Trade in Ancient Mesopotamia

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Dilmun-era Arabian ship

Large scale trade was pioneered in Mesopotamia. Both luxury goods and raw materials circulated within Mesopotamia and were brought in from the outside as far away as India, Africa and Greece. The only goods available in abundance in Mesopotamia were mud, clay, reeds, palm, fish, and grain. To obtain other goods Mesopotamians needed to trade. Mesopotamians developed large scale trade. Ships brought in goods from distant lands. Labor and grain were exported. Metals were brought in overland routes and paid for with wool and grains. Goods were moved in jars and clay pots. Seals identified who they belonged to.

Mesopotamia was where some of the first great trade routes were established. "Control of the Euphrates," an Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae told National Geographic, "meant control over the strategic traffic in metals from Anatolia and in wood from the Syrian forests near the Mediterranean, both natural resources essential to Mesopotamian economic life."

Nearly half of the pieces at Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition called “Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus” “illustrate the aesthetic and cultural interchanges among the first cities. The artifacts are presented in a sweeping display, arranged in geographic progression from west to east. Elaborate gold earrings, hairpins and beaded necklaces from Troy resemble aspects of jewelry found in Greece, central Turkey, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. Arustic banquet scene incised on a silver cup by a master craftsman from western central Asia echoes the banquet depicted on the Standard of Ur...A single carnelian bead, delicately etched with white circles, which was found on the Greek island of Aigina near Athens, 2,500 miles from its origin in the Indus Valley, provides dramatic evidence of a trading network that linked the Aegean Sea to the Indus Valley. “It was a shock to find it that far west,” says Aruz. “Until now, the beads had never turned up west of the royal tombs of Ur. In another surprise, a three-foot-high figure of a nude man carved around 2500 B.C. on the island of Tarut, in the Arabian Gulf near Bahrain, bears a marked similarity to figures found 600 miles north at Khafajah, near today’s Baghdad—an indication of the wide-ranging impact of Mesopotamian sculpture.”

Book: Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus edited by Joan Aruz and Romlad Wallenfels (Metropolitan Museum/ Yale University Press, 2003). It discusses art in Mesopotamia in its own right and as it relates to art in the Mediterranean region, ancient India and along the Silk Road. It has good sections on technologies such as sculpture production and metal making.

Websites on Mesopotamia: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; International Association for Assyriology iaassyriology.com ; Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago isac.uchicago.edu ; University of Chicago Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations nelc.uchicago.edu ; University of Pennsylvania Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations (NELC) nelc.sas.upenn.edu; Penn Museum Near East Section penn.museum; Ancient History Encyclopedia ancient.eu.com/Mesopotamia ; British Museum britishmuseum.org ; Louvre louvre.fr/en/explore ; Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org/toah ; Ancient Near Eastern Art Metropolitan Museum of Art metmuseum.org; Iraq Museum theiraqmuseum ABZU etana.org/abzubib; Archaeology Websites Archaeology News Report archaeologynewsreport.blogspot.com ; Anthropology.net anthropology.net : archaeologica.org archaeologica.org ; Archaeology in Europe archeurope.com ; Archaeology magazine archaeology.org ; HeritageDaily heritagedaily.com; Live Science livescience.com/

How Mesopotamian Trade Was Carried Out

Trade could be dangerous and full of hassles. In one letter dated to around 1800 B.C. a woman in an Assyrian merchant family wrote that she feared for the brothers’ safety. Their father had traveled to a distant city on business, and Ishtarbashti found herself alone in Assur. “I also heard about the rebellion of the country, and I become worried about you,” she wrote. “Your lives must be safe for your father’s sake!” She asked her sons to return to her in Assur “when the country is peaceful again.” In the meantime, she insisted they stop arguing over financial matters. [Source: Durrie Bouscaren, Archaeology magazine, November/December 2023]

Professor Lloyd Weeks of Australia’s University of New England, who studies metal production and exchange in the ancient Near East, told National Geographic History: Copper was widely used in everyday items like tools, vessels, and cutlery, and as such was an important commodity in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. At the time, Ur was a powerful Sumerian city-state located on the Persian Gulf and an important hub of a vast trading network, but because Ur was not metal-rich, Weeks explains, traders had to seek copper more than 600 miles away in Dilmun, on the island now known as Bahrain. [Source: Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, October 17, 2023]

Assyrian cart

To afford the expensive journey, individual merchants would band together to finance an overseas copper purchase, each putting up capital in the form of other commodities like silver and sesame oil. These private ventures would then sell the copper, splitting the proceeds among themselves and paying tithes and taxes to the palace and (possibly) temples. In the complaint, One merchant references paying 1,080 pounds of copper to the palace — evidence of the tithes exacted by Sumerian royalty.

