I'm John Bacheler and I welcome the Dusty one.

Indiana Honeline himself, the Shapo, the Bag of Tricks, the Bullwhip, and we're going to

his exploration of the Kingdom of Edom, the Copper Mines of Timna.

Indiana, what have you got in your Bag of Tricks?

Well, thanks to the wonderful work of our colleagues who have been excavating what is known

as Slaves Hill, though they have nothing to do with Slaves.

The new site near Timna, the mines, the copper mines that date back, as you said, to the

time of David and Solomon.

What they found there in one of the heaps was in this area, which was a center for copper

production, which was very highly guarded secret technology of its day, sort of what we

experienced today in high technology.

This was the largest copper smelting site in the area and they found in the waste and

slide, Colour Cloth.

The cloth immediately attract the attention of the excavators because it was the purple

dye associated with royalty.

And now, and the earlier the only things we found was a thousand years younger from the

Roman period.

So here we're finding stuff that goes back to the 9th to 11th centuries BCE and probably

made from the mousers, the snails that were used to dye the royal color blue for the

king and for the priests in the temple.

There have been a couple of samples of this found and even on the temple mount, one of

the snails was actually found there native to the Mediterranean.

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