EZION-GEBER — GLUECK 463 



ened like a fortress wall with regular offsets, there may have been 

 in the very first period an outer, complex fortification system, con- 

 sisting of two separate walls, with a glagis built against each of them, 

 and a dry moat between the two walls. All traces of it have disap- 

 peared because of a later fortification system much like it, which com- 

 pletely displaced it. 



Both the smelter and parts of the industrial square were used and 

 reused in later periods. Indeed, one of the main difficulties of the 

 excavations consisted in just this fact: That wherever a later age 

 found a good wall of a previous one, it frequently built other walls 

 against it to form a new room. The employment of a straight 

 stratigraphic method of excavation would have produced dire results. 

 The problems of unraveling the puzzles of walls there, built agamst 

 each other, yet frequently belonging to totally different periods, were 

 baffling at first appearance, but usually could be solved. The fre- 

 quent use of different types of bricks and different methods of brick- 

 laying in different periods helped to distinguish one period from 

 another. In certain parts of Tell el-KJieleifeh, walls of successive 

 periods were built on respectively higher levels. 



The intricate smelter-refinery of Ezion-geber : Elath was from the 

 very beginning till near the end of the history of the place consid- 

 ered to be its most important structure. It underwent numerous 

 changes in the course of time. The system of flues and air channels 

 in the walls was abandoned after they had become filled with sand 

 and soot. The flue holes were plastered over, and the smelting pro- 

 cess reverted to the use of hand bellows. In this wise, the great in- 

 dustrial plant continued to function for a number of centuries longer. 

 The tremendous heat in the furnace rooms of the smelter transformed 

 the sun-dried bricks used in its construction into the equivalent of 

 kiln-baked bricks. The copper sulfide fumes of the copper ores being 

 reduced in the smelter turned its walls green; where the fumes did 

 not come in direct contact with the walls, the heat turned them brown 

 and red. Centuries of experience had produced a brick measuring 

 40 by 20 by 10 centimeters, with which an excellent wall two and a 

 half bricks thick could be produced, of enduring strength. Some of 

 the walls of the smelter have stood ahnost to their original height 

 for nearly 30 centuries. 



When finally heat cracked the waUs of the smelter in places, and 

 repairs and reinforcements were necessary, a means of strengthening 

 them was employed, which had hitherto been applied only to 

 fortresses. A sloping retaining wall in all respects similar to a 

 fortification glagis, was discovered during the third season of work, 

 built against each side of the smelter. It was almost half again as 

 wide at the bottom as the smelter walls themselves. Each row of 



