Tell el-Kheleifeh and the Ezion-Geber Question

Nelson Glueck excavated Tell el-Kheleifeh in three campaigns from 1938 to 1940 after earlier exploration of the Aqaba region. He identified the mound with Ezion-Geber and interpreted certain mudbrick structures and wind channels as a sophisticated copper refinery from Solomon's reign. The conclusion became famous well beyond archaeology. Reexamination of the pottery, architecture, photographs, and field archive later overturned key elements: the principal occupation was later, and the supposed furnace system was better explained as ordinary construction. The revision is now part of the site's significance.

Tell el-Kheleifeh is a small fortified settlement built of mudbrick and stone near the northern end of the gulf. Excavated phases include defensive walls, towers, courtyards, rooms, storage facilities, pottery, seals, metal objects, and evidence of regional trade. Its buildings were repeatedly remodeled as political and commercial conditions changed. Industrial finds demonstrate activity but not the giant refinery once imagined. Shoreline movement and sedimentation also complicate reconstruction of any ancient anchorage. The mound is best understood as a strategic Iron Age station controlling land and maritime approaches rather than as one conclusively identified installation.

Revised ceramic studies place most substantial occupation in the eighth through sixth centuries BC, overlapping Edomite expansion and later Judean, Babylonian, and Persian interests in the gulf. Some earlier traces may exist, but they do not produce the tenth-century industrial port envisioned by Glueck. The location connected the Arabah copper districts, Arabian caravan routes, and Red Sea travel. Because ancient Elath and Ezion-Geber may have denoted ports, districts, or neighboring settlements whose locations shifted with shore conditions, one mound need not represent every period of the biblical place-name.