Featured Image Credit: Israel Antiquities Authority
Topics: History, Religion, Archaeology
Joe Harker
An archaeological discovery of a weapons factory 5,500 years old has shed some light on a people spoken about a lot in the Bible.
Earlier this year at the Nahal Qomem archaeological site in Israel, a workshop which appears to have been used to make bladed weapons was uncovered.
The workshop dates back to the early Bronze Age and among the things found there were flint blades and components used to put the weapons together.
As well as cutting weapons, there were also bladed harvesting tools found in the factory, thousands of years old, with archaeologists connecting the discovery to the Canaanite people who are frequently mentioned in the Bible.
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An excavation of the site discovered hundreds of underground pits, which served as storage and, in some cases, homes, which helps fill in some of the details of how people living in the area millennia ago lived.
Israel Antiquities Authority prehistorians Dr Jacob Vardi and Dudu Biton said these findings showed evidence of expert craftsmen living in the region.
They said in a Facebook post: "An advanced industry was revealed at the site, requiring an extremely high level of expertise.
"Only exceptional individuals knew how to produce the Canaanite blades. This is clear evidence that already at the onset of the Bronze Age, the local society here was organized and complex, and had professional specialization.
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"This archaeological site we excavated was used as an active settlement continuously for hundreds of years – from the Chalcolithic period through to the Early Bronze Age."
Dr Vardi said that the archaeological finding suggested that blades made in the uncovered settlement ended up being distributed around the region which would have made it a very important production centre back in the day.
"This is a sophisticated industry - not only because of the tools themselves, but also because of what is not found," Dr Vardi said of the discovery.
"The waste fragments, the debitage, were not scattered outside the site - perhaps to better protect and preserve the professional knowledge within the group of experts.
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"Today, we understand that this site served as a centre, from which Canaanite blades were distributed across broad regions in the Levant."
The more of the world we discover and uncover, the more we learn about how humans lived and worked in times gone by.
Discoveries from thousands of years ago provide an insight into times from which no written records exist and are the only surviving evidence of some people's existence and culture.