Four lead ingots found in a shipwreck off the coast of Israel feature Cypro-Minoan markings but actually originated in Sardinia.Ehud Galili / University of Haifa’s Institute for Maritime Studies
Posted on 04/05/2022 6:25:03 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Yahalom-Mack adds that her team was surprised to trace the ingots to Sardinia, which is “beyond the western Mediterranean, beyond the [Cypriots’] regular route of trade, which is Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and the Aegean.” Though Cyprus was once considered a passive player in the Bronze Age metal trade, simply producing copper for other countries, more recent research has painted a portrait of a “small but agile nation with both formal and informal trade ties that may well have helped fill the power vacuum that occurred with the collapse of entranced empires around 1200 B.C.E.,” per the Times of Israel.
Divers discovered the ingots in a shipwreck near the ancient city (and modern town) of Caesarea in the late 1980s. How the metal made its way from Sardinia to Cyprus, which is located more than 1,550 miles away, is unclear. The ingots’ existence “doesn’t have to mean direct trade between the two countries, [but] it might,” writes Ruth Schuster for Haaretz.
During the Bronze Age, Cyprus had access to a steady supply of copper. But it lacked lead and tin, both of which were needed to smelt bronze. The team’s analysis suggests that the Cypriots traded copper for lead ore or smelted metal from Sardinia. Once in Cyprus, the lead was stamped with Cypro-Minoan markings—“rebranded,” as co-author Assaf Yasur-Landau, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa, describes it to Haaretz—before being shipped further afield to Caesarea and other ports across the Levant.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
Four lead ingots found in a shipwreck off the coast of Israel feature Cypro-Minoan markings but actually originated in Sardinia.Ehud Galili / University of Haifa’s Institute for Maritime Studies
I want me some of that Cypro-Crypto. I want it real bad.
lol
https://www.varchive.org/dag/enkomi.htm
https://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/caphtor.htm
https://www.varchive.org/ce/baalbek/tarshish.htm
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