Carbon Dating of Cooper ruins in Jordan bolster biblical record of King Solomon

A massive copper smelting plant in the biblical land of Edom is at least three centuries older than researchers previously believed, placing it firmly in the traditional timeline of King Solomon, considered the greatest ruler of Israel, researchers reported.

The existence of Solomon 3,000 years ago has been questioned by some scholars over the last two decades because of the paucity of archaeological evidence supporting the biblical record and the belief that there were no complex societies in Israel or Edom capable of building fortresses, monuments and other sophisticated public works, such as large mines, in the 10th century BC.

"This is the most hotly debated period in biblical archaeology today," said archaeologist Thomas E. Levy of UC San Diego, who reported the new radiocarbon dates for the copper smelting operation in modern-day Jordan in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Critics, however, charge that Levy is overinterpreting the importance of the radiocarbon dates, because there is no evidence of habitation at the earliest dates to go with them. That suggests the site was operated periodically by nomads and not associated with any city or kingdom, much less an empire, according to archaeologist Piotr Bienkowski of the University of Manchester in Britain.

According to the Old Testament, Solomon was the son of King David and Bathsheba who brought Israel to its ancient fruition, ruling an empire that stretched from the Euphrates to the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. He is said to have built the First Temple in Jerusalem, amassed a fortune in gold and written the Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

The current center of the controversy is a 24-acre site called Khirbat en-Nahas -- Arabic for "ruins of copper" -- about 30 miles south of the Dead Sea and 30 miles north of the famed archaeological site of Petra in Jordan. It is the largest Iron Age copper factory in the Middle East.

The most notable characteristic of the site is the massive accumulation of black slag produced during the ancient smelting process. The site includes more than 100 buildings, including a fortress. Mines and mining trails abound.

Because wood was used to produce the heat for smelting, charcoal samples are available for dating. Two years ago, Levy reported radiocarbon dates from the site indicating that mining was taking place in the 10th century BC. Finkelstein and others objected, noting that archaeological evidence in the nearby highlands of Edom showed no evidence of habitation before the 8th century BC.

To answer those criticisms, Levy's team excavated through 20 feet of slag near the center of the site, carefully documenting the location of each bit of charcoal and other artifacts. The charcoal was then dated by physicist Thomas Higham of Oxford University.

The bottom stratum of the site revealed a period of extensive mining that lasted for about 40 years around 940 BC and produced 9 feet of slag. There was then a major disruption in mining about 910 BC, followed by a resumption in the 9th century BC.

In the stratum associated with the disruption, they found an Egyptian scarab from the eastern Nile delta and an amulet linked to the Egyptian goddess Mut.

The "tantalizing question," Levy said, is whether these artifacts are associated with the Egyptian pharaoh Sheshonq I (known as Shishak in the Bible), who conquered much of Palestine following the death of Solomon.

Records in Egypt show that Sheshonq's troops occupied Hazevah, about eight miles from Khirbat en-Nahas.
Technorati Tags: mining, ancient, Bible, King Solomon, archaeology, scarab, Egypt, Sheshonq I, pharaoh, Jordan, history

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Epilepsy as a writing device in Historical Literature

I ran across this interesting article on the use of epilepsy as a literary device in ancient literature when I was looking for a picture of Julius Caesar. Caesar supposedly suffered from epilepsy later in life. I happen to think there is a very good chance that his seizures were caused by a head wound he received at the battle of Munda:

Epilepsy as a theme in literature (I)

"The description and interpretation of suffering in the form of pain, illness and disability have an important role in the aesthetic literature of numerous cultural-historical epochs.This aspect of human existence has, for the most part, been made use of by individual authors in very different ways – whether as a directing factor within a plot structure, as a metaphor or as a moment of catharsis. "Suffering makes humans clear-sighted and the world transparent." This interpretation, which was formulated by the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Victor Emil Frankl in the previous century, may be a conscious or unconscious motivation for some poets and writers to use the concept of suffering in their works.

It is astonishing how often the chronic disease of epilepsy enters into poetry.

There are probably two decisive reasons for this surprisingly frequent presence of the theme of epilepsy. On the one hand, the prevalence (frequency) of this disease (which today is 0.5-1% worldwide, and was surely not smaller in earlier centuries); on the other, the impressive symptomatology of the prototypical epileptic event, the tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure.

References to epilepsy can already be found in written reports from the pre-Christian era, thus, for example, in the Old Testament – in the fourth book of the Pentateuch (Numbers [9th/8th centuries BC], amongst others, when Balaam the seer is repeatedly characterised as "falling; or in the Oresteia of Aeschylus (c. 500 BC), when Cassandra's prophetic sayings are accompanied by the phenomena of frothing at the mouth, convulsion and spitting blood. It is actually remarkable how frequently in literature epilepsy is brought into the vicinity of prophecy (divination - soothsaying - was a synonym for epilepsy in ancient Rome; this relationship has been retained in a French term for epilepsy: mal des prophètes). This connection – between epileptic symptoms and prophecy – is still being made in modern literature; e.g. in Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers (1933); Christa Wolf's Cassandra (1983); in Dostoevsky's epilepsy-contoured Myshkin (The Idiot [1868/69] and Murin (A Young Woman [1847]); in Isabel Allende's Of Love and Shadows (1984) or in the novel by Amoz Oz, To Know a Woman (1989).

In the ancient literature, not only in Aeschylus, but, for example, also in Plautus, in his comedy The Prisoners (from 200 BC) we come across grand mal epilepsy brought into connection with frenzy, in Xenophon of Ephesus, who in the love story Habrocomes and Anthea, the Lovers of Ephesus (2^nd century AD) describes a simulated epileptic fit, and in Apuleius of Madaura in his Apologia (157/158 AD), who gives the first detailed description of the sensitivity to light (photosensitivity) experienced by some epileptics. In the New Testament of the Bible, the disease symptoms described by the three synoptic evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke) leave no doubt that the moonstruck boy healed by Christ exorcising a demon refers to a boy with epilepsy. The theme of epilepsy is also occasionally found in mediaeval literature, e.g. in the Old French love story of Aucassin and Nicolette by an anonymous author (13th century), in which the sight of the beautifully formed leg of a young woman is able to cure a seizure-prone pilgrim of his illness; or in Dante's Divine Comedy (1307), in which the 24^th canto of the Inferno compares the condition of the sinner with an atonic seizure caused by the devil and the subsequent disorientation. Moreover, Dante himself, in his journey through Hell and Purgatory falls suddenly to the ground at least three times and is unconscious for a short period – not least these scenes let Dante be seen as one (by no means proven) example from the host of prominent epileptics.

Shakespeare also used the theme of epilepsy at the threshold of the modern era; the best known being the description of the epileptic fit of the protagonist in the drama Julius Caesar (1599). Less known is a scene from Othello (1604), in which the dark-skinned Venetian general falls to the ground while listening to a distressing report and the a witness standing close by (Iago) terms this an epileptic event.

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