“People talk about globalization as a modern phenomenon,” says Weeks. “The Bronze Age is typically the first period where archaeologists and economic historians feel that they can look at the effects of globalization. It may not encompass the entire planet, but it encompassed large areas of Eurasia at this time.”

Foreign Trade Partnerships in Ancient Mesopotamia

That partnerships in Babylonia were originally made for the sake of foreign trade seems probable from the name given to them. This is kharran, which properly means a “road” or “caravan.” The earliest partners in trade would have been the members of a caravan, who clubbed together to travel and traffic in foreign lands and to defend themselves in common from the perils of the journey. [Source: “Babylonians And Assyrians: Life And Customs”, Rev. A. H. Sayce, Professor of Assyriology at Oxford, 1900]

The products of the Babylonian looms must have been among the first objects which were thus sent abroad. We have already described the extensive industry which brought wealth into Babylonia and made it from the earliest ages the centre of the trade in rugs and tapestries, cloths and clothing. A large part of the industrial population of the country must have been employed in the factories and shops where the woven and embroidered fabrics were produced and made ready for sale. Long lists exist giving the names of the various articles of dress which were thus manufactured.

The goodly “Babylonish garment” carried off by Achan from the sack of Jericho was but one of the many which found their way each year to the shores of the Mediterranean. The trades of the dyer and the fuller flourished by the side of that of the cloth-maker. So, too, did the trade of the tanner, leather being much used and finely worked. The shoes of the Babylonian ladies were famous; and the saddles of the horses were made with elaborate care. The smith, too, occupied an honorable position.

Sumerian Trade

The Sumerians established trade links with cultures in Anatolia, Syria, Persia and the Indus Valley. Similarities between pottery in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley indicate that trade probably occurred between the two regions. During the reign of the pharaoh Pepi I (2332 to 2283 B.C.) Egypt traded with Mesopotamian cities as far north as Ebla in Syria near the border of present-day Turkey.

The Sumerians traded for gold and silver from Indus Valley, Egypt, Nubia and Turkey; ivory from Africa and the Indus Valley; agate, carnelian, wood from Iran; obsidian and copper from Turkey; diorite, silver and copper from Oman and coast of Arabian Sea; carved beads from the Indus valley; translucent stone from Oran and Turkmenistan; seashell from the Gulf of Oman. Raw blocks of lapis lazuli are thought to have been brought from Afghanistan by donkey and on foot. Tin may have come from as far away as Malaysia but most likely came from Turkey or Europe.

Richard Covington wrote in Smithsonian Magazine: “The Sumerians likely bartered palm, fish and vegetable oil, wool and cloth, grain and other agricultural products for such items as gold from Egypt and central Turkey, wood from Iran, and copper and diorite from the Oman Peninsula. Raw blocks of lapis lazuli were transported by foot or donkey from northeastern Afghanistan to Mesopotamian palaces, where artisans fashioned them into sculptures, bowls and jewelry. Sailing across the Arabian Sea, merchants from the Indus Valley converged on the bustling seaport of Dilmun, in present-day Bahrain, with their cargo of ivory combs and carnelian belts and beads to trade with buyers from Ur, 400 miles to the north” [Source: Richard Covington, Smithsonian Magazine, August 2003]

Trade and the Hammurabi Code

Claude Hermann and Walter Johns wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica:“Trade was very extensive. A common way of doing business was for a merchant to entrust goods or money to a travelling agent, who sought a market for his goods. The caravans travelled far beyond the limits of the empire. The Code insisted that the agent should inventory and give a receipt for all that he received. No claim could be made for anything not so entered. Even if the agent made no profit he was bound to return double what he had received, if he made poor profit he had to make up the deficiency; but he was not responsible for loss by robbery or extortion on his travels. On his return, the principal must give a receipt for what was handed over to him. Any false entry or claim on the agent's part was penalised three-fold, on the principal's part six-fold. In normal cases profits were divided according to contract, usually equally.[Source: Claude Hermann Walter Johns, Babylonian Law — The Code of Hammurabi. Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910-1911]

