Timna Park

The entrance is on Route 90 near Kibbutz Elifaz, and the park's own instruction after buying a ticket is to stop at the visitor centre for a barcode, a map and an orientation. That is not a formality: the centre is where the 360-degree film and the exhibits are, and it is where a ranger will tell which of the trails are open. From there a made road runs to each of the main sites, each with its own car park.

Almost every site is a short walk from a car park rather than a hike. The park gives Solomon's Pillars as a circular route of 500 metres at easy difficulty, the Hathor temple as 200 metres there and back, the Mushroom as 200 to 300 metres, the Chariots engravings as 200 to 300 metres, and the Waffle Wall as about 100 metres from the Mushroom car park. The long walking is optional and clearly signposted: three canyon trails of 4.7 kilometres, 6 kilometres and 10 kilometres, the last of which the park rates challenging and puts at about three and a half hours, and a family circuit of 3 kilometres past fossil trees.

Water is the constraint the park is most insistent about. Its hiker guidance asks for a minimum of three litres per person and states that a hydration station is available only at the Lake Complex. Hiking at night is prohibited outright, and drones need authorisation. Gates close at 16:00, but visitors already inside may stay until sunset.

• Solomon's Pillars: 500 m circular, easy
• Temple of Hathor: 200 m there and back, easy
• The Arches, red trail: about an hour, ladders and stakes
• Canyon trails: 4.7 km, 6 km and 10 km loops
• Fossil Trees: 3 km circular, family-friendly
• Carry at least 3 litres per person; water only at the lake

The single most consequential thing found in this valley is small, low and easy to walk past. At the base of Solomon's Pillars stands a shrine to Hathor, the Egyptian goddess associated with mining and with foreign lands, known in the excavation records as Site 200 and on the park's signs as the Miners' Temple. The Central Timna Valley Project's account credits its excavation to Rothenberg's Arabah Expedition in 1969. The park dates the structure to Egypt's 19th and 20th Dynasties and says it went through several phases of destruction and rebuilding, with material from both the Egyptian and the Midianite periods in it.

The wider Egyptian window is tighter than the temple alone suggests. Cavanagh, Ben-Yosef and Langgut, writing in Scientific Reports in 2022, put the New Kingdom presence at roughly 1300 to 1140 BCE, from Seti I to Ramesses V, and note that the valley was originally attributed solely to those dynasties precisely because of the rich Egyptian finds from this one small temple. Egypt then withdrew from the southern Aravah at the end of the Late Bronze Age, weakened by internal struggles and by the wider collapse across the eastern Mediterranean.

What a visitor sees is foundation courses and re-erected stone rather than a standing building, which is normal for a shrine of this size and age and is worth expecting. The compensation is above it. The park points to a smoothed surface on the cliff ceiling just north of the temple carrying an Egyptian rock engraving of Ramesses III, reached by the staircase that climbs from the temple. It is a short climb and it is the reason to do the Solomon's Pillars loop in the order the park suggests: up the stairs to the carving, then down to the temple.

Glueck's reading in the 1930s was that these were the mines of King Solomon, and the name stuck to the pillars permanently even though the pillars are a landform. The obituary of Rothenberg published in the Israel Exploration Journal in 2012 describes what happened next: with strict adherence to the facts on the ground, and in a period soaked in biblical literalism, Rothenberg replaced Glueck's Solomon at Timna with an interpretation of Egyptian-controlled mines after he found the Hathor temple. That became the standard account for nearly half a century.

It is no longer standard. The Central Timna Valley Project states flatly that the previously accepted Egyptian paradigm, under which the main sites belonged to the Late Bronze Age, is no longer valid: Site 30 is now dated to the early Iron Age, the 11th to 9th centuries BCE, and the date of the other main smelting camps and of the thousands of mine shafts is consequently insecure. Ben-Yosef, Liss, Yagel, Tirosh, Najjar and Levy, publishing in PLOS ONE in September 2019, radiocarbon dated 154 slag samples from controlled contexts and found continuous copper production from about 1300 to 800 BCE, peaking after Egypt's departure rather than during it.

