Edom and southern Jordan in the iron age

Abstract

Abstract: During the Iron Age, the region of modern southwestern Jordan was known as Edom, a name that appears in biblical and post-biblical literature and in contemporary Egyptian, Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian sources. (Another name, Seir, was very much related to Edom in biblical and extra-biblical texts, to the extent that some scholars consider them to be synonyms.) Our knowledge about Edom is much more limited than about their central Transjordanian neighbors, Ammon and Moab, owing to the very few Edomite inscriptions found and the problems of interpretation of the local archaeological evidence. Since the early 19th century southwestern Jordan was visited by European travelers who noted the local topography and documented the still visible archaeological remains. However, it was not until Nelson Glueck carried out three seasons of exploration of local sites in the 1930s, followed by the excavation of the prominent Iron Age site of Tell el-Kheleifeh, that serious knowledge of the region was acquired. Glueck’s conclusions regarding the history of settlement during the Iron Age have remained influential until today (Brown and Kutler 2006: 65–90). During the 1960s–1980s, C.-M. Bennett directed excavations at three Edomite sites, Busayra, Tawilan, and Umm al-Biyara, building the skeleton of the chronology of the Edomite settlement (Bennett and Bienkowski 1995; Bienkowski 2002, 2011). Until the 1990s, scholarship studied the history of Edom based to a large extent on the biblical narrative, viewing the relations between Judahites and Edomites as central for the identarian configurations of both peoples (Bartlett 1989). However, during the last 20 years new archaeological research in the region, accompanied by novel interpretations drawing from anthropology and ethnography, have tremendously widened our knowledge about the Edomites, extending their origins to the early Iron Age.