“A considerable amount of forwarding was done by the caravans. The carrier gave a receipt for the consignment, took all responsibility and exacted a receipt on delivery. If he defaulted he paid five-fold. He was usually paid in advance. Deposit, especially warehousing of grain, was charged for at one-sixtieth. The warehouseman took all risks, paid double for all shortage, but no claim could be made unless be had given a properly witnessed receipt. Water traffic on the Euphrates and canals was early very considerable. Ships, whose tonnage was estimated at the amount of grain they could carry, were continually hired for the a transport of all kinds of goods. The Code fixes the price for building and insists on the builder's giving a year's guarantee of seaworthiness. It fixes the hire of ship and of crew. The captain was responsible for the freight and the ship; he had to replace all loss. Even if he refloated the ship he had to pay a fine of half its value for sinking it. In the case of collision the boat under way was responsible for damages to the boat at anchor. The Code also regulated the liquor traffic, fixing a fair price for beer and forbidding the connivance of the tavern-keeper (a female!) at disorderly conduct or treasonable assembly, under pain of death. She was to hale the offenders to the palace, which implied an efficient and accessible police system.

Kanesh Tablet Provide Details of Mesopotamian Trade 4000 Years Ago

Eric A. Powell wrote in Archaeology magazine: “The world’s earliest evidence for a robust long-distance trading network comes in the form of thousands of clay tablets excavated from the Bronze Age site of Kanesh, in central Turkey. From about 2000 to 1750 B.C., this bustling city played host to a number of foreign merchants from Ashur, an Assyrian city some 700 miles to the southeast in modern-day Iraq. At the end of the third millennium B.C., Ashur’s king lifted the government monopoly on trade, opening the way for private merchants to operate donkey caravans that took luxury fabrics and tin north into the Anatolian heartland, where they exchanged their wares for silver and gold bullion in at least 27 city-states. In private archives at Kanesh, these entrepreneurs stored clay tablets inscribed with their business letters and contracts, as well as shipping and accounting records. A massive fire destroyed the merchants’ homes, but also baked and preserved these tablets, leaving a record of intensive trade whose detail wouldn’t be matched until the merchant houses of the Italian Renaissance began to document their activities. [Source: Eric A. Powell, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2018]

“Harvard University Assyriologist Gojko Barjamovic is currently collaborating with a group of economists, including the University of Virginia’s Kerem A. Cosar, to use mathematical models to analyze data from the tablets to reconstruct this vibrant trading system. Such is the fine-grained nature of these documents that the team has been able to use them to estimate the locations of 11 “lost” cities, ancient centers whose names are mentioned in the tablets but whose geographic position is unknown.

Barjamovic has long studied the Kanesh tablets and used traditional historical techniques to examine trade routes and posit the location of these lost cities. “I’ve traveled all over central Turkey to get to know the region,” says Barjamovic. “I’ve even stopped in towns and asked local old-timers where the trade routes were before modern roads were built.” Now, he has teamed up with Cosar and two other economists to analyze the tablets using quantitative techniques based on an economic concept known as the structural gravity model. First developed in the 1960s, the model, surprisingly, is based on Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which states that the mass and distance between two particles determines the gravitational attraction between them. This law was used in the mid-nineteenth century to predict the existence and location of Neptune based on anomalies observed in the orbit of Uranus. In a new application of the concept, modern-day economists use the structural gravity model to posit trade relationships between economic units based on their size and the distance between them. “It’s a very successful model,” says Cosar. “It can predict trade flows between cities or countries with an 80 percent success rate.”

“The team began by isolating 2,806 tablets that mentioned travel itineraries between two or more cities. They then employed equations based on the structural gravity model to predict trade flow between different centers. “We know where Kanesh and the other known cities are located,” says Cosar. “Depending on how much a lost city interacted with known cities, we could estimate the distance between those cities, as well as their economic size.” The model predicted locations of the lost cities within a radius of about 20 miles. In many cases, the team’s estimates lined up with proposals made by historians. In other cases, they supported one historian’s proposal over another. Remarkably, the ancient economic sizes of the cities could also be used to predict the income and population of cities now located in the same regions in modern-day Turkey. The key to a city’s long-term success, it seems, lies in its position on natural trade routes, ones first plied by donkey caravans some 4,000 years ago.

