The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— D. T. Potts —
that the area had a flourishing local industry. It says nothing about its role as a regular
supplier of copper to Mesopotamia. Similarly, the references to copper from Jamanu
in two sixth-century texts from Uruk are difficult to interpret. Was Jamanu a source
area, or was it perhaps transhipping copper from another region, such as Cyprus?
Tin
Bronze is an alloy of copper mixed with a variable quantity (from a few per cent to
15–20 per cent) of tin. Although archaeologists commonly speak of the Bronze Age,
the reality is that, whereas copper is relatively common, tin is rare in Western Asia.
While much research in the past two decades has focused on Kestel in the Taurus
mountains of southeastern Turkey (Weeks 2003: 167–169), and this was a probable
tin source for Anatolia, it seems unlikely that Mesopotamia’s tin came from this area.
Rather, it is far more likely that the tin used in Mesopotamia, Iran and the Gulf
region (and indeed further west at sites like Troy) came from the southern Afghan
sources identified in the 1970s by Soviet geologists. This is undoubtedly the ‘Meluhha
tin’ mentioned in an Ur III text from Ur, and the tin used at Tell Abraq in the
Persian Gulf. Moreover, it is likely to be the tin traded by Assyrian merchant houses
at Kanesh (Kültepe) in Anatolia, along with Babylonian textiles, in return for Anatolian
silver and gold. We know from the Mari archive that Elam, Iran’s major political
power prior to the foundation of the Persian empire in the sixth century BC, was an
important purveyor of tin to the Mari and its vassal states in Syria (Potts 1999: 166ff.)
and Elam’s political relations with Assyria during the early second millennium BC
almost certainly account for the ready supply of tin available to Assyrian merchants.
While this probably moved from the southern Afghan sources via overland routes,
the same source area may well have fed tin into a maritime network of trade, which
Meluhhan merchants, at the mouth of the Indus River or in Gujarat, trans-shipped
up the Persian Gulf to Magan, Dilmun and Ur.
In some respects the expectation that ancient metalsmiths would have used tin to
improve casting fluidity and for a hardening effect, while technically correct, is
probably historically unrealistic. Much ancient metalwork was made from recycled
metal, well exemplified by a hoard of metal tools and vessels discovered by W.K.
Loftus in the nineteenth century at the Old Babylonian site of Tell Sifr (ancient
Kutalla) in southern Iraq. Analyses have shown that an axehead from Tell Sifr contained
2.6 per cent tin while a mattock and an adze contained 7 per cent and 4.5 per cent,
respectively (Moorey et al. 1988: 44). It is highly unlikely that the Tell Sifr metalsmiths
could control tin content, or even bothered to try, probably because they were always
working with scrap metal, which they recycled. It is doubtful whether they ever really
knew the tin content of the old tools and vessel fragments that they regularly recycled.
Precious metals
Gold
Because of their richness, the gold offerings recovered in the Royal Cemetery at Ur,
of mid-third millennium BC date, have received considerable attention, but what of
gold use in Babylonia after 2000 BC? Old Babylonian sources attest to the circulation
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