Tarshish
Its importance stems in part from the fact that Hebrew biblical passages tend to understand Tarshish as a source of King Solomon's tremendous wealth in metals – especially silver, but also gold, tin, and iron according to Ezekiel 27.
The metals were reportedly obtained in partnership with the Phoenician king Hiram I of Tyre and fleets of ships from Tarshish, according to Isaiah 23.
[2] The Jewish-Portuguese scholar, politician, statesman and financier Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508 AD) described Tarshish as "the city known in earlier times as Carthage and today called Tunis.
"[13] Thompson and Skaggs[3] argue that the Akkadian inscriptions of Esarhaddon (AsBbE) indicate that Tarshish was an island (not a coastland) far to the west of the Levant.
[16] Hacksilver objects in these Phoenician hoards have lead isotope ratios that match ores in the silver-producing regions of Sardinia and Spain, only one of which is a large island rich in silver.
Contrary to translations that have been rendering Assyrian tar-si-si as 'Tarsus' up to the present time, Thompson argues that the Assyrian tablets inscribed in Akkadian indicate tar-si-si (Tarshish) was a large island in the western Mediterranean, and that the poetic construction of Psalm 72:10 also shows that it was a large island to the very distant west of Phoenicia.
[19] Some biblical commentators as early as 1646 (Samuel Bochart) read it as Tartessos in ancient Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula), near Huelva and Sevilla today.
[citation needed] Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) believed that Tarshish was Sofala, and that the biblical land of Havilah was centered on the nearby Great Zimbabwe.
[25] Bochart, apart from Spain (see there), also suggested eastern localities for the ports of Ophir and Tarshish during King Solomon's reign, specifically the Tamilakkam continent (present day South India and Northern Ceylon) where the Dravidians were well known for their gold, pearls, ivory and peacock trade.
Instead, the lack of evidence for wealth in Israel and Phoenicia during the reigns of Solomon and Hiram, respectively, prompted a few scholars to opine that the archaeological period in Mediterranean prehistory between 1200 and 800 BC was a 'Dark Age'.