Obsidian, A Valuable Trade Item

Zach Zorich wrote in Archaeology: “Three small and apparently unremarkable pieces of obsidian, found in the palace courtyard of the ancient city of Urkesh in modern-day Syria, are changing ideas about trade networks at the height of the Akkadian Empire’s power. Urkesh sits near a mountain pass by the border between the Bronze Age Hurrian and Akkadian empires—putting it in a natural position to be a trading center. [Source:Zach Zorich, Archaeology, December 19, 2012]

According to Ellery Frahm of the University of Sheffield and Joshua Feinberg of the University of Minnesota, decades of studies had shown that nearly all of the obsidian used in Urkesh and sites throughout Mesopotamia came from volcanoes in what is now eastern Turkey. Frahm, however, tested this by analyzing the magnetic properties of 97 pieces of obsidian found throughout the city and learned that three of the pieces came from a volcano located much farther away, in central Turkey. These pieces were dated to around 2440 B.C., about the time that Emperor Naram-Sin expanded the Akkadian Empire to its peak influence. Frahm believes that the Akkadians were expanding their trade networks into new territory. The three pieces of obsidian may have been from items traded along with more valuable goods, such as metals. According to Frahm, “It shows that they were tapping into a trade network at that time that they weren’t using before or after.”

Indus Valley Trade

The Indus Valley trade network stretched from India to Syria. The Indus people imported raw materials like lapis lazuli from Afghanistan; clam and conch shells from the Arabian Sea; timber from the Himalayas; silver, jade and gold from Central Asia; and tin, copper and green amozite, perhaps from Rajasthan or the Gujarat area of India. Evidence of maritime trade with Mesopotamia (about 1,500 miles form the Indus area) includes ivory, pearls, beads, timber and grain from the Indus area found in Mesopotamian tombs. Similarities between pottery in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley is further evidence of trade between the two regions.

The presence of a standardized weight and measurement system shows that the trade system was sophisticated, extensive and organized. Certain towns became known for specialized crafts: for example, Lothal for carnelian beads; Balakot for bangles, and the Rohri Hills for flint blades and tools. Some large brick-making and pottery making factories were located in the Cholistan desert. At Shortugai in Afghanistan, the Harappans established a colony to mine lapis lazuli.

Products brought from Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia were traded for raw material and precious metals. Based on its location on trade routes, Kenoyer told Discover, Harappa "was a mercantile base for rapid growth and expansion...The way I envision it. If you had entrepreneurial go-get-'em, and you had a new recourse, you could make a million in Harappa." There are number of archeological sites near Karachi that were probably used as ports.

Dillum

Dilmun tomb areas on Bahrain

Many goods that traveled through the Persian Gulf went through the island of Bahrain. There was an early Bronze Age trade network between Mesopotamia, Dilmun (Bahrain), Elam (southwestern Iran), Bactria (Afghanistan) and the Indus Valley. Ivory combs, carnelian belts and beads were carried by ship to Dilmun in Bahrain where buyers from Ur snapped them up the Euphrates and carried them to Mesopotamia.

Dillum (Dilmun) was ancient Semitic-speaking, city-state and trade center centered mainly on the island of Bahrain that thrived from around 3200 B.C. to 1200 B.C. It was described in Sumerian literature as the city of the gods. Archeologists have found temples and settlements on Dillum, dated to 2200 B.C.

Based on textual evidence, Dillum was located in the Persian Gulf, on a trade route between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilisation, and embraced Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the coastal regions of present-day eastern Saudi Arabia. close to the sea and to artesian springs. At its height, it controlled the Persian Gulf trading routes. Some scholars have theorized that the Sumerians regarded Dilmun as a sacred place, but there is no ancient textual evidence to back this up. Dilmun was mentioned by the Mesopotamians as a trade partner, a source of copper, and a trade entrepôt. It was among the lands conquered by King Sargon of Akkad and his descendants. The Sumerian tale of the garden paradise of Dilmun may have been an inspiration for the Garden of Eden story. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Dilmunites is the name given to the people of Dillum. They were a maritime people who controlled Persian Gulf trade. Andrew Lawler wrote in Archaeology magazine: “ In the mythology of ancient Sumeria (modern Iraq), Dilmun is described as an Eden-like place of milk and honey. But by 2000 B.C., Dilmunites were leaving their homeland to become seagoing merchants and establish a powerful trading network that eventually stretched from India to Syria. Mesopotamian clay tablets refer to ships from Dilmun bringing wood, copper, and other goods from distant lands. [Source: Andrew Lawler, Archaeology February 11, 2013 /=]

