Nomads and Their Artifacts

A new perspective on Biblical wanderers suggests they might have used buildings – just not to live in.

A breathtaking view of the Negev Desert, where the Hebrew Bible says the Israelites sojourned after the Exodus. The traditional archaeological interpretation of first milennium BCE buildings in this area, which held that nomads were settling down in more permanent communities after thousands of years of wandering, is now being questioned. Image credit: Aron Kamphausen.

My first encounter with ancient archaeology was a childhood visit to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, where you can famously lean over a railing and stroke a gargantuan thighbone still embedded in the rock. Europe has a surprising number of ancient sites as well — surprising since one tends to think of Europe as having retained much of its architecture, but Roman and Celtic ruins can be found as far north as Germany.

Still, nowhere is the distant past as present as in Israel/Palestine, which has woven archaeological preservation into its national identity. Go down a flight of stairs in Nazareth’s Annunciation church, and you’ll see the grotto where Catholics believe Mary’s home once stood. A similar trip below the stone-paved surface of Jerusalem will take you to a street from the time of Herod, lined with columns for shops from long ago.

Mary’s grotto beneath the Basilica of the Annunciation in the Palestinian city of Nazareth. Image credit: Carole Raddato via Flickr.

But the Hebrew Bible says that the ancient Israelites were nomads, continually pulling up stakes and taking all of their possessions with them. They left no stone edifices to be dug up centuries later, unlike the more advanced peoples of the Biblical era like the Egyptians and Babylonians.

Or did they?

A reexamination of hundreds of sites in the northern Negev desert — where I set my novel retelling the Exodus in a realistic frame — theorizes that these were not settlements, evidence that nomads were forming permanent communities in what would become biblical kingdoms, but rather “function-specific installations” of a highly organized but otherwise archaeologically invisible society. These sites were “trading hubs, protection and coordination nodes, and frontier markers” of a group of wanderers who were heavily involved in mining and selling copper, the main ingredient of the bronze for which the epoch was named.

The article in the 2025 issue of Antiguo Oriente, by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University’s archaeology department, argues that the lack of agriculture surrounding the buildings at these sites indicates that they were used by people who literally did not intend to put down roots. “[The] prominence [of these sites] in an otherwise archaeologically empty landscape should not be confused with evidence for ‘settlements’ or sedentary occupation,” writes Ben-Yosef. “Likewise, the end of their use does not indicate societal collapse, but rather the cessation of copper production and its associated exchange systems.”

A map of major copper mines in the ancient southern Levant. Timna, just above the right “fingertip” of the Red Sea, was hugely important to the early Israelite economy and may have been a place where the god of Israel, a.k.a. Jehovah, was worshiped. Image credit: Nissim Amzallag, Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

In order to make bronze, tin is added to copper , according to Rhys Tushingham of the University of Ottawa’s Museum of Classical Antiquities. This 1:9 ratio of tin to copper creates an alloy stronger than either metal, and thereby an advantage in weaponry. But tin had to be acquired from mines as far away as Afghanistan, so when those trade routes fell apart the peoples of the Middle East switched to refining iron ore instead. Although locally plentiful, iron smelting is a more challenging endeavor; in order to be worked, iron must reach much higher temperatures than those needed for copper. This is why the Iron Age succeeded the Bronze Age: Forging implements of iron required major technological advances made necessary by the scarcity of tin.

The historical moment when tin became harder to come by is approximately when the northern Negev sites were abandoned, and Ben-Yosef believes that the tribes who built them simply decided they weren’t useful anymore. The appearance of the sites are evidence “neither [of]the arrival of new populations nor a sedentarization process,” he writes, “but instead the episodic archaeological visibility of a society that remained essentially nomadic throughout.”

Ben-Yosef theorizes that the tribes involved in this copper exchange network eventually became the nation of Edom, which the Book of Genesis says was descended from Jacob’s brother Esau (Gen. 36:43). But he adds that much scholarly discussion must take place before any final identification is made. 

That is just enough ambiguity for me to claim that at least some of these nomads could have been Israelites — so they can be characters in my novel.

I am thrilled with Ben-Yosef’s interpretation of the archaeological evidence because it dovetails so well with the world I am building for the Israelites twenty years post-Exodus. One of my protagonists marries a caravaner who is bringing freshly-mined copper to far-flung places, while a side character founds an inn at Kadesh-Barnea for travelers along the copper trade route. The other main protagonist, along with most of the tribes of Israel, maintains a nomadic, pastoral lifestyle, occasionally interacting with caravans along the all-important copper road to sell wool or finished goods like jewelry. And the “bad guy” of the Exodus story, Moses’s cousin Korah, wears a lapis lazuli pendant originating from an Afghan mine, signaling his status as a smuggler of valuable commodities in my version of the biblical events.

After reading Ben-Yosef’s article, I may just add tin to the list of Korah’s contraband when I get around to revising my current draft. It really is true that research never ends for a historical novelist; as W. H. Auden said of poems, it is “only abandoned.”

King Tut’s world-famous golden burial mask. The decorations of the eye and the eyebrows were made from lapis lazuli, while the similarly-shaded blue stripes on his headcloth are glass — highlighting the value of the lapis, dug up in far-off Afghanistan and brought in small amounts to Egypt. Image credit: Roland Unger — Own work, Public Domain.