Camels, Copper and Donkeys in the Early Iron Age of the Southern Levant: Timna Revisited

Abstract

The camel and equid remains from a copper-smelting site — Site 30 at Timna in the southern Arabah excavated by Rothenberg in the 1970s and recently re-dated to the Iron I/Iron II — are analysed in relation to recently published data on the domestication of the dromedary and on the morphology of the various equid taxa present in the Middle East. It is concluded that camels and donkeys were employed in the distribution of copper from Timna and from mines in the eastern Arabah, prior to the large-scale utilization of camels in the incense trade between the Levant and southern Arabia in Iron II.

Keywords:

• Iron Age
• Timna
• dromedary
• donkey
• domestication
• Quarayya ware
• Southern Levant
• Camelus
• Equus
• archaeozoology
• incense trade
• Arabia

My thanks are due to Professor Beno Rothenberg for inviting me to work on the camel and donkey bones from Timna; to him, Peter Parr, Hans-Peter Uerpmann and Erez Ben-Yosef for much interesting discussion, help with the literature and critical reading of earlier drafts of this paper; much useful information was also received from Liora Kolska Horwitz, Guy Bar-Oz, Marjan Maskour and Henriette Obermaier. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for some corrections. The faults that remain are, of course, my own.