Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall
archaeology-world.com
archaeology-world.com
In the "Haifa marine Museum" you've never heard of, there are tin pieces found in Phoenician ships, that's ~3K yo and IIRC the sign even says the Tin is from today's England.
[edit: of course this piece could be referencing new confirmation or new methodology - we'll never know, as there are no references to anything of substance. The research is from https://www.researchgate.net/project/Bronze-Age-tin-Tin-isot...]
Charred cloves from the Moluccas (south of the Philippines) were recently found in in a jar in burnt-out remains of a 4000-year-old middle-class kitchen in Syria.
This sounds amazing -- do you have a source for this?
http://theconversation.com/worlds-oldest-clove-heres-what-ou...
The Phoenicians are reported to have circumvented Africa and when the voyaging party returned they reported Phoenician colonies on the Atlantic coast of Africa before entering the Mediterranean. This was done under contract for an Egyptian pharaoh, and from what I understand, the claim that the sun was on their right side as they rounded the southern tip of Africa, although viewed with derision in the ancient world is now widely accepted as evidence they did indeed make this trip.
At any rate, they were amazing sailors for the ancient world and it would be much harder to believe they didn't make the shortish trip up the coast of Europe to the British Isles then the reverse in my opinion.
But as for tin, I thought it was well known tin came from the British Isles. Could this tin have been brought in earlier when Bronze Age commerce was at it's height? Did the Bronze Age collapse really collapse _all_ trade and commerce and travel? Doubtful. Anyway, interesting find but not really a novel story.
There is no natural state of low-friction trade. It has to develop very slowly over centuries.
This is about tin from over a millennium before that map.
> we'll never know, as there are no references to anything of substance
The spectrometer, diffractomer, and xray analysis isn't substance?
> According to Phys.org, the researchers used “lead and tin isotope data as well as trace element analysis” to identify where the metal was originally mined. What they found was totally unexpected.
Phys.org article in question in here but says the same thing: https://phys.org/news/2019-09-enigma-bronze-age-tin.html
I don't have access to the actual study contents.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
A problem could be that metals scrappings can be recycled. Who grants that a tin was not part of a ship's hull before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk
Even though Germany is not as far, it's from 1600 BC
Abstract: "The origin of the tin used for the production of bronze in the Eurasian Bronze Age is still one of the mysteries in prehistoric archaeology. In the past, numerous studies were carried out on archaeological bronze and tin objects with the aim of determining the sources of tin, but all failed to find suitable fingerprints. In this paper we investigate a set of 27 tin ingots from well-known sites in the eastern Mediterranean Sea (Mochlos, Uluburun, Hishuley Carmel, Kfar Samir south, Haifa) that had been the subject of previous archaeological and archaeometallurgical research. By using a combined approach of tin and lead isotopes together with trace elements it is possible to narrow down the potential sources of tin for the first time. The strongly radiogenic composition of lead in the tin ingots from Israel allows the calculation of a geological model age of the parental tin ores of 291 ± 17 Ma. This theoretical formation age excludes Anatolian, central Asian and Egyptian tin deposits as tin sources since they formed either much earlier or later. On the other hand, European tin deposits of the Variscan orogeny agree well with this time span so that an origin from European deposits is suggested. With the help of the tin isotope composition and the trace elements of the objects it is further possible to exclude many tin resources from the European continent and, considering the current state of knowledge and the available data, to conclude that Cornish tin mines are the most likely suppliers for the 13th–12th centuries tin ingots from Israel. Even though a different provenance seems to be suggested for the tin from Mochlos and Uluburun by the actual data, these findings are of great importance for the archaeological interpretation of the trade routes and the circulation of tin during the Late Bronze Age. They demonstrate that the trade networks between the eastern Mediterranean and some place in the east that are assumed for the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE (as indicated by textual evidence from Kültepe/Kaneš and Mari) did not exist in the same way towards the last quarter of the millennium."
Archaeology World seems kind of sketchy.
An early reference is that inventor of 'History' himself [Herodotus, 430BC]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiterides
The name 'Britain' comes from the Phoenician name 'Baratanac', which means 'Tin Isles'. The fact that they supplied tin to the Near East from their home in Tyre is provided in the Old Testament [Ezekiel, ~600BC]:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/istorijabalkana/baratanac-t2...
3k ybp is a relatively unique timestamp for tin. This is during or shortly after the bronze age collapse, where many mediterranean civilisations (greece, egypt, assyria, hatti..) receded, and bronze (inc tin) trade receded with them. Bronze presumably became scarce, and ironworking developed as the eventual alternative.
The centuries of the last bronze dark age is the mythical period of iron age cultures (eg the hero achilles, king david, Rome's founders Romulus & Remus)...
In any case, it was a period of change... changing politics politics, migrations, trade patterns & metallurgy/metal-trade.
Does anyone know if these are new methods for identifying origin? Should we expect more artefacts? If so, we might find be able to identify all sorts of new trade patterns, and see if they relate to political/population chronologies... mythical characters may find themselves in a slightly more historical context.
..that's kinda why it's such an interesting and mysterious period. There's tons of room for theories on causes, effects and incidentals.
All the tin in this study is from the centuries before the collapse, 1530-~1200
>Does anyone know if these are new methods for identifying origin?
Most of this tin was taken from shipwrecks, and the dating method is derived from there. I believe trace elements have been able to tie metal to a mining location for a while.
Shortly before (13-12th century BCE) the "collapse" (12-11th century BCE).
