Khirbat en-Nahas, or “ruins of copper,” was the first site the archaeologist team excavated. But according to the ELRAP team’s findings, the people of Edom would swoop down into the dry river valleys below to mine precious copper. “Though you make your nests as high as eagles, I will bring you down from there,” the author wrote. King Solomon’s secrets may not be so easy to discover, but expeditions to southern Jordan in the last decade by a joint team of archaeologists from Jordan and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have revealed that copper smelting in the neighboring kingdom of Edom, Judah’s bitter rival, progressed to an industrial level.Įdomites lived in the highlands, according to sources dating back to the Book of Jeremiah. The test method is simple: fire x-rays, study the chemical makeup, and consider what your findings reveal given the historical context. All of this happens in as few as 1-2 seconds-pretty good for laboratory-grade analysis.Īrchaeologists use the ”elemental vision” of XRF to discover historical secrets. The sample responds by emitting x-ray fluorescence, with each element giving off its own ‘fluorescent fingerprint.’ The XRF gun then reads the fingerprints and gives the user a detailed profile of the sample’s elemental composition.
X-ray fluorescence (XRF) is a non-destructive measurement technique in which one fires x-rays at a sample with an XRF analyzer, a tool commonly known as an XRF gun. Meet the XRF Gun: An Archaeologist’s Storytelling Device
Who knows what could have been possible?Ī vision of history illuminated by a simple tool: the XRF gun. A baptismal basin that stood on twelve bronze bulls. Going deeper than you or I might, down into the slag’s elemental composition, archaeologists have discovered evidence in the last decade that King Solomon may have had smiths skilled enough to build the Kingdom of Judah described in the Bible. How, you may ask, would we know anything about a biblical King from a blacksmith’s slag-his metallurgical waste pile? K ing Solomon’s secrets may be hidden in a shard of copper slag.
Looking into the Past with “Elemental Vision”
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