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Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

archaeology-world.com

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Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#41

Post by rmah »

Retric wrote: post #21
mhh__ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but what magnitude? On the one hand, I'm always surprised by (say) how many thousands of gallons of beer could be produced by a victorian brewery but equally, we make a hell of a lot more now.

A large chunk of that is simply differences in population sizes. The current US population is likely larger than the global population in 1,000 CE. Further, children used to make up a larger chunk of the population exaggerating the differences. So, it was often possible to scale up production even more, but there where not enough customers to justify it.

The vast majority of limited trade during pre-industrial times is due to the inefficiency of (i.e. cost) of long range transportation. A single modern cargo ship can carry more cargo in a single voyage than an entire years worth of the entire medieval world's cargo fleets. And at a price that is few orders of magnitude cheaper (per ton).

Not that it mattered since production of everything was, by today's standards, a few orders of magnitude less efficient. It's often difficult to fully grasp how inefficient and slow everything was in pre-industrial times until you dig into the details.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#42

Post by avip »

Weird article. It reads as-if it's a new discovery, yet the "tin comes from England" meme appears in 2K yo maps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiterides).

In the "Haifa marine Museum" you've never heard of, there are tin pieces found in Phoenician ships, that's ~3K yo and IIRC the sign even says the Tin is from today's England.

[edit: of course this piece could be referencing new confirmation or new methodology - we'll never know, as there are no references to anything of substance. The research is from https://www.researchgate.net/project/Bronze-Age-tin-Tin-isot...]

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#43

Post by jaratec »

bserfaty wrote: post #34
kassas wrote: post #30

Funny. There was no "Israel" 3000 years ago, it is called "Palestine". Zionists invaded and occupied Palestine.

The name "Palestine" was given by the Romans. The area was known to it's inhabitants as Judea. During the iron age the kingdoms of Judea and Israel existed in the area. The name "Israel" first appears in the Merneptah Stele c. 1209 BCE: "Israel is laid waste and his seed is no more."

The name is older, it comes from the philistines, one of the people that emerged after the bronze age colapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#44

Post by narag »

jmorse2 wrote: post #29
DrScientist wrote: post #14

Rather bizarre the article implies direct ships from Cornwall to the middle east. Surely much more likely a trading network, where things change hands multiple times before reaching destination, probably with key trading hubs. In fact the tin was found off the coast - just as likely to have been on route to somewhere else.

Biblical sources describe tin as being sourced from Tarshish [0], a remote island that traded with the Phoenician naval merchants in Tyre. Plus as wtracz' sibling comment indicates there's a potential Phoenician connection with Cornwall, it isn't especially unlikely. [0] https://www.blueletterbible.org/esv/eze/27/12/s_829012

Tarsis is thought to be refering to Cádiz in Spain. Cádiz was founded by phoenicians (if you visit, make sure to check the archeological museum [0]) to trade with the lost kingdom of Tartessos.

Tartessos is placed in the Guadalquivir estuary by Rufus Festus Avienus' Ora Maritima, but its exact location is unknown. There are some efforts to pinpoint it using satellite images, because its ruins could be buried under the sand.

https://www.visit-andalucia.com/one_post.php?id=111

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#45

Post by jaratec »

wtracz wrote: post #24
DrScientist wrote: post #14

Rather bizarre the article implies direct ships from Cornwall to the middle east. Surely much more likely a trading network, where things change hands multiple times before reaching destination, probably with key trading hubs. In fact the tin was found off the coast - just as likely to have been on route to somewhere else.

There has always been speculation that there was a Phoenician connection to Cornwall, but not a lot of archeological evidence. This stemmed from things like Cornish place names having an unusual number of z's (a Phoenician letter) in them, and other similarities.

Can you point me to the information sources for this theory?

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#46

Post by ncmncm »

avip wrote: post #42

Weird article. It reads as-if it's a new discovery, yet the "tin comes from England" meme appears in 2K yo maps ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiterides ). In the "Haifa marine Museum" you've never heard of, there are tin pieces found in Phoenician ships, that's ~3K yo and IIRC the sign even says the Tin is from today's England. [edit: of course this piece could be referencing new confirmation or new methodology…

People have always suspected Bronze-age tin might have come from England, but most historians never took it seriously because it implied a lot more long-distance commerce than they believed was possible then.

Charred cloves from the Moluccas (south of the Philippines) were recently found in in a jar in burnt-out remains of a 4000-year-old middle-class kitchen in Syria.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#47

Post by Spooky23 »

mhh__ wrote: post #18
brian-armstrong wrote: post #7

You hear people today saying we live in a "global economy." It seems like that statement might be true of people hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

True but what magnitude? On the one hand, I'm always surprised by (say) how many thousands of gallons of beer could be produced by a victorian brewery but equally, we make a hell of a lot more now.

Remember that the economies of scale were made possible by technology.

Budweiser, Miller, etc dominated the US market with an inferior product because they could build a distribution network and ship/store the product at massive scale at low cost. This was particularly important post-prohibition. Consistently mediocre, branded/marketed, cheap beer was more valuable than local stuff.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#48

Post by BurningFrog »

tremon wrote: post #20
keiferski wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Amber Road is also a possibility: From at least the 16th century BC, amber was moved from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean area.[2][3] The breast ornament of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen (c. 1333–1324 BC) contains large Baltic amber beads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road

Using the amber road would be quite a detour here, I imagine. That would mean that instead of crossing the channel and traveling through France and Italy, or circumnavigating the Iberian peninsula, you think it's more likely the tin traveled from Britain, across Scandinavia, then to the Baltics, and from there southwards across Eastern Europe? Not that I have any knowledge of ancient trade routes, but to me having a…

I assume "trade routes" are emergent things.

As in: Nobody decided "let's start a trade route from Egypt to Scandinavia!".

Far more likely, people traded with their neighbors, and market forces led to goods step by step traveling to where they were most valued.

Probably without Egyptians and Scandinavians ever having a clue the other group existed.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#49

Post by ncmncm »

tssva wrote: post #22

During the run of the British archeology TV show "Time Team" they examined a couple of sites in Cornwall associated with tin. In each episode they discuss the far reaching international trade for tin from Cornwall during the bronze age including as far as to locations in Africa, so while adding to archaeological knowledge this find doesn't seem to be breaking new ground.

The new ground is that isotopic analysis established beyond doubt the source of tin used in the overwhelming majority of pre-2000 BC bronze, overcoming historians's skepticism about non-contemporaneous sources.
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