Die Metallindustrie Mesopotamiens von den Anfangen bis zum 2. Jahrtausend v Chr.

• Author: Zimmermann, Thomas
• Position: Book review

Die Metallindustrie Mesopotamiens von den Anfangen bis zum 2. Jahrtausend v Chr. Edited by HARALD HAUPTMANN and ERNST PERNICKA. Orient-Archaologie, vol. 3. Rahden Westphalia: VERLAG MARIE LEIDORF, 2004. Pp. xiii + 149, plates.

The development of metallurgy, one of the groundbreaking innovations in mankind's history, is far more than taking the crucial steps from experimental shaping and cold-hammering to annealing and finally to smelting the metal from the ore, thus giving birth to pyrotechnology with all its technological implications. Metals, indeed, make the "world go round," as it was nicely phrased at a recent symposium. (See Metals Make the World Go Round: The Supply and Circulation of Metals in Bronze Age Europe, ed. C. Pare [Oxford, 2000].) The quest for metals provoked large-scale interregional trade in the Mediterranean and the Near East, bringing together remote cultures with often profoundly different social and technological backgrounds. However, to reconstruct the motivation and mechanism of these contacts, the analysis of the chemical composition of metal artifacts is key, since their metallographical fingerprints allow conclusions about their provenance, the origin of the raw materials used, and the alloying technologies applied.

In the ideal case, chemical information obtained from artifact analysis can be correlated with philological sources from those societies that produced and circulated these items. This should be perfectly possible for the ancient Near East, since written sources containing information about raw materials, alloying and casting processes are available from the mid-third millennium B.C. (p. vii). Most surprisingly, little has been done in terms of analytical investigations to highlight these possibilities, and the data that does exist is mainly rather old, or derived from artifacts stored in American museums or private collections, thus in most cases lacking any context. With the earlier analyses, moreover, the data are often problematic, since the methodologies applied in the first half of the twentieth century A.D. in some cases delivered profoundly different results from the physical analysis carried out on the same or related specimens in more recent years. For Anatolia, to the spectral analysis carried out by Ufuk Esin in the 1960s (Kuantatif spektral analiz yardimiyla Anadolu'da baslangicindan Asur kolonileri cagina kadar Bakir ve Tunc madenciligi [Istanbul, 1969]) compare E. Kurucayirh and H...