Archaeology: The City of Solomon's Cauldrons

In the Biblical land of Gilead, on the east side of the Jordan River, stands a flat-topped mound 140 ft. high called Tell es-Sa'īdîyeh, the "Hill of Women of the Sa'īd Tribe." Its surface is thinly littered with pottery fragments, and a sharp eye can pick out traces of ancient walls. Archaeologists have long suspect ed that the place has a formidable his tory, but they could do little more than guess until famed Digger James B.

Pritchard of the University of Pennsylvania started exploring there two months ago. Pritchard hit pay dirt so fast that he has hardly caught up with himself. He now suspects that in Biblical times the Jordan Valley was the richest and most civilized part of Palestine.

The oldest city on the site of Tell es-Sa'īdîyeh may have been thousands of years old when Abraham first drove his flocks into the land of Canaan.

Burned City. After mobilizing 130 Arab laborers from nearby villages, Dr. Pritchard sank 30 pits at the northwest part of the mound. The much-eroded surface layer was probably the remains of the last city to occupy the mound, apparently abandoned about 700 B.C. A few feet below the surface were the floors, streets and wall-footings of an older city that was destroyed by fire. Grey wood ash was everywhere, sometimes mixed with charred beams and mud from fallen roofs.

One building must have been full of combustible material; the fire inside got so hot that it baked the clay walls into reddish brick. A line of 72 loom weights in one corner made Dr. Pritchard suspect that the structure was a primitive textile factory full of inflammable weaving materials. When his diggers removed the dirt near by, they found the regular streets of a carefully planned city with a community bakery. The dwellings had mud-brick walls and central columns to support the wooden roof beams. Mixed in the debris were many homely objects of ancient daily life—bowls, flasks, cooking pots, primitive safety pins, figurines, cosmetic palettes.

Dr. Pritchard thinks that the city that burned was probably Zarethan, which is mentioned in the Bible as the place where the great bronze cauldrons for Solomon's temple were cast. From potsherds found on the surface two decades ago, Archaeologist Nelson Glueck had already deduced that Tell es-Sa'īdîyeh would prove to be Zarethan, but other experts thought it an unlikely place for bronze casting. The nearest copper mines of the time were south of the Dead Sea. Dr. Pritchard weakened this argument by digging up quantities of bronze, including a heavy cast cauldron with a jug and strainer. A bronze-founding industry may have grown up because of plentiful firewood in the nearby mountains. If the city was really Zarethan, its destruction by fire can readily be explained. An inscription on Egypt's Great Temple of Ammon at Karnak tells how Pharaoh Sheshonk I ravaged this part of Palestine a few years after Solomon's death.