From the PLOS One conclusions: "Although many questions remain unanswered and new ones arose, the integrated approach of using trace elements, tin and lead isotopes turns out to be a promising tool for provenancing and fingerprinting ancient tin objects. It should be followed up by future archaeometallurgical research in order to unravel the enigma of BA tin. In this form, our study should stimulate new discussions on the provenance of tin of the Eurasian BA rather than postulating an origin from a specific deposit."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Surely much more likely a trading network, where things change hands multiple times before reaching destination, probably with key trading hubs.
In fact the tin was found off the coast - just as likely to have been on route to somewhere else.
From the paper: "Direct contacts between the British Isles and the Eastern Mediterranean are not assured at present, while inter-regional and international trade networks between the latter and northern and central Europe seem to be well documented for the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE [145–148]. "
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
This stemmed from things like Cornish place names having an unusual number of z's (a Phoenician letter) in them, and other similarities.
Even if the languages had not split, could there still not be regionalised influences on place names?
Tartessos is placed in the Guadalquivir estuary by Rufus Festus Avienus' Ora Maritima, but its exact location is unknown. There are some efforts to pinpoint it using satellite images, because its ruins could be buried under the sand.
While I'm at this, it's no secret that coastal cities in Spain have Phoenician names: Barcelona, Malaga, Cartagena and Cadiz. Cadiz comes from "gader," meaning "boundary", and the Phoenician colonists there were charged with making sure nobody except Carthaginians would be allowed to sail west of there (and then on to Britain.)
> While I'm at this, it's no secret that coastal
> cities in Spain have Phoenician names
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispania#Etymology
One must also likely compare the proposed root with Latin Hispania rather than directly with modern España.
Rome, for example, was supplied by an unbelievable number of ships' worth of food every day. It would have starved without that ocean access; there's not enough nearby land to be used as farmland to grow all the necessary food in the pre-railroad era.
Railroads are the cheapest form of land transportation. But boats are cheaper still.
Basically, fire neutrons into your item, and then look at how it [edit: radioactively] decays to determine the constituent chemical elements.
My one beer-brewing book mentioned that they can trace some pot sherds to a specific region of a specific river using this method. Very cool.
It could also have been John Palmer's _How to Brew_ too - I remember the author goes into super interesting detail about metallurgy and similar topics.
Trade is a given. Celtic (mode) jewelry found in near-eastern sites, riverine trade routes littered with evidence from around 5-6k BCE indicating vast ancient world trade networks.
While first discovered writing on clay tablets in Mesopotamia are first SURVIVING samples of writing, this doesn't preclude cellulose-based writing media (paper) that simply rotted. Harrappan and early Sumerian trade has been also archeologically demonstrated, as well as Harrappan and <name of Anatolian city complexes recently found I forget...> trade routes, based upon found artifacts likely origins.
Avoiding this route to sail directly to Northern Europe may also be why a Greek explorer from Marseille, Pytheas [1], gave us one of the first, if not the first, direct accounts of the British Isles.
From at least the 16th century BC, amber was moved from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean area.[2][3] The breast ornament of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen (c. 1333–1324 BC) contains large Baltic amber beads.
Not that I have any knowledge of ancient trade routes, but to me having a trade route from Britain towards the northeast instead of southeast feels weird.
In any case, I don't think it's much more of a detour though, especially if we assume that it wasn't a specific journey, but a chain of multiple cultures interacting with each other. It doesn't seem implausible to me that tin went from Britain to Scandinavia then down the Amber Road, but I'm not a historian.
As in: Nobody decided "let's start a trade route from Egypt to Scandinavia!".
Far more likely, people traded with their neighbors, and market forces led to goods step by step traveling to where they were most valued.
Probably without Egyptians and Scandinavians ever having a clue the other group existed.
But even that would have been possible, if anyone had enough knowledge of enough prices for common trade goods at enough of the ports along the way. One trip would make the owner, captain, and crew rich enough for it to be worth the risk.
On the one hand, I'm always surprised by (say) how many thousands of gallons of beer could be produced by a victorian brewery but equally, we make a hell of a lot more now.
So, it was often possible to scale up production even more, but there where not enough customers to justify it.
Not that it mattered since production of everything was, by today's standards, a few orders of magnitude less efficient. It's often difficult to fully grasp how inefficient and slow everything was in pre-industrial times until you dig into the details.
Budweiser, Miller, etc dominated the US market with an inferior product because they could build a distribution network and ship/store the product at massive scale at low cost. This was particularly important post-prohibition. Consistently mediocre, branded/marketed, cheap beer was more valuable than local stuff.
And today, you can buy any of those things for a few $ off the internet and have it delivered to you.
"And did those feet in ancient time. Walk upon Englands mountains green"
Referring to the myth/legend that Jesus visited England with Joseph of Arimathea:
We’ve been pretty good at selling stuff for a while, I suspect.
Indeed. There were similar trade routes in North America, likely using the Mississippi River for transportation.
Ocean shells in the Midwest. Object made from Michigan copper all over the continent. Likewise tools made from obsidian from the west.
Our ancestors were collectively as smart and motivated as we are.
It's an alternative history sci-fi book where the author proposes that greeks are sending envoys to britain in 1250bc for trade.
To be precise, Iberian greek colonies are sending these envoys but they speak a common language being ancient greek.
I can also recommend visiting Knossos and hiring a local guide. It is not crowded and not too hot off season.
The tabloid.