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Glueck and his companions knew as soon as they saw the place. Khirbet Nahas, now in Jordan, was the center of a mining and smelting complex, part of which can be traced back to the Early Bronze Age. Most of the crude furnaces and miners' huts were built during the Iron Age, which includes the time of Solomon. The large amount of slag proves that copper was smelted there in quantity, making the place well worth protecting with a chain of forts.
Apes & Peacocks. Another favorite passage in Glueck's guidebook spoke of Solomon's seaport: "And King Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom." The Queen of Sheba presumably passed through Ezion-geber on her visit to Solomon, and every three years a fleet of merchant ships brought "gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks."
There are many archaeological sites at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern branch of the Red Sea, but no one knew which, if any, was Solomon's seaport. A German explorer, Fritz Frank, discovered a low mound called Tell el Khalifa that seemed to fill the requirements. But Frank had no way of backing up his guess. When Glueck came along, he quickly satisfied himself by means of the pottery code that the tell was indeed Solomonic. But why was it built in such an unpleasant place, where water is scarce and a tremendous wind, often laden with sand, roars down the wadi? A brief investigation brought the answer: Ezion-geber was only incidentally a seaport. It was principally an elaborate copper smelter built to use the blast effect of the prevailing wind.
On the spot, Glueck turned temporarily from a surface man to a dogged digger. Financed by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Smithsonian Institution, he braved the heat and the dust storms to excavate the smelter. The buildings that he revealed are probably the best examples of early industrialism. The massive walls of the smelter are pierced with intricate holes and channels through which the wind still whistles.
Well-Covered Spy. By the time Glueck finished his dig, World War II was raging, and he barely managed to get his share of the finds shipped back to the U.S. He followed later, via Bombay and Cape Town, and reconciled himself to staying out of the Near East for the duration. But a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he got a telephone summons to appear in Washington without delay. By lunchtime the next day he was working for General "Wild Bill" Donovan's Office of Strategic Services. He took a quick course in how to handle codes, and soon he was on his way back to Transjordan. "I had the best cover of any spy," he says, "because it was real. I went on doing what I had always done. I would investigate five to ten archaeological sites per day, then find the nearest Arab encampment."
During the long evening gabfests he got all the local news, sounded out Arab public opinion, watched for Nazi spies, kept track of the rather secretive British. For "archaeological purposes" he even managed to borrow the best British air photos of Transjordan, and got them copied for the OSS. "I was supposed to play some sort of Lawrence of Arabia role," he says. "I