Some 2,600 years ago, much like today, the Middle East was in turmoil.

At the time, the region featured several superpowers — the Assyrians in decline, the Babylonians on the rise, and the ever-influential Egyptians — fighting over land and hegemony in the Southern Levant.

Between the end of the 7th century and the beginning of the 6th century BCE, control over the northern part of the land of Israel — where the Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Israel a century earlier — switched hands from the Assyrians, to the Egyptians and then the Babylonians (who in 586 would also conquer and destroy the kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem).

It was against the backdrop of this upheaval that a ship sank just meters from the ancient harbor of Dor, on the Carmel Coast in northern Israel (also known as Tantura Lagoon). Over two and a half millennia later, as maritime archaeologists retrieved some of its cargo, they made an unprecedented discovery, which changes the understanding of ancient metal production, trade routes, and possibly war supplies in the Iron Age (1200-586 BCE), a crucial time in the region’s history when most of the biblical narratives took place.

As revealed in a paper published earlier this month in Heritage Science, a journal of the prestigious Nature group, the goods carried by the ship – nothing of which survived other than a wood and lead anchor – included several chunks of iron in their raw state after the smelting process in a furnace.

Known as “iron blooms,” the artifacts offer, for the first time, evidence that iron was traded in this semifinished form, with very significant implications, Tzilla Eshel of the University of Haifa, one of the authors of the paper, told The Times of Israel.

According to Eshel, the dating of the iron shipment is no coincidence.

“This was a tense period of constant conquering of the Southern Levant, and iron was a very important resource,” she said. “If you produce blooms, that means someone is waiting for them on the other side, and has the technology and the ability to make them into something that is worthwhile the effort — first and foremost, weapons.”

At the time, iron was used to make arrowheads, daggers, swords and more, she explained.

The researchers were able to radiocarbon-date the cargo with high precision thanks to several organic samples recovered from its remains, including grape seeds in the pottery and a charred oak twig embedded in one of the blooms. Because of the rapid political changes in the few decades between the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th centuries, though, they could not determine which political entity the ship could be associated with, nor whether it was departing or arriving at Dor.

“When I imagine these blooms sinking, I see someone waiting for a ship full of metal that will help them fight a war, only to see it sink in front of their eyes,” Eshel explained. “However, we do not know which of the empires we can associate the trade with.”

The importance of iron

The iron........

© The Times of Israel