In about 1300BC, the major civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean made a cultural and technological leap forward when they began using bronze much more widely for weapons, tools and jewellery. While a form of the metal had previously been used in smaller quantities by the Mycenaeans and Egyptians among others, bronze was now abundant – but how?
Most bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, but while the former was widely available in antiquity, tin is a rare element, with no large sources within thousands of kilometres. This left one big question, referred to by archaeologists as the “tin problem”. Where were the bronze age societies of the Mediterranean getting the tin for their bronze?
A British-led group of archaeologists believe they have solved the mystery. By scientifically analysing ore and artefacts from across Europe, they have established that tin from the abundant deposits in Cornwall and Devon was being widely traded in the Mediterranean more than 3,000 years ago – and may have played a key part in the advances of sophisticated kingdoms and states more than 4,000km (2,485 miles) away.
I thought we already knew that? Not that I could provide a citation but I’ve some memory of a shipwreck from 1100, 1200 BC somewhere in the Levant which had ingots of Cornish tin…..
The study, the first major project of its kind, performed trace element, lead isotope and tin element analysis on tin ingots recovered from bronze age shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, including three that sank off the coast of Israel. Scientists also analysed ore samples and ancient tin artefacts from south-west Britain and the handful of other European sources.
By comparing their results, the authors were able to establish not only that Cornish tin was being widely traded in the eastern Mediterranean,
Aha! So this study is in fact just a confirmation of that stuff I already knew. Ho hum.
I’ve a feeling this was something I’ve “always” known as well. Wasn’t it from the goods that were traded for the tin turning up? Always good to get you’re hands on some research money, though.
Another “win” for academia.
Finding out the bleeding obvious
Somewhere that doesn’t have tin was using tin.
Where did it come from?
Somewhere that has tin.
Look around and find the nearest few tin supplies. Probably came from one of them…
Further evidence that most jobs these days are adult day care.
The Cornish delicacy of saffron cake is due to their ability to trade tin for saffron in the dim and distant past.
The central asian ‘stan’ countries were named as that’s where the ancients got their stannum from. Got told that in a Liverpool pub once and believed it long time.
There was a sarcastic saying in research to the effect of “three months work in the lab can save you a whole mornings work in the library“.
“So this study is in fact just a confirmation of that stuff I already knew. Ho hum.”
No this study is a make work scheme for middle class layabouts.
PS I’m sure I read this in my Look and Learn magazines, aged about 10.
Ah, Look and Learn! That, along with my dad, taught me more than primary school ever did, apart from arithmetic and some French. I could already read before I went to school.
I suspect a great deal of academic research is similar. Probably most of it. Either confirming things already known or “discovering” the completely useless.
Of course it is. The 80-20 Rule applies just as firmly to “academic research” as it does to all cultural output and Pareto’s pea plants. Except the ratio is probably more like 99-1.
I once looked over some papers a Surrey University lecturer was marking. They were student pitches for grant-aided studies. Laughable. Lamentable. And this was 30 years ago when my default attitude to academia was still A Good Thing.
“I thought we already knew that?”
There is a need for further research to establish the date at which we first knew that.
(Did you know that there’s a theory that some of the names of the Hebridean islands are semitic in origin, presumably having been named by Carthaginians searching for new tin deposits?)
There are a few bronze age mysteries but this isn’t one of them.
Fr’instance, the Sea People, a society of pirates, basically. Where did they come from, did they have a home base or overwintering shelter?
As any fule kno,
Cornwall was named after Corineus who was a Trojan soldier and fought the giant Gogmagog.
His commander was Brutus the great grandson of Aeneas.
If the Trojan War was fought around 1400BC, then 1300-ish will be about right for Brutus and his lads to arrive and set up a tin mining business.
Seeing as Aeneas stopped off for a bit of hanky panky with Dido, it is not unreasonable to suppose that some of the Trojans had Carthaginian blood and could speak the lingo.
There was some codger (Wilkens, or similar) who made a credible argument that Troy was in Cornwall, not Turkey, and Schliemann found another place.
The war was over control of the tin, not some hotel chain heiress.
Clive Cussler used the concept in a novel.
There’s no reason to presume a direct trading link between the Middle East & Cornwall. Fairly unlikely. Second or third hand or possibly even more. Trade depends on information & information’s easily transported.
Does anyone know why the Bronze Age came before the Iron Age? Isn’t finding, mining, and mixing the copper and tin a whole lot more difficult and technologically advanced than just dealing with the iron?