Dilmun Trade

copper bull head from Dilmun

"Persian Gulf" types of circular, stamped (rather than rolled) seals associated with Dilmun have been found at Lothal in Gujarat, India, and Failaka, as well as in Mesopotamia, This is regarded as fairly firm evidence that long-distance sea trade involving Dillum took place.. What was traded is less known but is believed to have included timber and precious woods, ivory, lapis lazuli, gold, and luxury goods such as carnelian and glazed stone beads, pearls from the Persian Gulf, shell and bone inlays, which were traded with Mesopotamia in exchange for silver, tin, woolen textiles, olive oil and grains. Copper ingots from Oman and bitumen from Mesopotamia is likely to have been exchanged for cotton textiles and domestic fowl from the Indus region as examples these as trade goods have been found. The weights and measurements used at Dilmun were identical to those used by the Indus, but different from those used in southern Mesopotamia. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Sumerians established trade links with cultures in Anatolia, Syria, Persia and the Indus Valley. Similarities between pottery in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley indicate that trade probably occurred between the two regions. The Sumerians traded for gold and silver from Indus Valley, Egypt, Nubia and Turkey; ivory from Africa and the Indus Valley; agate, carnelian, wood from Iran; obsidian and copper from Turkey; diorite, silver and copper from Oman and coast of Arabian Sea; carved beads from the Indus valley; translucent stone from Oran and Turkmenistan; seashell from the Gulf of Oman. Raw blocks of lapis lazuli are thought to have been brought from Afghanistan by donkey and on foot. Tin may have come from as far away as Malaysia but most likely came from Afghanistan, Turkey or Europe.

Magan

The ancient Magan culture thrived along the coasts of the Persian Gulf during the early Bronze Age (2500-2000 B.C.) in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Ancient myths from Sumer refer to ships from Magan carrying valued woods, copper and diorite stone. Archeologists refers to people in Magan as the Barbar culture. Based on artifacts found at its archeological site it was involved in trade with Mesopotamia, Iran, Arabia, Afghanistan and the Indus Valley. Objects from the Indus Valley found at Magan sites in Oman include three-sided prism seals and Indus Valley pottery.

Sumerian texts, dated to 2300 B.C., describe Magan ships, with a cargo capacity of 20 tons, sailing up the Gulf of Oman and stopping at Dilum to stock up on fresh water before carrying on to Mesopotamia. The texts also said Magan was south of Sumer and Dillum, was visited by travelers from the Indus Valley, and had high mountains, where diorite, or gabbro, was quarried to use to make black statues.

The Magan people subsisted on a diet of fish, shellfish, camel and goat meat, barley, wheat, dates and fruit. They made jewelry with beads made of agate, carnelian paste, steatite (soapstone), shell, bone and gold and produced small animal figures made from a lead-silver alloy.

Magan and Copper

Samad Al Shaan is an ancient site with copper mines and smelting sites that have been dated to the third millennium B.C. Trade from Oman's ancient copper sources was controlled by the Magan culture, who dominated the copper trade in the ancient world. Copper was needed to make both copper and bronze tools and weapons.

A number of Magan era (2500 to 2000 B.C.) copper slag heaps and un-shaped copper ignots have been found at the oasis village of Maysar in central-eastern Oman. A metal workshop was also found there.

The ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia didn't have their own copper sources. Copper mined from mines in the hills around Wadi Jizzi near Sohar in Oman were exported at least as early as 2200 B.C. by the Magan to the Sumerian empire and Elam, another ancient civilization. As other copper sources were discovered and exploited, the influence of the Magan waned.

Sources of Mesopotamia-Era Tin in Afghanistan and Turkey

Copper slag from Cyprus

One of the most enduring mysteries about ancient technology, Wilford wrote, “is where did the metalsmiths of the Middle East get the tin to produce the prized alloy that gave the Bronze Age its name. Digging through ruins and deciphering ancient texts, scholars found many sources of copper ore and evidence of furnaces for copper smelting. But despite their searching, they could never find any sign of ancient tin mining or smelting anywhere closer than Afghanistan. Sumerian texts referred to the tin trade from the east (thought to be Afghanistan). In the 1970s, Russian and French geologists identified several ancient tin mines in Afghanistan, where tin appears to be abundant . For many years that discovery seemed to resolve the issue of Mesopotamia's tin source. [Source: John Noble Wilford, New York Times, January 4, 1994]

It seemed incredible though that such an important industry could have been founded and sustained with long-distance trade alone to places like Afghanistan. But where was there any tin closer to home? After systematic explorations in the central Taurus Mountains of Turkey, an archeologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago has found a tin mine and ancient mining village 60 miles north of the Mediterranean coastal city of Tarsus. This was the first clear evidence of a local tin industry in the Middle East, archeologists said, and it dates to the early years of the Bronze Age.

