overview
Timna, located in the Arabah
excavation
The Timna Valley was first identified as an ancient site of copper extraction and smelting by J. Petherick in 1861. The remote location was subsequently partly explored and described by A. Musil (1902); thereafter by both F. Frank (1934) and Nelson Glueck (1935), who together reported finding evidence of seven smelting camps with slag heaps without, however, identifying the actual copper mines or deposits which had obviously supplied these camps.
bibliography
Merkel, J.F.
“Experimental reconstruction of Bronze Age copper smelting based on archaeological evidence from Timna”, in Rothenburg, B. (ed.), The Ancient Metallurgy of Copper: Archaeology, Experiment, Theory, London: Institute for Archaeo-metallurgical Studies, 1990, pp.78-122.
Rothenberg, Beno
“Ancient Copper Industries in the Western Arabah: An Archaeological Survey of the Arabah, Part 1”, PEQ 94 (1962), pp.5-71.
Timna – Valley of the Biblical Copper Mines, [New Aspects of Antiquity, ed. Mortimer Wheeler], Thames & Hudson: London, 1972.
The Egyptian Mining Temple at Timna – Researches on the Arabah 1, London: Institute for Archaeo-Metallurgical Studies, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, 1988.
“Timna”, in Stern, E. (ed.), The New Encyclopaedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, volume 4, Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993, pp.1475-1486.
“Who were the ‘Midianite’ copper miners of Arabah?”, in Rehren, Th., Hauptmann, A. & Muhly J.D., Metallurgica Antiqua. In honour of Hans-Gert Bachmann and Robert Maddin [Der Anschnitt 8], Deutsches Bergbau-Museum: Bochum, 1998, pp.197-212.
Segal, I., Rothenberg, B. & Bar-Matthews, M.
“Smelting slag from prehistoric sites F2 and N3 in Timna, SW Arabah, Israel”, in Rehren, Th., Hauptmann, A. & Muhly J.D., Metallurgica Antiqua. In honour of Hans-Gert Bachmann and Robert Maddin [Der Anschnitt 8], Deutsches Bergbau-Museum: Bochum, 1998, pp.223-234.