Tarshish

Tarshish (Hebrew:תַּרְשִׁישׁ‎) occurs in the Hebrew Bible with several uncertain meanings, most frequently as a place (probably a large city or region) far across the sea from the Land of Israel and Phoenicia. Tarshish was said to have supplied vast quantities of important metals to Israel and Phoenicia. The same place-name occurs in the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon (the Assyrian king, d. 669 BC) and also on the Phoenician inscription on the Nora Stone, indicating that it was a real place; its precise location was never commonly known, and was eventually lost in antiquity. Legends grew up around it over time so that its identity has been the subject of scholarly research and commentary for more than two thousand years. Its importance stems in part from the fact that biblical passages tend to understand Tarshish as a source of King Solomon's great wealth in metals - especially silver, but also gold, tin and iron (Ezekiel 27). The metals were reportedly obtained in partnership with King Hiram of Phoenician Tyre (Isaiah 23), and the fleets of Tarshish-ships. However, Solomon's Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, and there has been so little evidence identified for Solomon and his kingdom, that some modern scholars following Israel Finkelstein have suggested Solomon and his kingdom never existed (see the essays in Schmidt, ed. 2007). The existence of Tarshish in the western Mediterranean, along with any Phoenician presence in the western Mediterranean before circa 800 .B.C has also seemed unthinkable to some scholars in modern times, because there had been no recognized evidence; instead, the lack of evidence for wealth in Phoenicia and Israel during the reigns of Solomon and Hiram prompted scholars to understand the period in Mediterranean prehistory between 1200 and 800 BC as a 'Dark Age' (Muhly 1998).