Has the furnace been invented in Israel?
In 2017 a 6,500-year-old copper workshop has been uncovered during an archeological excavation of Israel Antiquities Authority in Neveh Noy neighborhood of Beer Sheva.
A new study by Tel Aviv University | אוניברסיטת תל-אביב and the Israel Antiquities Authority shows that this site may have made the first use in the world of a revolutionary apparatus: the furnace!
The study was conducted by Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, Dana Ackerfeld, and Omri... Yagel from Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, in conjunction with Dr. Yael Abadi-Reiss, Talia Abulafia, and Dmitry Yegorov of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Dr. Yehudit Harlavan of the Geological Survey of Israel - המכון הגאולוגי לישראל.
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This story begins in the Chalcolithic period, about 6,500 years ago. During this time, copper-producing started.
"It's important to understand that the refining of copper was the high-tech of that period. There was no technology more sophisticated than that in the whole of the ancient world," Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef says. The secret of metalworking was kept by guilds of experts.
The finds include a small workshop for smelting copper with shards of a furnace – a small installation made of tin in which copper ore was smelted – as well as a lot of copper slag.
An analysis of the isotopes of ore remnants in the furnace shards shows that the raw ore was brought to Neveh Noy neighborhood from Wadi Faynan, located in present-day Jordan, a distance of more than 100 kilometers from Beer Sheva!
Scientists believe that the reason copper-producing technology remained a closely guarded secret is the distance between the raw ore brought from in Jordan to where the process was made in Be'er Sheava. It seems that every workshop had its own special "recipe," which it did not share with its competitors.
Prof. Ben-Yosef further notes that "At the beginning of the metallurgical revolution, we see metalworkers' quarters within Chalcolithic settlements, like the neighborhood we found in Beer Sheva."
These findings provide very early evidence for the use of furnaces in metallurgy and it raises a possibility that the furnace was invented in this region. This will only be settled by future discoveries, but there is no doubt that ancient Beer Sheva played an important role in advancing the global metal revolution and that in the fifth millennium BCE the city was a technological powerhouse for this whole region.
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📸 credit: Anat Rasiuk and Emil Alagem, Courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority
