The End of Arabah Copper Production and the Destruction of Gath: A Critique and an Alternative Interpretation

ABSTRACT

Recent research has proposed that the Philistine city of Tell es-Safi/Gath was centrally involved in the copper trade from Faynan and Timna in the Wadi Arabah, and that the end of Arabah copper production in the second half of the 9th century bce should be attributed to the destruction of Tell es-Safi/Gath by Hazael, after which Cyprus replaced the Arabah as the major source for Levantine copper. This paper argues that the assumptions underlying this interpretation are not supported by the evidence. Gaza, not Tell es-Safi/Gath, was the main terminus for the Arabah copper trade; the termination of copper production in the Arabah was not an abrupt end caused by external intervention, but the result of a long process of decrease in administrative control and abandonment of copper production sites from the early 9th century bce; Hazael’s motivation in destroying Tell es-Safi/Gath was more likely owing to its size and dominance of the region, and its economic power through olive oil production; Cypriot copper production had already intensified in the late 10th and first half of the 9th centuries bce, while Arabah copper production was still at its peak. An alternative and more complex explanation for the end of copper production in the Arabah emerges from this re-evaluation. The Arabah industry may have lacked the leadership and administrative infrastructure to compete with the renewed Cypriot trade. It continued to produce copper and probably traded it to established markets, but finally petered out by the end of the 9th century bce.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabah
• Faynan
• Tell es-Safi/Gath
• Iron Age
• copper
• Hazael
• Cyprus
• Gaza

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the following for their invaluable assistance with references and comments: Rocío Da Riva, Jamie Novotny, Aren Maeir, Robert Mullins, Brian Schmid and Juan Manuel Tebes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Maeir and Gur-Arieh (2011) and Gur-Arieh and Maeir (2020, 167–71) comprehensively address the challenges to the identification of a siege system at Tell es-Safi/Gath, e.g., by Ussishkin (2009; 2015, 133–34). Although 2 Chr 26:6 records that the Judahite king Uzziah ‘broke down’ the wall of Gath (as well as Jabneh and Ashdod), his dates in the mid-8th century bce are too late to be linked to the destruction of Tell es-Safi/Gath, where pottery clearly dates the siege trench and the destruction to the 9th century bce (Gur-Arieh and Maeir 2020, 162). For Uzziah, see Levin (2017, 235), who comments that ‘breaking down’ or ‘breaching’ walls does not mean destroying them.

2 Maeir (2013, 452) claims that Assyrian sources mention Gaza from the reign of Adad-nirari III (c. 810–783 bce) onwards, but in fact the first specific mention of the city in Assyrian records is in the annals of Tiglath-pileser III. It is true that Philistia first appears in Assyrian records in the inscriptions of Adad-nirari III, when he marched against it (Pritchard 1969, 281–82): this might imply the existence of Gaza a short time after the destruction of Tell es-Safi/Gath, but no city is mentioned by name.

3 The late date of c. 750 bce for the use of Faynan copper—well after the cessation of production in Faynan—might indicate recycling of metal (Ben-Yosef and Sergi 2018, 466).

4 According to the revised chronology of Khirbat an-Nahas by Tebes (2021), the Area A gatehouse and the Area R building were constructed in the 9th century bce, but still went out of use well before the end of that century.

5 Levy, Najjar and Ben-Yosef (2014, 993; see also Ben-Yosef and Sergi 2018, 467–68) interpret these changes as a centralisation of production connected with Shoshenq I’s campaign in the second half of the 10th century bce. However, the evidence for Shoshenq’s presence at Faynan is weak, and in any case, this does not explain the lack of evidence for administrative control after the early 9th century bce.

6 In fact, there is no archaeological evidence of other siege trenches from the ancient Near East, only textual references (Maeir and Gur-Arieh 2011, 231–32). Intriguingly, one of these, on the Zakkur inscription, refers to Bar-Hadad, the son of Hazael, who with other kings besieged Hadrak in Syria: ‘And they raised a rampart higher than the rampart of Hadrak/ and they dug a moat deeper than its moat’ (Younger 2016, 478). This sounds similar to the siege system used by Hazael, albeit not as successful (see Younger 2016, 481–86 for the siege and deliverance of Hadrak).

7 Maeir, Welch and Eniukhina (2021, 140) suggest that the flourishing of olive oil production in the Judaean Shephelah in the 8th century bce may have been connected to the destruction of Gath and its large-scale olive oil production by Hazael.

8 Kassianidou (2014, 266–67) argues that, although Cypriot copper production intensified in the early Iron Age, it had never been interrupted, but that in the 11th and 10th centuries bce copper exports primarily went west to the Aegean and central Mediterranean rather than east. She cites samples from an ancient slag heap at Skouriotissa radiocarbon-dated to the 11th and 10th centuries bce (not included in the chart in Ben-Yosef and Sergi 2018, fig. 4), which can be added to timber supports dated to the first half of the 1st millennium bce (Kassianidou 2013, 57–58), although the bulk of ancient mining at that site dates to the Late Roman–Early Byzantine period (Kassianidou, Agapiou and Manning 2021).

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Piotr Bienkowski

Piotr Bienkowski is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology and Museology at the University of Manchester, and previously was Director of Manchester Museum. He has been carrying out fieldwork in southern Jordan since 1980 and is co-director of the International Umm al-Biyara Project and the Roads to Mansur Project.