An almost global world

The tin of the Haifa ingots travelled from Cornwall in the UK to the coast of Israel where it ended up on the seafloor. Even though the area today known as Cornwall may ― both geographically and culturally ― seem far away from the Bronze Age Aegean, societies from both areas were part of a larger web of trade networks stretching from the Baltic to the Western Mediterranean and from the Black Sea region to India.

The tin of the Haifa ingots travelled from Cornwall in the UK to the coast of Israel where it ended up on the seafloor. Even though the area today known as Cornwall may ― both geographically and culturally ― seem far away from the Bronze Age Aegean, societies from both areas were part of a larger web of trade networks stretching from the Baltic to the Western Mediterranean and from the Black Sea region to India. From the 15th century BCE onwards, these trade networks emerged as a result of societies’ need for remote resources (like tin) and the technological skills to handle these resources. In order to maintain the ‘international’ trade connections, diplomacy (in the widest possible sense) was needed. The complexity of the Bronze Age Mediterranean diplomatic networks is confirmed by different archives, like the Amarna archive from the time of the famous pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1350-1330 BCE), and the archives that have been found in Hattuša, the former capital of the Hittite Empire.Kristiansen & Suchowska-Ducke 2015. ‘Connected Histories: the Dynamics of Bronze Age Interaction and Trade 1500-1100BC’, p.361-363; and Bryce, T. 2003. Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East. The Royal Correspondence of the Late Bronze Age Although literary evidence for the exchange networks of the Bronze Age only covers a relatively limited geographical area, archaeological finds from northern European tumulus graves indicate that the societies in this region engaged in trade with, among others, Mycenaean Greece.Broodbank, C. 2013. [The Making of the Middle Sea. A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World(https://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Making_of_the_Middle_Sea.html?id=EugZmwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y); and Kristiansen & Suchowska-Ducke 2015. ‘Connected Histories: the Dynamics of Bronze Age Interaction and Trade 1500-1100BC’, p.364-365.

The tin trade is a good example of the effects of these long-distance trade networks. In societies heavily dependent on bronze, like in the Bronze-Age Aegean, the very small amount of tin deposits in the Mediterranean posed a major problem. Tin had to be imported from distant areas, like the northern part of the Iberian peninsula, southern England or Central Asia. Although it is impossible to reconstruct ‘tin routes’ in mainland Europe, tin from distant regions was traded internationally across the Mediterranean Sea region, as for instance the cargo of the Uluburun shipwreck shows. Below, we will discuss the Uluburun shipwreck in more detail. For more information about Bronze Age shipwrecks, see Bachhuber 2020. ‘Shipwrecks’. In the beginning of the second millennium BCE, Assyrian merchants benefited heavily from this international tin trade, as the archives of one of their trading posts in Anatolia, Kaneš (about 1200 km. west of the Assyrian heartland in Mesopotamia) show.Kristiansen & Suchowska-Ducke 2015. ‘Connected Histories: the Dynamics of Bronze Age Interaction and Trade 1500-1100BCE’, p.366.

The existence of sea trade in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean had since the beginning of Mycenaean studies been assumed on the basis of literary sources, like the texts from the Egyptian Amarna archive, the archives of the Old Assyrian trading posts in Central Anatolia and the Linear B tablets from Greece. There is also iconographic evidence, like the scenes depicting Aegean merchants that have been found in Egyptian tombs. When in 1960 a Late Bronze-Age shipwreck was excavated near Cape Gelidonya, off the southern coast of Turkey, maritime archaeology confirmed the picture of an interconnected trade network in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Late Bronze-Age shipwrecks that have been found in the eastern part of the Mediterranean shed an interesting light on the way in which different societies engaged in international and intercontinental trade as early as the late 14th century BCE.

Currently, five Late Bronze Age shipwreck sites have been investigated in some detail. The most famous and best-preserved is the so-called Uluburun Shipwreck, which was found in 1982 off the southwestern coast of Turkey, near Cape Uluburun, about 65 km west of Cape Gelidonya. The Uluburun Shipwreck is not only the oldest (it has been dated to c. 1330-1300 BCE), but also the richest of the Late Bronze-Age shipwrecks that have been studied: apart from copper and tin ingots in oxhide form, the ship’s cargo included luxury goods, like jewelry (presumably from Egypt), manufactured ivory and pomegranates.Bachhuber 2020. ‘Shipwrecks’, p.1093-1095. Interestingly, a wooden writing tablet with hinges made from ivory, probably a personal belonging of one of the ship’s merchants, was also found – no writings on this tablet have been preserved, unfortunately, except for a few signs on the edge, which cannot be identified with certainty .For more information about the wooden Uluburun writing tablet, see Payton 1991. ‘The Ulu Burun Writing-Board Set’; Steele 2020. ‘Script and Literacy’ p.253.

The condition of the other three shipwrecks was rather bad at the time of excavation. The Uluburun and Gelidonya shipwrecks were protected from the current and from looting by the rocky terrain at the seafloor off Turkey’s southwestern coast. The circumstances for preservation off the coast of modern day Israel, where our ingots were found, were less favorable. there.Bachhuber 2020. ‘Shipwrecks’, p.1095-1097.

These Late Bronze Age watery graves offer us a glimpse of the interconnected maritime trade networks of that period. After the so-called Bronze Age Collapse, the political structures that had emerged alongside the international trade networks in the Late Bronze Age largely disappeared, but the rudimentary trade routes remained in operation. The Phoenicians, whose cities came out of the Late Bronze Age Collapse relatively intact, took over sea trade. In doing so, they paved the way for the increased commercial activity between the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe about 800 years later, known as the Ancient Silk Roads Era.Benjamin 2018. Empires of Ancient Eurasia. The First Silk Roads Era, 100BCE-250CE, p.1-15; Wood et al. 2020. ‘The Origin of Tel Dor Hacksilver and the Westward Expansion of the Phoenicians in the Early Iron Age: The Cypriot Connection’, p.1-2.