far away in the Middle East a revolution was starting which would end this vision
of community forever
human identity would never be the same again in the Wadi Hana in southern Jordan
green malachite was exposed by flash flooding in a river bid
it's one of the sources of copper
the thing that's fairly clear about Malachi wall£¨µØÃû£© is that there was a lot of
it around in places like what you find in
it's one of the predominant rocks anyone that might fire a place and what we find
in and out of the green rocks was going to realize that this stuff melted at a
pretty low temperatures and it wouldn't have been too long and i had a fashion
this melted stone into a variety of forms and better steal you could do it
over and over again
the miners were inspired by the color they grounded it into peace for jewelry
without smelting it but they had customers from the other side of the
Dead Sea who wanted huge quantities
they have a monopoly that is the people living in the Bear Shovel Valley about a
hundred and fifty kilometers from here over there on metal production ie they
would send their miners their traders over here to procure the ore to mine the
ore and then put it on the donkeys and sort of schlep it back across the desert
- the Bear Shovel Valley
but these traders had a secret
the exact way of heating the ore to create something fabulous by
superheating with blown pipes they created the first true smelted metal
copper was used to make everything from ornaments to daggers
not only that it could be inversely recast into other shapes
we are actually finding copper objects abandoned which is very strange
copper and crucibles and the nozzles of bellows which shows that they're
actually making those objects on that site and they're a long way from any
copper the nearest copper is over in the Wadi Arab in Jordan
the other side of the Dead Sea and the other side of the Wadi Arab and
there we've got people who are apparently mining and smelting copper
and it's hardly anybody living there to use the stuff so presumably again we've
got networks and people living in southern Israel know how to get the
materials they need from people who live in what is today inside Jordan and
people inside Jordan were sitting on the top of metal resources know that
there are people living over to the west of them quite a long way away several days walk
but does there is a market as we would say in terms of our modern
economics that they know that those people over there who
who want the stuff
smelted copper was the first metal and very exotic
it was a prime trade item and the prime traders were the rustle dealers
they love the chance to show off and copper could be cast to such wonderful shapes