The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Babylonian sources of exotic raw materials —
of considerable quantities of gold. At Sippar, the craftsman most frequently mentioned
in cuneiform sources was the kutimmum, a goldsmith or jeweller, perhaps because the
‘the merchants of Sippar would hoard their wealth and riches in the form of golden
jewellery’ (Renger 1984: 89). Old Babylonian dowry documents often mention gold
jewellery, whether armlets, earrings, nose-rings or finger-rings (Dalley 1980). Some
Kassite period private accounts also reveal the ownership of considerable quantities
of gold (e.g. Kessler 1982: 65). This is perhaps not surprising since gold, along with
silver, functioned as an established exchange commodity in Babylonia at this time.
Gold, however, was four times as costly as silver (Müller 1982: 271). An interesting
sixth-century BC text from Uruk discusses the cleaning and repair of gold jewellery
worn by the statues of the Lady of Uruk and Nanâ. The high regard of the Uruk
goldsmiths is shown by the fact that jewellery from cult statues in the Esagila at
Babylon was sent to Uruk for treatment there (Sack 1979). The lavish abundance of
gold in the Esagila is also illustrated a few centuries later in Herodotus’ description
(Hist. 1.183) of a golden statue of Marduk (Zeus) and a golden altar in his temple
at Babylon (Dandamaev 1993: 41). On the other hand, gold beads appear in graves
of virtually all periods (Limper 1988), showing that gold was accessible to a relatively
broad segment of society and was by no means limited to those associated with the
temple or palace estates.
Where should one look for the gold sources of the ancient Babylonians? The answer
is far from clear. Considerably more is known about the gold used in early Egypt
(Forbes 1939: 241ff.; Mallory-Greenough et al. 2000) and Europe (Muhly 1983), but
the spurious use of white platiniridium inclusions in objects from Ur, Tell Brak,
Alalakh, Crete and elsewhere as evidence of a source in the Pactolus valley of Anatolia
has been discredited (Muhly 1983). Evidence for gold extraction from auriferous lead
has been cited at Kestel and Göltepe in Anatolia by several different authorities (for
references, see Weeks 2003: 168) and Assyrian merchants exported both gold and
silver from Anatolia in return for textiles and tin during the early second millennium
BC. By the Achaemenid period, gold could have come from an even wider array of
sources. In boasting about the construction of his palace at Susa, Darius I stated that
the gold used there came both from the Lydian capital of Sardis, in Asia Minor, and
from Bactria (modern southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan) (Kent 1953:
144, s.v. DSf).
Silver
The fact that the Assyrians were able to acquire silver from their Anatolian trading
partners obviously suggests that Anatolia may also have been a source of Mesopotamian
silver. In fact, Mesopotamia’s silver sources, although conspicuous by their absence
in the cuneiform sources, almost certainly did lie in Anatolia (Moorey 1994: 234),
although Magan is another possibility since silver has been mined in the recent, premodern
past in Oman (Potts 1990: 116, n. 106). Argentiferous lead is common in
Iran and may have been smelted in antiquity to acquire silver. Certainly Elam, the
most powerful state in western Iran, on at least one occasion sent silver to Mari in
Syria (Potts 1999: Table 6.2). But silver could also come from much further afield.
In the Achaemenid period, the Persians imported silver from Egypt (Kent 1953: 144).
In Babylonia, silver acted as an equivalence or standard in determining value and
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