number of sites have been suggested as the location of his mines, including the workings at the Timna valley near Eilat, in Israel. Research published in September 2013 has shown that this site was in use during the 10th century BCE as a copper mine possibly by the Edomites, who the Bible reports were rivals of and frequently at war with King Solomon. The Bible does refer to King Solomon having sent out, in partnership with his Phoenician allies, trading expeditions along the Red Sea, which brought exotic wares and animals from Africa to Jerusalem. But there is no evidence of Solomon having maintained mines for precious metals and diamonds in the depths of Africa, such as provide the book’s title and the centre of its plot.
Haggard knew Africa well, having travelled deep within the continent as a 19-year-old during the Anglo-Zulu War and the First Boer War, where he had been impressed by South Africa’s vast mineral wealth and by the ruins of ancient lost cities being uncovered, such as Great Zimbabwe. His original Allan Quatermain character was based in large part on Frederick Courtney Selous, the British white hunter and explorer of Colonial Africa. Selous’s real-life experiences provided Haggard with the background and inspiration for this and many later stories.
Copper has been mined in the area since the 6th or 5th millennium BCE. Archaeological excavation indicate that the copper mines in Timna Valley were probably part of the Kingdom of Edom and worked by the Edomites, described as biblical foes of the Israelites, during the 10th century BCE, the period of biblical King Solomon. Mining continued by the Israelites and Nabataeans through to the 1st and 2nd centuries CE during the Roman period, and then, after the 7th-century Arab conquest, by the Ummayad Caliphate, until the copper ore became scarce.
The copper was used for ornaments, but more importantly for stone-cutting, as saws, in conjunction with sand.
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The recent excavations dating coppers mining to the 10th century BCE also discovered what may be the earliest camel bones with signs of domestication found in Israel or even outside the Arabian Peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE. This is seen as evidence by the excavators that the stories of Abraham, Joseph, Jacob and Esau were written or rewritten after this time, seeing that the Biblical books frequently reference travelling with caravans of domesticated camels,
Public interest was aroused in the 1930s, when Nelson Glueck attributed the copper mining at Timna to King Solomon (10th century BCE) and named the site “King Solomon’s Mines”. These were considered by most archaeologists to be earlier than the Solomonic period until an archaeological excavation led by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University found evidence indicating that this area was being mined by Edomites, a group who the Bible says were frequently at war with Israel. In 1959, Professor Beno Rothenberg, director of the Institute for Archeo-Metallurgical Studies at University College, London, led the Arabah Expedition, sponsored by the Eretz Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology. The expedition included a deep excavation of Timna Valley, and by 1990 he discovered 10 000 copper mines and smelting camps with furnaces, rock drawings, geological features, shrines, temples, an Egyptian mining sanctuary, jewelry, and other artefacts never before found anywhere in the world.His excavation and restoration of the area allowed for the reconstruction of Timna Valley’s long and complex history of copper production, from the Late Neolithic period to the Middle Ages.
The modern state of Israel also began mining copper on the eastern edge of the valley in 1955, but ceased in 1976. The mine was reopened in 1980. The mine was named Timnah after a Biblical chief.
