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.
Not OP, and it's an article about an article about a study, but I think this is where the analysis would be mentioned:
> 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.
Is this essentially a superset of the techniques they use to identify gold bullion? I understood they have a map of trace elements by mine so that gold isn’t really fungible (if stolen or used for criminal activity, they can figure out where it came from and connect the dots).
People have always suspected Bronze-age tin might have come from England, but most historians never took it seriously because it implied a lot more long-distance commerce than they believed was possible then.
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.
I have no idea why that would be believed impossible.
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.
It collapsed all record-keeping, anyway. The people who sacked the cities were probably very bad trading partners. It would not be safe to beach a ship. Trade with Egypt would still be possible, but stopovers elsewhere would be hazardous.
There is no natural state of low-friction trade. It has to develop very slowly over centuries.
>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?
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]:
That etymology for 'Britain' doesn't seem to be referenced anywhere else—the link in the post you've linked to hasn't worked since 2003 and doesn't cite its source either. Seems the name derives from Brythonic (British Celtic) and meant "the painted ones" or "the tattooed folk" rather than a reference to tin. The etymological path it took was (roughly): Brythonic -> Ancient Greek (by way of the Greek explorer Pytheas) -> Latin -> Old English/Middle English/Old French -> Modern English [0][1]
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."
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.
Climate change, too. The Minoan Warm Period ended around this time, and temps would not return to their optimum until the Roman Warm Period almost 1000 years later. Had to have an effect on agriculture and trade.
There's evidence for climate changes, earthquakes, revolutions, invasions, war, economic crisis, political crisis, ethnogenesis (both historiographical like accounts of sea peoples & mythical like exodus)... all seemingly substantial and concurrent.
..that's kinda why it's such an interesting and mysterious period. There's tons of room for theories on causes, effects and incidentals.
"This is during or shortly after the bronze age collapse..."
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."
>This is during or shortly after the bronze age collapse, where many mediterranean civilisations
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.
From the article: "Given the limited technology at the time and the lack of roads, the most plausible way for the ingots to have reached modern-day Israel was by sea"
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]. "
Britain and Wales don't have a lot of evidence for a Phoenician presence, but interestingly, some place names on the west of the island have Semitic names, and those places make sense as locations where Phoenicians would be allowed to land to trade for the tin but not allowed to venture inland. Most interesting is Echri Island in the Severn river. It's the most inland island in the river, making it the last island a ship would try to land on if forbidden to land in the mainland. And E-kh-R is the Semitic root for the word "last." (A-kha-ron in Hebrew.)
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.)
I don’t want to discredit this, since I don’t know your source, but linguistically that seems quite unlikely for a consonant introduced three thousand years ago to have influence on the modern Cornish place names. Three thousand years ago, the Celtic languages hadn’t even split from proto-Celtic, so any influence on Cornish should have also had influenced on the rest of the Celtic languages. In addition, the sound /z/ is a very common one across languages (so it does indicated Phoenician influence), and they didn’t have a script then to write the place names (so the orthographic letter z doesn’t mean anything).
That’s true, but the long time change leaves it quite unlikely that the names would leave enough of a remnant of a particular sounds that you could point to a Phoenician influence.
Prior to the invention of the railroad, all bulk goods (including food and non-precious metals like tin) could essentially only be traded long distance via ship. It simply isn't practical to move them via animal-drawn carts; the animals cost too much, they eat too much, it takes too long, and the roads weren't there.
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.
Even after the invention of the railroad, it is cheaper to sail from Los Angeles through the Panama Canal to New York than to send the same load cross country by train.
Railroads are the cheapest form of land transportation. But boats are cheaper still.
Tin was very valuable. In fact most often we find high-value product have travelled long distances. Like jewelry, decorative items. Is tin one of these?
Biblical sources describe tin as being sourced from Tarshish [0], a remote island that traded with the Phoenician naval merchants in Tyre. Plus as wtracz' sibling comment indicates there's a potential Phoenician connection with Cornwall, it isn't especially unlikely.
Tarsis is thought to be refering to Cádiz in Spain. Cádiz was founded by phoenicians (if you visit, make sure to check the archeological museum [0]) to trade with the lost kingdom of Tartessos.
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.
I agree, it seems more likely to me that it operated similarly to the principles that held the Silk Road together. Almost no one did a Marco Polo and went all the way from the Mediterranean to Peking; instead most of the trade was bucket-brigading goods from one market town to the other.
I haven't got the book to hand but have read of Moorish pirates kidnapping fishermen from their boats around the Lizard peninsula and selling them into slavery.
If true then the idea of ships travelling directly may not be so far fetched.
(edit - in the 1600s though)
I can't remember exactly as I haven't made beer in years and sold all my books and equipment - but - I think it was _Uncorking the Past_ by Patrick Mcgovern.
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.
From a 2016 talk: "Possible some came from Cornwall though I rather doubt they went up there more than once in a blue moon. There are some tin mines in southern Turkey but not enough. The vast majority came from Afghanistan. Specifically the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4&feature=youtu.be...
Is it unfeasible that the tin was traded from ancient Britain to ancient France to Ancient Greece to ancient Israel in sort of a chain rather than ships transporting them directly to Israel?
