Mesopotamia trade system
In this case they were used for fine glasswork, for instance decorating glass vessels and stoneworks, and for inlays in gold jewelry and wooden objects, such as coffins and furniture. Glass was as highly valued in the Late Bronze Age as the precious stones lapis lazuli or turquoise, obsidian and amethyst. Diplomacy in Akkadian. The Amarna Letters, a set of clay tablets in Akkadian, detailing diplomatic correspondence between ancient rulers in today's Syria and Egypt, show that Akhenaten was seeking significant quantities of Mesopotamian glass, despite the existence of glass workshops in his city Akhetaten.
Evidently, even though Egyptian glass manufacturing was significant in scale, foreign supplies were needed. Thilo Rehren, professor of archaeological materials and technology at University College of London, explains that in his opinion, not every workshop was capable of producing all colors.
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The exchange of glass between the main powers of the time gave them all access to the full spectrum of glass for their artistic studios, sparing them the need to maintain primary producing workshops with access to, not to mention knowledge of, all the exotic minerals needed for each color, Rehren argues. A matter for the Pharaoh. The analysis provides the first solid archaeological evidence of glass trading between Mesopotamia and Egypt, which had been known beforehand solely from the Amarna Letters.
In fact, Egypt was apparently already importing glass from Syria a hundred years earlier, during the reign of Thutmosis III BCE , and he may have been personally involved too. A depiction of Thutmosis III donating tribute acquired from his Syrian wars to the Temple shows gold, silver and seven baskets with what seem to be precious stones to the Karnak temple — but three of these baskets mostly likely contain glass ingots.
They are shown as circular pieces of fairly consistent size, whilst other pieces are shown as irregular lumps," Dr. Maybe the king was so impressed by this new material that he chose to add his throne name to it. Mycenae, trading hub of the ancients. The team's chemical analysis of glass beads found in burials in Romania, Northern Germany and Denmark shows that they were also made from, or with, Mesopotamian glass, probably traded some time between BCE.
Some were made of mixed Mesopotamian and Egyptian glass. Even though the origin of the raw glass used to make these beads can be determined as Egypt or Mesopotamia, determining where the glass beads unearthed in Europe were made is harder. Secondary glass workshops would have reworked the raw glass, for instance mixing in Egyptian cobalt blue to create luxurious blue glass beads. It first appeared in Mesopotamia, but later it also was produced in Egypt. The glass was mostly traded as big 'round cheese' shaped ingots in that area. And probably, somewhere, glass workshops produced glass beads for trade in Europe.
Jeanette Varberg, who is associated with the research and curator of Exhibits at Moesgaard Museum, told Haaretz. Rehren is more cautious.
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There are some observations and analyses that could be interpreted this way, but more data and clarity is needed before I can see this as a regular pattern," Rehen says. In the East, raw glass seem to have moved along established trade routes via ports like Ugarit, reaching central places such as Mycenae. From the Mycenaean central places, the trade routes were many. Also, glass beads are small. For the Mesopotamian glass to reach remote Alpine areas from the coast, all it took was one or two travelers slogging across the peaks with a thousand beads in a bag.
In Western Romania, beads made with Mesopotamian glassine elements were found in several burials and hoards.
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The most prominent is the Cioclovina Cave, which had artifacts of which were glass beads, faience beads and amber beads. In Neustrelitz, North Germany a ceramic vessel containing objects was found, with 20 amber beads and glass beads. Recent analysis of Danish glass beads has demonstrated that Mesopotamian glass is represented in 10 Danish burials.
The most recent analysis of the chemistry of a blue glass bead from Puggegaard, Bornholm, has yielded yet another Mesopotamian result. We complement this formula by collecting information on impassable rivers and river crossings fords , and allow for maritime travel near the coast. Our approach in defining natural routes finds support in Palmisano , and Palmisano and Altaweel , who argue that ancient routes followed least-effort paths closely.
Armed with this measure of optimal travel routes, we consider a very large number of routes between origin-destination pairs. This measure corresponds to the notion of betweenness centrality in the network of optimal routes. We define a road-knot score equal to the number of intersections or overlaps for each location. Our variable NaturalRoads i is the simple average of this road-knot score within 20 km of city i. In essence, it measures the propensity of a given site to connect to the natural routes network.
This measure is arguably exogenous as it only uses topographical data as input.
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Figure VII shows a heat map of our road-knot scores for Turkey and the surrounding region. Major modern urban settlements and transportation arteries, not included on this map, overlap with our road measure, although neither were used as an input. Notes: This table presents the estimation from various specifications of equation Each observation is an ancient city. Explanatory variables are: NaturalRoads , the average natural road score of the area within 20 km of the ancient city as defined in Sub section V.
In unreported regressions, we experimented with alternative measures of local amenities elevation, crop yield, distance to the nearest river, and distance to the nearest known copper, gold, or silver deposit documented in the Early Bronze Age , but none of those measures were either significant or robust. Robust p -values are in parentheses. We find robust and significant evidence in support of the road-knot hypothesis.
The more road intersections near a city, the larger it is. While the RomanRoads variable has a positive but nonsignificant effect columns 2 and 5 , our a priori measure of the connectedness of a city to the natural road network, NaturalRoads , is strongly significant, with a p -value below.
