From Palladium Magazine, December 5:
Reflection on the ancient world often brings to mind the city-state of Athens, the white columns of the Parthenon, and its philosophers such as Socrates, Diogenes, or Zeno. This seems ancient enough to us, and might seem to be the beginning of what we think of as Western civilization. And yet, already in the fifth century BC, the classical Greeks themselves looked back to a different vanished world, a lost civilization of the Mediterranean further east. It was the world remembered in the Iliad and the Odyssey, of warriors like Achilles besieging Troy and seadogs like Odysseus wandering across strange lands. When the Athenians contemplated antiquity, they reflected on what we today call the Bronze Age: an era defined by a metal that does not occur in nature and which dated from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, a timespan as long as the time from us back to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar.
Bronze alloy is a fabrication, a man-made alloy. The formula was simple enough, a recipe known to smiths from the banks of the Nile to the hillforts of the Danube. You took copper, soft and plentiful and the color of the dying sun, and added tin in a proportion of about ten percent, a ratio arrived at not by calculation but by centuries of trial and error. The added tin made the difference between a metal that bends and a metal that cuts. This technological shift allowed for complex casting and a hard edge for tools and weapons.
Bronze was the strength of the age, the chisel that cut the stone for the Pharaoh’s limestone, the sword that severed the artery, the pin that held the cloak, a synonym for strength in poems written down on papyrus. The material divided the strong from the weak. Without the tin, you had only copper, which bent. You were soft and vulnerable and likely dead.
This necessity meant that for over two millennia, the great civilizations of the Mediterranean had a problem of geography that became a problem of survival. All of them, the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans in their Aegean citadels, the Egyptians along the Nile, and the Hittites on the Anatolian plateau, possessed copper in abundance. They had gold, timber, and grain. They had the favor of their gods and the discipline of their scribes. What they did not have was tin. They had built their political order, their armies, their economies, and their sophisticated diplomacy, on a metal that did not exist in their own soil.
This age of civilization was not a time of isolation. It was an era of globalization on a remarkable scale. A king in Mycenae could commission a sword whose blade was forged from copper mined in Cyprus and tin mined in Afghanistan, a weapon that was, in its molecular structure, a record of the known world. It was a time of far-reaching connectivity, a network of overland routes stretching across the Eurasian landmass and shipping across the Mediterranean Sea and even Indian Ocean—but a network that would ultimately prove to be fragile.
The Riddle of the Tin Mountains
For a long time, archaeologists didn’t know where the tin came from. This was the “tin problem,” a phrase that suggests a logistical hiccup rather than a centuries-long mystery that already baffled the historians of the classical world like Herodotus and Pliny. The texts were not so much silent as coy. The scribes of Mari and Ugarit listed the metal, annaku in Akkadian, AN.NA in Sumerian. They listed the prices, the weights, and the middlemen. But they did not list the mines. The tin came from “the East,” or it came from “the Mountains,” or it came from a market that had bought it from another market. It was a commodity with no origin, a ghost metal that seemed to simply appear in the palace workshops of Thebes and Knossos by magic.
We now know that, in the early centuries, tin came from far to the east, from Central and South Asia, from the Zeravshan Valley in what is now Tajikistan and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. There, in the high, thin air, miners dug into the rock, crushed the ore, smelted it into ingots, and sent it west by a relay of donkeys. The distance was striking. From the mines of Afghanistan to the furnaces of Mesopotamia is a journey of thousands of kilometers, across the Zagros Mountains, across the Iranian plateau, through the bandit country of Elam. The records of the Assyrian merchants of the 19th century BC tell of their trade network stretching out from their colony at Kanesh, in central Anatolia.
The Kültepe texts, in the form of twenty thousand cuneiform tablets found at Kanesh, are not concerned with poetry or myth but ledgers. They are the receipts of a family business. They record, with a dryness that borders on the hypnotic, the arrival of caravans from Aššur, the Assyrian home city. They record the movement of tin: about forty-eight tons of it over thirty years, carried on the backs of black donkeys....
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