A team of Israeli researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Antiquities Authority were able to measure the Earth’s magnetic field on the day Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, a prominent contribution formed by the Jewish people’s long memory to preserve and open traces of the planet’s past. The trailblazing study published in the journal PLOS One on Sunday opens new horizons in the understanding of the destruction of Jerusalem, but it also offers important insights into a scientific discipline that has major implications in many contemporary aspects of life, from navigation systems to environmental considerations, such as Yoav Vaknin, TAU, the lead author of the paper, explained The Jerusalem Post.
Left to right: Yoav Vaknin, prof. Gadot, Dr. Shalev (Credit: Shai Halevi Israel Antiquities Authority)In August 586 BCE, after months of siege, Babylonian troops broke through the walls of Jerusalem and began destroying and burning the city, including the Holy Temple. The moment marked one of the most dramatic events in Jewish history and is commemorated to this day with the speed of the 9th of Av, which centuries later also became the day when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. steps of the Temple Mount, one prominent two-story building, probably used for administrative purposes, was also set on fire and collapsed. More than 2,600 years later, the coalition beams and stones discovered in the excavation of the Givati car park near the City of David National Park represent an incredible living testimony to those horrific days, whose horrific events in the Bible become described. “By the ninth day [of the fourth month] the famine had become acute in the city; there was no food left for the common people. Dan [the wall of] the city was broken into. All the soldiers [left the city] on the seventh day of the fifth month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, came Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard, an officer of the. the king of Babylon, to Jerusalem. He burned the house of Yahweh, the king’s palace, and all the houses of Jerusalem; he burned the house of every remarkable person, ”read the last chapter of the book of II Kings. Among the most notable remains of the building, archaeologists saw several fragments of a refined plaster floor. Those pieces, left in the same position for millennia, proved to be essential for measuring the intensity and direction of the earth’s magnetic field at those precise moments. “Even though my PhD is in archeology, this is an interdisciplinary study between archeology and live sciences,” Vaknin told the Post. Among his advisers was Dr. Ron Shaar, the director of the Paleomagnetic Lab at the Hebrew University. “One of the purposes of her lab is to understand how the magnetic field behaved in the past before direct measurement began about 400 years ago at the initiative of the captain of a British ship,” said Vaknin. The collection of data has become faster and more accurate The mathematician Carl Friederich Gauss developed a system for measuring the intensity of the phenomenon in the 19th century.Today, the most accurate information is provided by satellites, which are not affected by human interference that could have occurred on the planet.However, decades after Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein described the fluctuations of the Earth’s magnetic field as one of the five mysteries of physics, many enigmas remain. in modern history the direction is associated with the geographical north, making it for centuries a pillar of navigation systems, in the past it is known that the magnetic field was completely neutral or even pointed to the south. it is also an essential factor in shielding the planet from dangerous solar radiation, scientists worry about what would happen if such changes had to happen again. “Recently, we have seen many specimens in which live sciences contribute to archeology, but in this case, the opposite is also true,” Vaknin noted. For his PhD, he and his advisers decided to focus on the issue of the earth’s magnetic field in archaeological layers as a result of massive destruction. When objects with magnetic minerals burn at a very high temperature, those minerals are magnetized again and therefore record the direction and size of the field at that exact moment. Artifacts such as pottery, brick and tile, which are fired in kilns, ovens and kilns, can all provide these records. However, just as accurate as their dating may be, it spans most of at least a few decades. Conversely, as evidenced by historical records, destruction lawyers could be arrested at a very specific moment – in the case of Jerusalem in 586 almost to the date – giving a unique opportunity. “The focus of my research was the Iron Age, which goes from about 1200 to 586 BCE in Israel. In the beginning, I tried to concentrate on another archaeological site where they discovered traces of the Babylonian destruction that took place.” “I was also in the city of David, but I could not carry out the measurements effectively. I was then suggested to try to cross the street,” Vaknin recalls. At that time, archaeologists were unsure whether the remains they had recently unearthed in the Givati parking lot date back to the Babylonian destruction or were associated with the more recent Persian or Hellenistic periods, outside the scope of the study. and PhD. “Since I was so close, I decided to give it a try anyway,” he explained. The preliminary results of his measurements seemed very promising. Only a few months later, the archaeologists reached the floor of the building and the findings confirmed the dating and brought new insights. ‘We date the destruction of the structure to 586 BCE – the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, based on contaminated pottery typical of the end of the First Temple period, found on the floor. “Apart from the broken gear, we found signs of burning and large quantities as well,” said the directors of the excavation, Dr. Yiftah Shalev of the IAA and Gadot of TAU in a press release. Vaknin focused on measuring the magnetic field of the numerous scattered floors scattered around, and found that, despite their position, they recorded the same magnetic direction. “Measuring magnetic data from a floor that burned thousands of years ago is not a trivial matter,” Shaar commented. “We had to characterize the magnetic particles, understand how the magnetic data were encoded in the material, and develop measurement techniques to read this data to us. Nature has not made life easy for us. Thus, an important part of the analytical work we do at the paleomagnetic lab investigates the magnetic properties of archaeological materials. Fortunately, in this particular study, Yoav was able to decipher the magnetic code of nature and provide us with important information from various angles: historical, archaeological, and geomagnetic. “Vaknin emphasizes that in order to perform a similar process, performing the measurements on objects that are still in their original position in the field after destruction is essential. Artifacts from the same period that have been moved can provide information about the magnitude. of the magnetic field, but not about its direction.In the future, however, researchers will be able to use this system to date the remains they discover.The team is already conducting similar research on advocates for destruction from various periods on other sides, such as those caused by the Assyrian conquest in the 8th century BCE The ultimate goal is to create a new system of precise dating based on the earth’s magnetic field and its changes by turning them in a curve “We build the curve from a lot of data and the idea is that the destruction attorneys who are very precisely dated are the chronological anchors for all this information,” Va concluded. knin.
