Cornish tin found in Israel unearths evidence of earliest trade links
Tin ingots found in Israel that are more than 3000 years old are of Cornish origin and probably reached the Middle East by way of Greece, experts say.
Archaeologists said that their chemical analysis provided the first hard evidence for trading of the metal, which is used in making bronze, between the west of Britain and the most famous Bronze Age civilisations – over networks covering thousands of kilometres.
The 23 ingots from shipwrecks off the coast of Israel date from about the 13th and 12th centuries BC, when Phoenician and Greek traders dominated the eastern Mediterranean, and around the time of the first recorded written mention, by the ancient Egyptians, of the word ‘‘Israel’’. Tin was a prerequisite for making bronze swords and armour.
Analysis of the chemical composition of the 10-15kg ingots by researchers at the Curt Engelhorn Archaeometry Centre in Mannheim and other institutions indicates that the metal did not come from central Asia as has sometimes been assumed, based on earlier inscriptions, but from tin deposits in Cornwall or Devon, possibly from the Carnmenellis area of west Cornwall.
Although the Phoenicians of the Levant are sometimes held to have pioneered the metal trade with Britain, the German authors speculate that the route may instead have owed its development to the Mycenaean Greeks, whose adventures to the east inspired tales of the Trojan war.
In their paper, in the scientific journal they wrote: ‘‘It is no accident that the shift in the tin trade from the Near East to Europe and Cornwall in particular, documented by the isotopic and chemical evidence [on the tin ingots], corresponds to the demise of the Minoans and the rise of the Mycenaeans circa 1430 BC. Unlike the Minoans, the Mycenaeans sailed west and established trading ports in southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and south Iberia, which served as gateways to new trading routes to Britain and the European interior.’’ They added that important eastwest trade routes ‘‘probably’’ ran via the Greek mainland. Bob Johnston, a specialist in British prehistory at Sheffield University, who was not involved in the study, said: ‘‘This is a very exciting find. While we’ve speculated the southwest of Britain was an important source of tin at this period, due to the relatively few sources of the metal we didn’t have direct evidence of trade linking Mediterran ean.’’
The researchers said that ‘‘direct’’ contacts between Britain and the eastern Mediterranean in the period remained unproven. They said that the trade may have been conducted in a number of stages, in an economy that also valued glass beads and amber.
Daniel Berger, lead author of the research, told ‘‘That there could have been long-distance trade or exchange systems between it to the eastern the British Isles and the eastern Mediterranean is not a new idea. However, [this is] the first concrete evidence that tin was one of the driving forces of these trade networks.
‘‘We have analysed only 23 tin ingots from Israel, but we have to assume that the amount of tin traded in the Late Bronze Age must have been enormous.’’
Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was already being produced in the Middle East, Anatolia and the Aegean in the late fourth and third millennia BC. Knowledge on its production spread across large parts of the Old World.
There is a rich historiography and folklore around ancient Cornish tin. The historian Diodorus Siculus of the 1st century BC wrote what is believed to be a description of tinmining and trading in Cornwall based on an earlier account by the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (Marseilles).
In one legend that inspired the poet and painter William Blake, Joseph of Arimathea, the Christian disciple, travelled to Cornwall for tin and may have brought the young Jesus with him.
The researchers also looked at one tin ingot of the period from Crete and others from a shipwreck off Turkey. The metal in these appeared to derive from what is now Afghanistan and Sardinia, respectively, indicating that there were a number of different tin routes.