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Elayi, J., and A. G. Elayi. 2014. A Monetary and Political History of the Phoenician City of Byblos. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
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Chapter 26
Metallurgy and other Technologies
Philip Andrew Johnston and Brett Kaufman
Phoenician metallurgy and other technologies played a central role in the political economy of the Iron Age and subsequent periods.* Metals in particular, according to both Classical tradition and archaeological consensus, constituted one of the primary drivers of the Phoenician expansion to the west, a process that forever changed the cultural and economic landscape of the Mediterranean world. We focus on the ninth to sixth centuries bce—the span known as the Archaic, “Orientalizing,” or Phoenician period for scholars of the western Mediterranean, which is equivalent to the eastern Mediterranean Iron IIA–C or Iron II–III.
Technology in the Phoenician Political Economy
The historical sources contemporary to the Phoenicians—from Homer to the Hebrew prophets—unanimously acknowledge the Phoenicians’ wide-ranging economic activities, their skill as sailors, merchants, and craftsmen, and their ability to procure valuable and exotic natural raw materials (Markoe 2000: 93–95, 143–69). Neo-Assyrian tribute lists provide a particularly vivid example of the kinds of goods the Phoenicians trucked. Metals predominate, but other items that are less well preserved archaeologically also had an important place. Shalmaneser III’s gates of Balawat (858 bce) record “the tribute of Tyre and Sidon, silver, gold, lead, bronze, purple-dyed wool I received,” and depict Tyrian servants carrying metal ingots (Katzenstein 1997: 163, 165; figure 26.1; see also figure 27.1 in this volume for another Assyrian relief showing Phoenician merchants). The “Monolith-Inscription,” also made during Shalmaneser III’s reign, records a wider array of goods from the “kings of the sea-coast,” who brought “silver, gold, lead, copper, copper vessels, cattle, sheep, brightly colored woolen and linen garments” (Katzenstein 1997: 166).
Figure 26.1 The city of Tyre, with Phoenicians unloading goods for Shamaneser III, drawing of bronze relief from the Balawat gates, Band III (detail).
Source: Drawing by Nora Clair.
The ability of Phoenicians to provide such prized goods had great historical importance, in that they guaranteed a measure of independence to the Phoenician city-states through the end of the Iron Age, at a time when their Levantine neighbors were subjected to varying degrees of neo-Assyrian dominance. Technology was, moreover, the lubricant for Phoenician international exploration and colonization. The constellation of Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean was the locus of extensive intercultural contacts that accelerated the formation of a Mediterranean koine of cultural expressions and the rise of regional styles in ceramics, architecture, and other material culture.
The importance of metals in Phoenician political activities is exemplified by the Phoenician and Israelite alliance that is remembered in the Hebrew Bible. The copper mines of the Aravah, whose scale strongly suggests Israelite state sponsorship, would have been a central component in this relationship (Witte and Diehl 2008; Barkay 1992), with Israel offering raw materials in exchange for the work of Phoenician artisans (2 Samuel 5:11). Among these artisans, a coppersmith named Hiram is remembered in particular detail, along with the objects he fashioned (1 Kings 7:14). Archaeological evidence of such transactions may be found in the metallurgical remains in the “Crucibles Layer” beneath the Large Stone Structure in the city of David (Mazar 2009; see also Kaufman in press). Regardless of their historicity, however, the stories show that the biblical writers of the eighth–sixth centuries bce remembered the Phoenicians as master smiths and metal traders whose skills were recruited by the early Judean kings.
The Phoenicians were also proficient in a range of non-metallurgical technologies. Phoenician shipbuilding and seafaring—knowledge inherited from their Canaanite forbears—allowed the foundation of trading outposts as far west as Mogador in Morocco (López Pardo and Mederos 2008), while Phoenician commercial savvy provided a basis for economic contacts reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to South Asia, as attested by cinnamon residues recently discovered in Phoenician bichrome juglets dating to the eleventh–tenth centuries bce (Namdar et al. 2013). Direct access to mineral resources in distant historical lands such as Ophir and Tarshish yielded exotica to the Phoenicians in the form of ivories and precious metals like silver and gold, and base metals such as copper, tin, iron, and lead, providing Phoenician craftsmen with a great deal of raw material to perfect their crafts for both neo-Assyrian overlords and fellow Levantine elites (Jiménez Ávila 2015; Giumlia-Mair 1992; Markoe 1985; Winter 1976). Finally, the Phoenicians were adept in the production of primary and secondary goods of agricultural (grain, fruit, olive oil, wine), pastoral (meat, wool), and maritime (salt, fish, garum) origin, as well as in management of timber essential to shipbuilding. The most famous of Phoenician products was the purple dye from the murex shell which, applied to raw wool, could increase the value of the wool by a factor of thirty (Stager 2005: 248). The production of agro-pastoral and maritime goods other than purple was not unique to the Phoenicians, but the Phoenicians’ ability to market simple products over long distances through maritime commerce was unprecedented, and allowed them to derive massive profits from relatively mundane goods (Stager 2005: 635).
