458 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



it directly in the path of these winds, at the sacrifice of much con- 

 venience and comfort for its inhabitants. 



The very first building uncovered gave the answer to this par- 

 ticular problem. The excavations were begun at the northwest end 

 of the mound for various reasons, not the least of them being consid- 

 eration for the direction of the winds, which would at least blow 

 the debris being dug up away from, and not directly into, the eyes of 

 the workmen. A large building containing originally three large 

 rectangular rooms and three small ones was dug out, its walls more 

 or less intact to about a third of their original height. It soon be- 

 came evident that this was not an ordinary large building or palace, 

 but a completely novel type of structure, the like of which had not 

 previously been discovered in the entire ancient Near East. The 

 walls of the rooms were pierced with two rows of flues, and the main 

 walls were interconnected by a system of air channels inside the 

 walls, into which the upper rows of flues opened (pi. 3, fig. 2). The 

 lower rows of flues pierced the walls between the rooms. It is our 

 present idea that the lower rows of flues were intended to permit 

 gases forming in one chamber to penetrate into a second one and 

 preheat its contents. In other words, not all of the rooms were 

 fired at the same time, but were fired progressively. The upper rows 

 of flues were used then to create a draft, the air being sucked 

 throughout the entire length of the building toward the draft chim- 

 ney, which we have reason to believe once rose over the southeast 

 corner of the structure. The originally unfired yellowish mud 

 bricks had been baked by the heat of the fires in the rooms to the 

 consistency of kiln-fired bricks. It became evident that the building 

 was an elaborate smelter or refinery, where previously "roasted" 

 ores were worked into ingots of purer metal. It was obvious both 

 from the sulfuric discoloration of parts of the walls, and from fin- 

 ished metal articles fashioned from the ingots produced, that the re- 

 finery at Ezion-geber was devoted mainly to copper, and in a lesser 

 degree to iron. Great quantities of both copper and iron, especially 

 copper, abound in the WadI el-'Arabah, in Sinai, and in northwestern 

 Arabia.^^ In the complex of buildings surrounding the smelter were 

 foundry and factory rooms, in which finished or semifinished articles 

 were turned out for home consumption and for export. Ezion-geber 

 was the Pittsburgh of Palestine. The rooms in its refinery were, so 

 to speak, air-conditioned for heat, utilizing a natural forced-draft 

 system to fan the flames in the furnace rooms, which in principle 

 was related to the Bessemer principle of forced draft discovered 

 less than a century ago. 



" Glueok, Nelson, The first campaign at Tell El-Kheleifeh (Ezion-Geber). Bull. Amer. 

 Schools Oriental Res., No. 71, p. 7, October 1938. 