I'm not an expert, but I think it's a given that high-value durable goods like this could change hands many times. For example, probably no-one travelled all the way with the Indian metal objects which have been found in Britain: https://www.caitlingreen.org/2014/12/indian-silver-coins-in-... .
This over-land route was common, afaik. It may be one of the reasons the Greeks founded a colony near the Rhone delta: present day Marseille.
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.
Using the amber road would be quite a detour here, I imagine. That would mean that instead of crossing the channel and traveling through France and Italy, or circumnavigating the Iberian peninsula, you think it's more likely the tin traveled from Britain, across Scandinavia, then to the Baltics, and from there southwards across Eastern Europe?
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.
Yeah, I don't know much about the actual trade routes, I was more pointing out that 'stuff from northern Europe' made it to Israel / the Levant.
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.
I buy tin in one market town and sell it for 5% more at the market town a week's journey away. Or I load up my ship with tin in one port town and sell it for 20% more at the port town a month's journey away. That tin can go quite a distance without any one captain having to load up in Penzance and do a long haul all the way to the terminal end of the Mediterranean.
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.
When I was in Afghanistan the mines in Badakshan were known for the high quality lapiz lazuli and pale colored jade that were traded in shops through out the country. There is an estimated $5 trillion in mineral deposits in the region, which is the second most valuable source of largely untapped natural resources on land.
You hear people today saying we live in a "global economy." It seems like that statement might be true of people hundreds or even thousands of years ago.
Eh, that’s a false equivalency. Ancient economies had far less impact on each other, even if they did trade some things occasionally. Today, economies are far more global in an interconnected sense; if America, China or the EU have a recession, the rest of the world probably does too. The same scenario would not be true a couple thousand years ago.
Sure, but when the Roman Empire collapsed, it didn’t take the rest of the world with it. If the US went through a similar scenario, it would have a dramatic impact on pretty much everyone.
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.
A large chunk of that is simply differences in population sizes. The current US population is likely larger than the global population in 1,000 CE. Further, children used to make up a larger chunk of the population exaggerating the differences.
So, it was often possible to scale up production even more, but there where not enough customers to justify it.
The vast majority of limited trade during pre-industrial times is due to the inefficiency of (i.e. cost) of long range transportation. A single modern cargo ship can carry more cargo in a single voyage than an entire years worth of the entire medieval world's cargo fleets. And at a price that is few orders of magnitude cheaper (per ton).
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.
Remember that the economies of scale were made possible by technology.
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.
'economy of scale' is a spectrum and also related to input costs, of which technology is one of many such as labor cost, etc. Also, 'technology' means 'one producers relative advantage in technology' rather than 'the invention of X in the year Y'
It's certainly, unambiguously, true (the Silk Roads were roughly 200AD onwards, and the Roman Empire was trading for centuries before that for smaller values of 'global').
Look at how metals were traded in that time. "Bullhide ingots" are not uncommon and are widespread, Certainly people copied good ideas and used them locally, too; but I've always thought that evidence of some clever (and tough!) folks doing a lot of running all over the ancient world.
Amazing to imagine how back then, there must've been brokers or imperial court wizards / Game of Thrones style, who were the few that knew about such places where magical materials would come from and only have the smallest inkling of what those properties meant. And those materials would travel thousands of miles secreted in pouches to find their way to someone worthy of the rarity.
And today, you can buy any of those things for a few $ off the internet and have it delivered to you.
During the run of the British archeology TV show "Time Team" they examined a couple of sites in Cornwall associated with tin. In each episode they discuss the far reaching international trade for tin from Cornwall during the bronze age including as far as to locations in Africa, so while adding to archaeological knowledge this find doesn't seem to be breaking new ground.
The new ground is that the tin is dated from apx 1000 BCE rather than 2000 BCE to 1500 BCE when the trade from the now british isles to the near east cultures was well established. These trade routes were thought to be disrupted during the bronze age collapse which, IIRC, started around 1500 BCE.
We don't know exactly why the Bronze Age collapse happened, but it's likely that copper was what was disrupted, because copper smelting results in deforestation.So a perfectly functioning and open tin trading route meeting a society that can't find copper any more would explain this find.
The new ground is that isotopic analysis established beyond doubt the source of tin used in the overwhelming majority of pre-2000 BC bronze, overcoming historians's skepticism about non-contemporaneous sources.
If you visit the Heraklion archeological museum on Crete, they have an astonishingly good timeline of the development of the Minoans (how they are called nowadays). Starting from stone age, and how they entered the bronze age. They were very established by 1700 BC. They were selling olive oil and pottery (at least) and importing tin and copper far and wide. You can see the bronze saws that were used to build ships and create a naval power and ability to trade.
I can also recommend visiting Knossos and hiring a local guide. It is not crowded and not too hot off season.
What the place was called 3000 years ago is irrelevant; today it's called Israel, and that's where the archaeologists have digged it up. The article actually says "modern-day Israel" and "modern-day Britain" in places. (Because, of course, 3000 years ago what's now called Great Britain wasn't called that either...)
The name "Palestine" was given by the Romans. The area was known to it's inhabitants as Judea. During the iron age the kingdoms of Judea and Israel existed in the area.
The name "Israel" first appears in the Merneptah Stele c. 1209 BCE: "Israel is laid waste and his seed is no more."
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...]