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The Copper Ox-Hide Ingots and the Bronze Age Metals Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

J. D. Muhly
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Extract

Trade in metals, notably the precious metals gold and silver, and the base metals copper and tin, represents one of the major aspects of Bronze Age commerce. It has been argued that the first large-scale growth of a metals trade, during the mid-third millennium B.C., stimulated the development of international commerce and made possible the wealth of the EB II period in the Aegean, Anatolia and the Near East. Trade in metals continued to be one of the most important elements of commerce down to the end of the Bronze Age. Thus a proper understanding of the nature and the scope of this trade is essential to the study of Bronze Age civilization and the nature of foreign relations in the third and second millennia B.C.

Since these metals were available only in certain areas, trade was essential for the development of metallurgy in those parts of the ancient world without native mineral resources, especially the Aegean and Mesopotamia. As virtually no work has been done on sources or uses of silver in the Bronze Age this paper will concentrate upon trade in gold, copper and tin. Technological developments will be discussed only in so far as they made possible the utilization of certain types of ores and hence influenced the growth of trade.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 1977 , pp. 73 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1977

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References

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22 The present author discussed this theme in greater detail at the Fourth International Colloquium on Aegean Prehistory, Sheffield, England, April 1977.

23 The most recent (and also the final) publication of this project is SAM II/4, being Junghans, S., Sangmeister, E. and Schröder, M., Kupfer und Bronze in der frühen Metallzeit Europas. Katalog der Analysen Nr. 10,041–22,000 (mit Nachuntersuchunger der Analysen Nr. 1–10,040) (Berlin, 1974)Google Scholar.

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