Who ran that peak is where researchers still differ, and the difference is not a technicality. The 2019 paper reads the industry as the emergence of the Edomite kingdom, and identifies a sharp technological leap in the second half of the 10th century BCE, with the copper left behind in the slag falling by 55.5 per cent as smelting got better. It links that leap to the campaign of the pharaoh Shoshenq I, commonly dated to around 925 BCE. Timna Park's own account of the same evidence takes the 10th-century date as reassigning the mines to Solomon and the United Monarchy. Both readings sit on the same radiocarbon dates; the disagreement is about which polity to attach them to, and it is unresolved.

Rothenberg's expedition sorted the workings into three technologies, and the project that succeeded him kept the scheme. Type A is open-pit mining, shallow pits dug into the gravel below the sandstone cliffs to pick out copper ore nodules that had already eroded out of the rock. Type B is shaft-and-gallery work cut with stone tools. Type C is the same idea cut with metal chisels, and thousands of shafts across the valley belong to it, most of them dug to prospect for a vein rather than to follow one.

Dating a hole in the ground is hard, because mines leave almost no pottery or organic material. The Central Timna Valley Project applied optically stimulated luminescence to the sediment that refilled two mining areas near the chariot engravings, measuring how long the quartz grains had been in the dark. The results put open-pit mining at Merkavot 1 in the Chalcolithic, with further work there at the end of the second millennium BCE, and put an excavated shaft at Merkavot 2 in the Chalcolithic as well. That is a very long industry: the same valley, worked with hammer stones and then with chisels, across three and a half millennia.

For a visitor the mines are reached at the Arches. The park's red trail there takes about an hour and involves ladder climbs, stakes and squeezing through narrow passages, and it runs past ancient mining works with interpretive signs. The black trail is a 30-minute variant off it, climbing ladders into a cave and back out to a viewpoint. Anyone unhappy on ladders or in confined spaces should take the green trail instead, which the park gives as 15 to 20 minutes to the Small Arch.

Smelting copper takes a furnace at around 1,100 degrees, and in a hyper-arid valley the scarce commodity is not ore but firewood. Mark Cavanagh, Erez Ben-Yosef and Dafna Langgut set out to find what the smelters actually burned, analysing hundreds of charcoal samples from two well-stratified accumulations of industrial waste. Their paper appeared in Scientific Reports on 21 September 2022.

The answer was two local species: Retama raetam, white broom, and acacia, both high in calorific value and both well suited to a furnace. The telling detail is what turned up later in the sequence. Species unsuited to the prevailing regional conditions begin to appear in the charcoal, which the authors read as the search for fuel widening as the nearby stands were used up. Their conclusion is that the lucrative copper industry ended because it ran out of fuel, having hastened desertification and degraded the local ecosystem itself.

It is an unusually direct thing to be able to see from an archaeological site, and it changes how the slag mounds read. The heaps beside the trails are not just waste. They are a record of how many acacia trees the valley no longer has.

Three of the park's best-known features are modern, and the park says so. The Tabernacle is a full-scale reconstruction of the biblical Mishkan, built with the altar, the copper laver, the table of showbread, the menorah, the Ark and the priestly garments, and presented as a model rather than as a find. It is seen on a guided tour that has to be booked in advance and costs ₪20 per person on top of entry, running hourly on Sunday to Thursday mornings and afternoons, earlier on Friday, and not at all on Saturday.

Timna Lake is artificial. It was made to give wildlife a permanent water source and visitors somewhere to sit, it covers 16 dunams and holds roughly 20,000 cubic metres of water that is not drinkable, and swimming in it is not allowed. Pedal boats are. The lake complex is where the café, the shop, the sand bottle filling station and the accommodation are, and it is the only place in the park with a hydration station.

The sandstone formations, by contrast, are entirely natural and are frequently taken for the opposite. The park is explicit that the arches, though they mimic built structures, are the work of wind on sandstone over millennia. So is the Mushroom, where a hard cap sits on a slender stem because the softer rock beneath eroded faster, and so is the Sphinx, and so are Solomon's Pillars, which are erosion working down the cracks in red sandstone and have no connection to Solomon beyond Glueck's naming.