Tell el-Qudeirat

Tell el-Qudeirat is an archaeological site in the Sinai,[1] about 5 mi (8.0 km) east of the Egyptian village of Quseima.[2][3] It is widely considered to be the location of the biblical Kadesh Barnea.[4] Recently, some authors have referred to it as Tel Kadesh-barnea.[5] Moshe Dothan (1965) referred to it as Tel 'Ein el Qudeirat,[6] while in the early twentieth century Woolley and Lawrence used the spelling Tell Ain el Guderat.[7]

Tell el-Qudeirat is the name of the archaeological mound (the "tell") itself. It sits near Ain el-Qudeirat, which Carol Redmount describes as "the most fertile oasis in northern Sinai".[5] The Ain ("spring") flows out of the ground about 1.5 km (0.93 mi) east of the tell, and the water from it flows west, becoming the Wadi el-Qudeirat. The tell then sits along the northern bank of the wadi, which continues flowing west and then turns toward the north. The tell is located along the southern base of a hill known as Jebel el-Qudeirat.[8]

During the Iron Age, Tell el-Qudeirat was a rectangular[9] fortress, and multiple layers of fortifications have been uncovered.[10] The modern site is a tell, an archaeological mound caused by long-term human habitation. At the lowest level, labelled 4c, are traces of human habitation dated by Israel Finkelstein to the twelfth to tenth centuries BCE.[11] Carol Redmount, on the other hand, claims that the oldest remains at the site date to the tenth century.[5] Tell el-Qudeirat is one of scores of permanent settlements which existed in Iron Age II in the Negev Highlands.

  1. ^ Finkelstein 2010.
  2. ^ Israel Journal of Botany 1975, pp. 23, 29.
  3. ^ See also the map in Haiman (1994), p. 37
  4. ^ Drinkard (1990), p. 485.
  5. ^ a b c Redmount (2001), p. 67.
  6. ^ Dothan (1965), p. 134.
  7. ^ Woolley and Lawrence (1914), pp. 6, 7.
  8. ^ See the map on page 2 of Cohen and Bernick-Greenberg (2007).
  9. ^ See, for example, the title of Ussishkin (1995).
  10. ^ Gilboa et al. (2009), p 82-94
  11. ^ Finkelstein (2010), p. 111.