The horizontal axis is the logged index for road-knots, NaturalRoads for ancient cities. Two observations are in order. First, our method explains which among the existing ancient cities are large, which are small. We do not attempt to explain where cities are located, only how large they are given their location. Second, our measure of connectedness to the natural road network, NaturalRoads , is particularly relevant in this central part of modern Turkey, a high plateau with many smaller mountains.
Had we applied our method on a flat plain, such as lower Mesopotamia, eastern China, northwestern Europe, or the U. Midwest, the topography would presumably have offered little guidance on natural road access of a particular location, and access to waterways instead might play a larger role. Anatolia, with its clearly defined mountain ranges and valleys, is a particularly well-suited laboratory to test our road-knot hypothesis.
It suggests that the defensive value of a site contributed to the emergence of larger cities. Among all measures of local amenities, Ruggedness is the only variable significantly correlated with city size. Crop yield, elevation, distance to the nearest river, and distance to mineral deposits exploited in the Early Bronze Age are all either insignificant or driven by outliers.
History of Mesopotamia
Next we confront our ancient size estimates with modern size measures, and document a strong persistence of the distribution of city sizes over four millennia. To do so, we match the locations of ancient sites with corresponding modern urban settlements. We project two alternative measures of modern city sizes on our ancient size estimates and a control for geographic amenities. As a result, it rapidly grew to be the second largest city of the country.
It is now much larger than any other city in our sample, primarily due to the idiosyncratic positive effect of assuming a political role in recent history. Our first measure of modern size, Population i , measures the total urban population living within 20 km of ancient city i. Our second measure, NightLight i , is the total nighttime luminosity of the area within 20 km of ancient city i.
In the absence of modern city-level income data, nighttime luminosity is a strong correlate of local incomes Hodler and Raschky This table presents the estimation from various specifications of equation Dependent variables are modern-day size measures: Population and NightLights are total urban population and night luminosity within 20 km of the ancient city, respectively. In unreported regressions, we experimented with other geographic controls elevation, distance to the nearest river, and distance to modern mineral deposits of gold, silver, and copper , but none of those measures were significant or robust.
Table V , columns 1 and 4 show the results of simple specifications without any geographic controls for each measure of modern size, population and night lights. These results are also plotted in the two panels of Figure IX. The correlation between ancient and modern sizes is high, 0. This surprising level of persistence in city sizes from the the twentieth century BCE to the twenty-first century CE is robust to controlling for modern local crop yields columns 3 and 6 , while crop yields are not statistically significant on their own columns 2 and 5.
The strong and robust correlation of city sizes over four millennia is unlikely to be a mere coincidence, which gives us confidence that our estimates for ancient city sizes are plausible.
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Although our results do not offer a definitive explanation for this persistence, two mechanisms highlighted in the literature are potentially at play. The first mechanism is path dependence. Despite a series of large shocks, with states rising and collapsing, radical changes in institutions and political boundaries, migrations and shifts in population for the region, climate change, large earthquakes, the rise and fall of religions, and so on, people seem to have come back to the same locations to restart cities.
The second mechanism is the effect of time-invariant fundamental characteristics. We have shown that the advantageous location as a natural trading hub conferred by the topography of the land is a key determinant of ancient city sizes. To the extent that transport routes are shaped by similar constraints throughout history, topography may have continued to affect the relative size of cities. We hope to explore this mechanism in other historical settings and regions in future research. Figure X presents the results of estimating equation It should of course be interpreted with due caution.
First, our variable Population is estimated with error, so our estimate for the Zipf exponent may be biased. Second, we have no direct evidence on actual population sizes and rely instead on trade data and a structural gravity model to infer population sizes in the Bronze Age. It is, however, an intriguing finding, worthy of further investigations. The vertical axis is the log of rank minus one-half. The regression line corresponds to the estimate of equation First, the estimated locations of lost cities from both models are far apart— So the modeling choices, structural versus naive gravity, have a substantial impact on our estimates.
Our structural estimates are also substantially closer to the proposals from historian Barjamovic Our structural gravity model seems better at identifying the location of lost cities than a simpler naive gravity model. Controlling for distance, and correcting for general equilibrium forces does have a sizable impact on city size estimates.
For instance, using size estimates from naive gravity in estimating equation 15 to test for the persistence of economic activity over 4, years gives an insignificant coefficient of logged modern population on logged ancient size 0. Our structural estimates for size are also significantly related to measures of access to natural roads, for all cities together and for the subset of lost cities only.
Naive size estimates are related to access to natural roads only when considering all cities, but not for the subset of lost cities only. Our structural estimates for city sizes seem more plausible than naive estimates. To recap, estimating a structural rather than a naive gravity model delivers not only different but also more reliable estimates for the location of lost cities and the sizes of ancient cities.
Business documents dating back to the Bronze Age—inscribed on clay tablets and unearthed from ancient sites in Anatolia—give us a window to analyze economic interactions between Assyrian merchants and Anatolian cities 4, years ago. The data allows us to construct a measure for trade between ancient cities and estimate a structural gravity model.