(I like you guys more than Chat GPT…)
One more bit of well known evidence that people have been trading since the dawn of time, but I think in the current environment that is regarded as one of those primitive activities, such as human sacrifice, burning of witches, or wife beating that needs to be stomped out.
Highlighted the relevant bit. That “opinion” is now squashed to satisfaction.
And you need an extra go on the available finds with modern detection methods to actually prove it.
Canon among Historians is not much different from the 19thC: You had Civilisation in the East, while western Europe had tribes in mud-huts, if they got beyond hunter-gathering at all.
Not being helped by the tendency of Romans to view and describe anything not Roman as Inferior and Barbaric. And Historians have always taken the Roman Opinion as Gospel Truth.
(Later this same trick was perpetrated by the Frankish Christians regarding the Nordics ( and anyone else not adopting Christianity as the Bees’ Knees..))
This despite the fact that modern archeology has proven that this most definitely was not the case.
But you know Academics, they won’t acknowledge new facts that might disprove their Opinions even if you slap them in the face with it.
Which is where you get research funded that actually does the slapping and confirm things people “already knew” or suspected, but was never official. Just another “interpretation of the available evidence”.
The same happens in actual Science…. Re-hashing of the same experiments with ever increasing accuracy to determine whether current theory is actually correct.
Brought us proof of time-dilatation, the Higgs field and gravitic waves, quantum field-effects in enzymes and other catalists, abiogenesis of molecules once thought to be the sole purvey of “life”… y’know… Stuff… But all only figured out after re-testing things we already knew or suspected, but never were able to prove in sufficient detail to “put the finger on”.
And each heavily contested by experts, even to this day.
So much for the Gravity Theory of Trade, then.
Simon: Copper and tin are much easier to extract from their ores than iron. The metals can be worked at much lower temperatures too. Reducing iron oxide to the metal needs very high temperatures in a reducing environment – CO atmosphere basically – so it took a while for bronze metallurgists to get on top of it.
So this study is in fact just a confirmation of that stuff I already knew.
Nope. The study confirms what you believed – and belief is not knowledge. Pytheas of Massalia’s account of his voyage to northern Europe in c.325 bc has not survived, but he is quoted by one or two other authors as mentioning the tin trade with Cornwall. So there were reasonable grounds to believe the Cornwall-Mediterranean tin trade existed, though ancient authors can be unreliable (eg Herodotus). However, the isotope analysis etc proves the existence of the trade beyond reasonable doubt, so we now have knowledge rather than belief.
“Where lay the famous tin-islands, the Cassiterides? How were the great ingots of Cornish tin delivered down to the coast and shipped on to Marseilles, Carthage, Tyre? We know that they were shaped pannier-wise, and carried by ponies. But where was the island of Ictis, where the ships received them? Our latest theories will not allow it to have been St Michael’s Mount – the nearest of all, and the most obviously correspondent with the historian’s account. They tell us hardily it was the Isle of Wight – or the Isle of Thanet. Ah, if these professors did not suffer from sea-sickness, how much simpler their hypotheses would be! Image the old Cornish merchant taking whole trains of ponies, laden with valuable ore, along the entire south of England, through dense forests and marauding tribes, to ship his ware at Thanet, when he had half a dozen better ports at his at his door!”
Arthur Quiller-Couch, “The Commerce of Thought”
BiS
“There’s no reason to presume a direct trading link between the Middle East & Cornwall.”
And we don’t have to. The Celts were established in Europe around 1800BC and had a trading network. They also had the wheel. We don’t have to imagine triremes turning up in Plymouth, but small boats crossing the Channel loaded at a port further east by ox carts.
Delboios : This tin is well kushty, where’d it comes from ?
Arturo Dalio : Ah secret supplier out west. Can’t spread it around or those bloody Trojans will come and conquer it.
Philip Scott Thomas
Bugger.
Trust “Q” to get there first.
And of course John Masefield
Cargoes’
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
John Masefield
From memory from a visit to Ironbridge, getting iron out of the ore needs temperatures only achievable from using coking coal, bellows and a suitable furnace vessel lining (can’t recall the name, could be magnesite).
It still begs the question, why didn’t the ancients discover iron making. Given that coking coal, cheese and wine were discovered long ago by people playing around, why not reduction of iron ore in a furnace.
TG has the gist of it, except that it didn’t *quite* happen that way..
The terms copper/bronze/iron age is based on the main material tools were made from. Specifically military tools.
