Textiles From King David Era Discovered in Israel.
Over 100 pieces of cloths dating to the 10th century BCE in Israel have been discovered at the Timna copper mines, deep in the desert. The textile pieces, most made of wool but some of linen, shed the first light on fashion in the days of King David’s kingdom. They were of an unexpectedly high quality, equivalent in their weaving to fabrics made a thousand years later by the Romans, said the surprised archaeologists.
“Most of the fragments were tiny, some only 5 by 5 centimeters, but some were big,” Erez Ben Yosef, head of the Tel Aviv University team that made the discovery, told Haaretz.
“Timna is a unique site, practically unmatched in Israel or anywhere else in the Levant,” Ben Yosef says. “The extreme aridity at Timna preserves organic remains that couldn’t have been preserved anywhere else, not at Megiddo or Lachish or Hatzor, and not even anywhere else in the Arava Valley.”
