Timna and the mines called Solomon’s

Copper has come out of this valley since the fifth millennium BCE, which makes it some of the oldest worked ground on Earth. In the 1930s the archaeologist Nelson Glueck looked at the sandstone pillars here and tied them to King Solomon, and the name stuck hard enough to build a tourist industry on. His hypothesis was never accepted. What the digging actually found is better: Erez Ben-Yosef’s excavations dated the big smelting camps to the eleventh to ninth centuries BCE and read them as Edomite, an industrial operation run by a desert kingdom nobody credits with one. Solomon’s Pillars themselves are natural, cut by water working down fractures in the sandstone. There is also a genuine Egyptian temple to Hathor from the fourteenth or thirteenth century BCE with thousands of finds in it, and rock drawings of Egyptian chariots. Nature reserve since 2002, about 30 km north of Eilat.