Peeps happily used stone, bone and bronze ( later increasingly brass ) well into the medieval periods, depending on availability and cost for any amount of other purposes.
Getting copper and tin from their ores requires the same reducing environment you need to get iron.
The technique used ( loam towers fired with charcoal, ventilated with bellows ) is exactly the same for any of the metals: they’re in oxydised state in the ore, so need to be reduced.
The temperature for tin/lead/copper/zinc is slightly lower than for iron, but not so much that a bit of enthousiastic bellowing can’t get you there.
It is suspected both the Egyptians and Assyrians already knew about iron.
After all, the “black sand” so often featured in the gold-hunter “documentaries” is nothing but iron sand. And we know such deposits were a main source for gold and silver in those days.
They probably could make iron as well if they chose to, certainly did when roasting the iron sand to get the last dregs of precious metals out. Someone will have fired up the stack to see what happens and got the iron out. Human nature..
The thing there is that the sand-iron you get from that is either so pure it’s soft and can’t be hardened, or so carbonised it’s too brittle to be of any use. Bog-iron is even worse, since it still contains a lot of silica ( slag) which needs to be worked out.
And all of it rusts something fierce as soon as you look at it.
Compared to bronze, iron simply wasn’t a good proposition. So it was treated as waste, which piled up.
It took a couple of centuries of experimenting ( those damn greedy Apprentices…) to figure out the correct temperatures , loads, and other tricks to get a decent iron out of the stacks. From that “waste”. And that red layer that buggers up your fields, and you can find in swamps you drained for fields, and…
This coincided with an upstart tribe with Ambitions in the eastern end of what is now Italy, (and where currently 133 old men decide who’s going to be Chief God-Botherer), and which needed a *lot* of cheap weapons and armour. Fast.
So they adopted the inferior iron as their main metal for military purposes. Because it was cheap compared to bronze, and you could find the “ore” damn near everywhere you dug down half a meter. Especially in the boggy places you just drained for Lebensraum. And you weren’t dependent on those damn snooty Phoenician traders who controlled the trade, and….
And thus the Iron Age was born.
And note the iron there.
Steel (for a given value of “steel”) did happen piecemeal, but actual production in trade volumes ( Persian “Wootz” steel from which the real Ulfbehrt swords were made) didn’t happen until roughly the 8-9th C. And it wasn’t until the 12th-13th C. for the early blast furnaces to appear in Europe.
(coinciding with a marked increase in availability and quality/style in armour… once again…)
thank you Grikath
Bellows
In Hallein near Salzburg they have little furnaces as built by the local Celts.
They were placed on the sides of hills with vents in the front so that the wind could blow up them.
Also coking coal – didn’t they use charcoal instead ?
@Bongo You don’t need coking coal and special linings…
Loam, charcoal, and the red line bugg’ring up your drainage will do it.
I’ve done it several times at Iron Age historical demonstrations, there’s plenty of Youtube vids on how to do it nowadays.
To get *really* good iron you want the rust as pure as possible ( washing out the sand and clay as much as possible, or make bog iron, pound it to bits, then let it rust), roast it until black ( getting rid of the water) , and mix it with horse dung.
You feed little balls of that to the stack, layering it with charcoal.
Get your inlets and bellowing *just* right, and you get a pretty pure soft iron, bordering on low-carbon steel.
Do it slightly different, and you get brittle high-carbon “steel”.
Stacking., firewelding, twisting, more stacking, and a *lot* of pounding gets you the pattern-welded blades that were once the norm for “high quality” weapons.
And later the same techniques and basic materials were used to create the compound swords of the early medieval era. ( some of those are made up of 5 or 6 (!) different irons/steels in various parts of the blade.. true hardcore engineering/smithing…)
The wife’s pottery group in Texas made an anagama kiln. You can make one in a couple of hours and fuel it with wood and get it up to 1400C. On a slope, pointing into the wind. I am constantly amazed by what was achieved in the ancient world.
Thomas Sowell points out that the sum total of an individual’s knowledge hasn’t really changed, but its content has. Obviously true.
The largest prehistoric copper mine in the world is on the Great Orme in Llandudno. It was operating from ~2000-1000BC and it seems unlikely its only customers were the local Celts. If they could export copper, no reason they couldn’t do the same for Cornish tin as well.
O/T the Chiltern woods are peppered with slag from early iron smelting – I found a lump the size of two fists. It could be Romano-British or mediæval – as the technology didn’t really change for a millennium or so, there’s no way to tell except by isotopic analysis and I’m not about to spend the thick end of a grand to find out!