The findings changed established thinking about the role of trade and metallurgy in the economic and cultural expansion of the Middle East in the Bronze Age. In an announcement made in January 1994, Dr. Aslihan Yener of the Oriental Institute reported that the mine and village demonstrated that tin mining was a well-developed industry in the region as long ago as 2870 B. C. She analyzed artifacts to re-create the process used to separate tin from ore at relatively low temperatures and in substantial quantities."Already we know that the industry had become just that — a fully developed industry with specialization of work," Dr. Yener told the New York Times, "It had gone beyond the craft stages that characterize production done for local purposes only."

Dr. Vincent C. Pigott, a specialist in the archeology of metallurgy at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, said: "By all indications, she's got a tin mine. It's excellent archeology and a major step forward in understanding ancient metal technology." To Dr. Guillermo Algaze, an anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego and a scholar of Mesopotamian civilizations, the discovery is significant because it shows that bronze metallurgy, like agriculture and many other transforming human technologies, apparently developed independently in several places. Much of the innovation, moreover, seemed to come not from the urban centers of southern Mesopotamia, in today's Iraq, but from the northern hinterlands, like Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

Speaking of the ancient tin workers of the Taurus Mountains, Dr. Algaze said: "It's very clear that these are not just rustic provincials sitting on resources. They had a high level of metallurgy technology, and they were exploiting tin for trade all around the Middle East." The mine, at a site called Kestel, has narrow passages running more than a mile into the mountainside, with others still blocked and unexplored. The archeologists found only low-grade tin ore, presumably the remains of richer deposits that had been mined out.

For this reason, Dr. James D. Muhly, a professor of ancient Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania, said he was skeptical of interpretations that Kestel was a tin mine. "They have identified the geological presence of tin," he contended. "Almost every piece of granite has at least minute concentrations of tin in it. But was there enough there for mining? I don't think they have found a tin mine." In her defense, Dr. Yener said: "His arguments are still based on an analysis of the mine and not the industry. He has to address the analysis of the crucibles." Although he was skeptical of Dr. Yener's claim to have found an ancient tin mine, Dr. Muhly praised her effort to find the sources of metals in the Middle East as "tremendously important archeology" because of the connection between the development and widening use of bronze and the emergence of complex societies, large urban centers, international trade and empires.

Trade or Colonialism Between Mesopotamia and Turkey?

John Noble Wilford wrote in the New York Times, “On a limestone bluff overlooking the Euphrates in southeastern Turkey, a low mound spreads across several acres, blanketing the ruins of a settlement that bustled with life and trade in the late fourth millennium B.C. The ruins may tell a tale of how the world's first urban societies reached into the hinterlands for raw materials and thus started the earliest practice of colonialism.[Source: John Noble Wilford, New York Times, May 25, 1993]

Or it may turn out to be a somewhat different story. The first archeological excavations at the Turkish site of Hacinebi Tepe, begun last summer, have yielded surprising results. A preliminary examination of the stones, mud brick, ceramics and other artifacts suggests that the local people at Hacinebi may well have been trading with their supposed Mesopotamian masters as equals.

If so, these new findings do more than provide additional evidence of the widespread Mesopotamian presence among their neighbors to the north; they also raise serious questions about the nature of that relationship. Were they really there as colonialists? Perhaps they were only merchants in a widening network of long-distance trade, asserting little or none of the political, military or economic dominance usually associated with colonialism. They might even have been there, in some cases, as refugees.

Dr. Gil J. Stein, an anthropologist at Northwestern University who is directing the excavations, said the discoveries at Hacinebi are "provoking us to think of ancient colonization in a dramatically different way." Although other sites of Mesopotamian trading outposts and presumed colonies have been sampled before, this is the first one known to be superimposed on an existing local community. There is a well-preserved layer of artifacts of the people who lived there for generations before the Mesopotamians arrived. Immediately above it is a layer of indigenous artifacts and architectural remains mingled with clear evidence of a Mesopotamian presence.

Dr. William Sumner, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, said this was the first opportunity for archeologists to investigate the role of the indigenous societies in these trading centers and determine their relationship with the foreigners. Dr. Guillermo Algaze, an anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego who specializes in the colonialism of ancient civilizations, said: "This site has great potential. We will be seeing to what extent the enterprise was exploitative or more reciprocal, and seeing the social and economic impact it had on the locals."

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated July 2024