Archaeologists performing excavations in the south of Israel say they've exposed copper mines old-fashioned to the days of King Solomon.
Copper mines formerly thinking to have been built by early Egyptians in the 13th century B.C. really instigated three centuries later through the control of the legendary King Solomon, they said.
Intellectual study and investigation of materials found in the area -- the Timna Valley in Israel's Aravah Desert -- advocate the mines were operated by the Edomites, a semi-nomadic ethnic amalgamation mentioned in the Bible as warring regularly with Israel, a liberate from the American Friends of Tel Aviv University reported Tuesday.
"The mines are definitely from the period of King Solomon," Tel Aviv archaeology Professor Erez Ben-Yosef said. "They may help us understand the local society, which would have been invisible to us otherwise."
Excavation revealed a massive smelting camp containing the remnants of hundreds of furnaces and layers of copper slag, the waste created during the smelting process.
Cooperation among thousands of people would have been required to operate the mines in the middle of the desert, the researchers said.
(In Timna Valley, we unearthed a society with undoubtedly significant development, organization, and power," Ben-Yosef said. "And yet because the people were living in tents, they would have been transparent to us as archaeologists if they had been engaged in an industry other than mining and smelting, which is very visible archaeologically.)