Environmental Data for Specific Sites within the Dead Sea Region

Abstract

Discussion of Early Bronze cultural history at Bab edh-Dhr’a and Numeira sites east of the Lisan Peninsula and on the northeast flank of the Dead Sea south basin is guided mostly by Rast (1987) and Rast and Schaub (1974, 1978, 1980, and 1981). This epoch was divided by Rast and Schaub into two sections according to traditional archaeological chronology. The first section is the urban period of Bab edh-Dhr'a (4890 to 4340 B.P.) including Early Bronze I, II, and III. The second is the posturban period (4340 to 4190 B.P.), Early Bronze IV or the Intermediate Bronze age according to Kochavi (1967), Kenyon (1979), Gophna (1992), and R. Amiran and Kochavi (1985) as well as Middle Bronze I according to Albright (1962). Although no prominent cultural hiatus separates these two sections, the transition between them contains abundant indications of extensive destruction and fire events brought about by natural disasters such as earthquakes. Donahue (1980, 1981) considered that not just one but two severe earthquakes occurred, one about 4400 B.P. and the other 4350 B.P. Numeira was totally and finally abandoned after the second earthquake, whereas Bab edh-Dhr’a was reinhabited apparently as a result of conquest by seminomadic people of the same cultural background. This second earthquake probably was the one by which Sodom and Gomorrah were totally destroyed. Abrupt cultural changes also were recorded in the southeast Negev at Uvda Valley during transition from Early Bronze III to Middle Bronze I about 4300 B.P. These changes were from a gradually increasing population within a walled city having a life-style based on a combination of agriculture and animal husbandry into a more nomadic community with unfortified houses and primarily a grazing economy. According to Avner (1990, p. 133) “Subsequent to a brief climatic crisis at the end of the third millennium BC the climate improved, allowing the new culture to blossom in the desert.” This climatic crisis could have been extreme dryness. By the middle of the Intermediate Bronze age at about 4200 B.P., Bab edh-Dhr’a, the last Early Bronze site to survive was totally abandoned and the Dead Sea south basin remained basically unsettled for more than 1,500 years until Hellenistic time.