Although metallurgical technologies and their products provided the impetus for Phoenician expansion and offered leverage with the neo-Assyrian empire, it was the wider array of Phoenician technologies and their respective products that ensured the survival of settlements like Carthage, Motya, Sulcis, Málaga, and Cádiz following the disintegration of the Tyrian colonial system in the sixth century bce, as well as their longevity and prosperity in Punic and Roman times.
Metallurgy
Our understanding of metallurgical activities in the Mediterranean world of Phoenician and Punic times is based on very fragmentary data. There has been some bias in the research, with considerable interest devoted to activities at Phoenician settlements at the expense of metallurgical activities of nearby indigenous groups (not to mention those dating to the Punic period). A surge in archaeometric studies has begun to fill out the picture. Chemical and microscopic analyses of metal objects and of by-products of metallurgical activities discovered during archaeological excavations are revealing a landscape of metallurgical practices that is considerably more complex than what was previously assumed based on historical documentation.
Instead of simple west-to-east traffic, archaeometallurgists are discovering evidence of extensive movement of metals within the west underscoring the importance of local political and economic relations.
Metal Use and Availability in the Ancient Mediterranean
The metals in question are silver (Ag), gold (Au), lead (Pb), copper (Cu), tin (Sn), and iron (Fe). In nature, these metals are found in a variety of states. Native, or naturally pure, metal can be worked without having to smelt ores to obtain it, as was the case for iron in the ancient Near East before the development of iron-ore smelting in the mid-second millennium bce. The production and use of metals at anything beyond a small scale requires smelting ores containing appreciable concentrations of metals, which necessitates a certain level of pyrotechnic control (the ability to generate and maintain consistent, desired temperatures). Smelting can be a fairly straightforward process with simple ores like copper oxides, but it can also be complex, requiring multiple stages and ingredients, as is the case with extraction of silver from the mixed-mineral sulfur-rich ores of the southwestern Iberian Peninsula.
Of the “utilitarian” metals used for tools and weaponry, copper was the most common, smelted into ingots, refined and melted, cast into objects, and recycled as scrap. Pure copper alone is relatively soft, so in the Iron Age it was most often alloyed or combined with tin to produce bronze, which can have far greater strength and hardness, as well as a golden appearance. The earliest prehistoric smelting was undertaken on copper ores, including copper oxides like cuprite, copper carbonates like malachite and azurite, and copper sulfides like chalcopyrite or covellite. Copper sulfides typically make up the deeper levels of mines, but they are capped at the surface by a gossan of iron oxides, weathered and oxidized copper carbonates, and native copper, and at times enriched in other minerals such as arsenic—all easier to work with than sulfur-rich ores which must be roasted to oxides before smelting (Killick 2014). The minerals cassiterite and stannite were the most commonly exploited tin oxides in antiquity, and they are often found in alluvial lodes or veins (Deer et al. 1992: 534–35).
Wrought iron was slowly adopted throughout the Early Iron Age and eventually equaled and displaced bronze in the tenth century bce (Waldbaum 1980). Wrought iron was obtained through the so-called direct method whereby ores were smelted into a spongy iron-enriched mass called a bloom, which was later refined (primary smithing) and forged into finished products (secondary smithing) (Blakelock et al. 2009). Some iron ores that would be common to Iron Age smiths would be oxides such as hematite, magnetite, and goethite, which could be smelted directly, and sulfides like pyrite and pyrrhotite, which would require pre-smelt roasting. It was essential to separate the unwanted gangue materials from the metal into a free-flowing slag. This could be accomplished by charging ore, charcoal, and flux into a furnace to react with oxygen and carbon dioxide delivered through tuyères (figure 26.2)—ceramic tuyères such as the one in the figure constitute one of the most distinctive remains of Phoenician metallurgy in the west. This mechanism created a reducing atmosphere of carbon monoxide, which reduced the ore oxides, making slag flow off of the remaining metal or metal-rich bloom. Slag was tapped out of the furnace or crucible, and once frozen into solid form became the most durable and archaeologically visible remnant of metallurgical production facilities. Wrought iron, although softer than tin bronze, could be carburized to make steel (iron alloyed with less than 2.1 percent carbon), causing it to gain greatly in hardness and durability.
