When I was a boy in Saltash, the Tamar at low tide revealed the grey-green slate the Cornish call killas — the foundation of a peninsula that for four millennia gave the ancient world one of its most precious metals. Tin. Without tin, no bronze. Without bronze, no Bronze Age. And, as a remarkable 2019 study quietly demonstrated, without Cornish tin, in all likelihood no Solomon’s Temple.

That is not Sunday-school speculation. In June 2019, an international team of archaeometallurgists led by Daniel Berger of the Curt Engelhorn Centre in Mannheim published in PLOS One the most rigorous provenance analysis ever attempted on Late Bronze Age tin: lead and tin isotopes combined with trace-element fingerprinting, applied to twenty-seven ingots recovered from shipwrecks off Israel, Turkey, and Crete. The verdict on the ingots from Israel — including those raised from the Hishuley Carmel wreck off Haifa — pointed neither to the Taurus mountains nor to the Afghan and Central Asian sources long favoured by orthodox scholarship. It pointed to the Variscan tin belts of Cornwall and Devon. The Carnmenellis and St Agnes granites of west Cornwall are now the leading suspects for the metal that, alloyed with copper, became the bronze of the eastern Mediterranean.

The dating matters. The ingots in question are thirteenth- and twelfth-century BCE, predating Solomon by two to three centuries. They establish that by the time Hiram of Tyre and Solomon of Jerusalem entered into their famous metals partnership in the mid-tenth century BCE, a long-haul tin supply chain from south-west Britain to the Levant had already been operating for the better part of three hundred years. The 1 Kings 10:22 record is explicit: Solomon and Hiram operated “a navy of Tharshish” returning every three years with gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. By Solomon’s day this was not a new venture. It was mature infrastructure. The operation was a relay rather than a single voyage — Cornish miners to Atlantic-Gaul........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)