From the Times of Israel, March 26:
Iron from a 2,600-year-old shipwreck off Israeli coast may rewrite the history of war
The first evidence that iron was traded as a semifinished product has been found off the coast of northern Israel. It may have been intended for weaponry among rival empires in an era of upheaval
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....
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