The Dead Sea—and its environs of Jericho and the Jordan River—is perhaps second only to Jerusalem as a place where history, archaeology, religion, politics and international relations meet and mix. It is, as Nir Arielli points out in his new book, quite a bit older, and today is as much a place of environmental as political dispute.
And unlike Jerusalem, however, the Dead Sea was rarely at the center of anything: it has usually been more a place of crossing and meeting, much as it remains today. Known today variously and for the most part disconnectedly as a geographic curiosity (the lowest place on Earth), a tourist destination and the source of the eponymous scrolls, Arielli writes a millennia-long history focusing on how the Dead Sea’s unique geography has driven its history.
The story of the Dead Sea involves salt and sulphur, but also date palms and sugarcane. It can be pieced together thanks to sediments that gathered at the bottom of the lake, scrolls that were hidden in caves, the remains of mosaics and the accounts of travel writers. Its protagonists are Jews and Arabs but also Moabites, Nabataeans, Greeks, Idumaeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Over the centuries, the shores of the lake have seen farmers and nomads, biblical figures and pilgrims, conquerors and explorers, great architects and entrepreneurs. Around the Dead Sea one can still find the remains of ancient cities, some of the oldest the world has seen, fortresses perched on hilltops and caves where rebels and refugees sought safety.
It is (as are many good subjects for books) a place of contrasts:
At different times, the Dead Sea area was seen as both hostile and inviting, sacred and cursed, a seat of war and a resource that could bring prosperity. The lake is farmed for having healing properties but, if ingested, its water can kill.
The region can make a case for being one of the first, if not the first, places where people (in the case of the so-called Natufians) actually settled down. Sometime just before 10,000 BCE
Instead of small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the Natufians adopted a more sedentary lifestyle, with larger groups and a more complex level of social organisation that may have included early agriculture…
a story that leads to the establishment of Jericho, “often described as the oldest city in the world”.
Arielli continues through the rest of the Neolithic, Chalolithic (“Copper Age”) and the Bronze Age, during at least part of which, the region had close relations with an expansionist Egypt and its religious importance was firmly established. He runs through the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the centuries-long hunt for their exact location. There is, as one might expect, a long discussion about the relation of the region to the Bible.
Most readers will probably have a rough outline of this story. Arielli however tells an environmental story in parallel, one of changing climate, the changing level of the Dead Sea itself and, as time goes on, how human activity has affected the environment. The Dead Sea was an early site for industry, with bitumen, a material of regional commercial importance, extracted from early only on. Much of the later history is dominated by the desire to mine the potash, access the water and generate electricity.
Indeed, unlike many histories which barrel through the more distant past to reach the events with direct impact on the modern day, Arielli doesn’t reach the 20th-century until well beyond the book’s halfway point; his narrative, furthermore, revolves more around industry and water rather than mandates and empire, which leads to a discussion of the region’s environmental state which seems increasingly dire as more water is extracted from the Jordan and the surrounding area.
Arielli says he hoped to end his book optimistically but “2023 and 2024 have not been good yeast for optimism in this region of the world.” The Dead Sea “won’t be saved,” he writes, without “a change in direction” and that “such a change requires international cooperation and peace.”
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