Abstract:
Archaeometallurgical research in the U.A.E. and Oman has demonstrated that local Bronze Age societies undertook
copper production on a very large scale, providing solid evidence for the identification of this region as the land of Magan known in
Mesopotamian sources as a key supplier of copper in the later 3rd millennium b.c. However, consideration of the textual, archaeological
and archaeometallurgical evidence from across the greater Persian Gulf region indicates a more complex exchange system conditioned
not only by raw material sources and trade routes, but by politics and warfare, by technological traditions of manufacture and recycling,
by ideologies of elite consumption, and by the social obligations that created and underpinned exchange relationships. A great deal of
work remains to be done to demonstrate the likely contribution of Iranian polities to this system.
Machine summary:
and Oman has demonstrated that local Bronze Age societies undertook copper production on a very large scale, providing solid evidence for the identification of this region as the land of Magan known in Mesopotamian sources as a key supplier of copper in the later 3rd millennium b.
c. However, consideration of the textual, archaeological and archaeometallurgical evidence from across the greater Persian Gulf region indicates a more complex exchange system conditioned not only by raw material sources and trade routes, but by politics and warfare, by technological traditions of manufacture and recycling, by ideologies of elite consumption, and by the social obligations that created and underpinned exchange relationships.
Thus, analyses of raw metal and artefact composition have suggested that the Oman Peninsula was the dominant source of copper used on the southern shores of the Persian Gulf from the mid-third to the early second millennium b.
For example, lead isotope analyses of the copper-base artefacts from the northern Emirates suggest that tin-bronze may well have been traded through the Persian Gulf in its alloyed form by the later third millennium b.
Nevertheless, until such future isotopic analyses as might prove this hypothesis are undertaken, the data from Maysar 1 and Saar raise the possibility that copper from non-Omani sources, as well as tin-bronze, was exchanged in the Bronze Age Persian Gulf in the late third/ early second millennium b.