Figure 26.2 Ceramic tuyère from the iron production precinct at Carthage, dating to the Early Punic (~800–530 bce). The front (left) bears remnant iron slag and would have been placed at the hottest part of the furnace where the oxygen met the charge. The ceramic-slag interface can be seen lengthwise (center), and the internal ceramic component with double barrels is seen from the back (right).
Source: Photograph by authors, courtesy Bir Massouda excavations Carthage, Institut National du Patrimoine and Ghent University. For compositional analysis of this artifact (8217 32232) see Kaufman et al. 2016: table 3.
Of the precious metals, gold (Au) and silver (Ag), silver was by far the more common and popular Phoenician import to the Near East. Silver mineralization is diverse and there are many different ore types that contain or are associated with silver. Because lead and silver co-occur in many of these ores, a process called cupellation was used to separate the silver from the lead. This involved oxidizing the silver-lead alloy obtained from smelting in a ceramic vessel called a cupel, causing the lead to be absorbed by the cupel, and leaving behind a button of molten silver (Kassianidou 1993). Since it was often present at various stages of the silver production process, lead—and lead oxide (or litharge) in particular—is a reliable archaeological indicator for silver production. The most common kind of silver ore used by the Phoenicians in the Río Tinto mines (Iberia) was lead-poor jarosite, the silver concentrations of which could exceed 1000 ppm (Craddock 1995: 217). As Craddock relates, Pliny recognized the importance of lead in the extraction process. Indeed, the recovery of silver from jarosite was not possible without the addition of lead, which the Phoenicians imported to Río Tinto especially for this purpose (Craddock 1995: 217).
Gold was more highly valued than silver among the indigenous elites of the Iberian Peninsula (Murillo-Barroso et al. 2016). Although it no doubt had an important place in the Phoenician procurement network, gold is archaeologically scarce (although some recent provenience studies are very informative; cf. Ortega-Feliu et al. 2007; Ontalba-Salamanca et al. 2006). Gold was found either in its pure state or in the form of electrum (a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver). In its native form, gold appears in quartz veins and placer deposits, and mineralized within pyrites and arseno-pyrites and as inclusions in the platinum group elements (PGE) (Craddock 1995: 110–11). Gold would be extracted from these latter types through smelting. Direct archaeological evidence for Phoenician-Punic gold production has largely eluded excavators and little is known about their process, but some of the most striking art of the Iron Age is found in the gold- and gem-work of Phoenician style at Nimrud (Hussein and Benzel 2014), and El Carambolo (Carriazo 1970). Still, the available information offers an overall picture, including Carthaginian gold workshops on Sardinia (Bernardini 2008: 573), many gold items of Phoenician-Punic manufacture recovered from excavations (cf. Ontalba Salamanca et al. 2006), as well as inscriptions at Carthage dedicated by at least two types of goldsmiths (Kaufman 2014; Wolff 1986: 191; Heltzer 1983), and neo-Assyrian inscriptions mentioning Phoenician gold tribute (Katzenstein 1997: 163–66).
The distribution of the metal resources described here is important for understanding the pattern of Phoenician settlement in the west (Kassianidou and Knapp 2005: fig. 9.1). Phoenician settlements tended to be either near or en route to areas rich in metal resources, and almost all Phoenician sites in the western Mediterranean have yielded some remains of metallurgical activities. Copper was the primary metal resource of Sardinia, but silver, lead, tin, and iron were also available on the island (Giardino 1995). The high value placed on silver explains the rapid development of eighth- to seventh-century bce metallurgical activities in the Iberian pyrite belt in the southwestern Iberian Peninsula, as well as Phoenician interest in the Atlantic coast of Portugal, where tin and gold from the interior were in ready supply. The need for lead in the processing of silver ores from southwestern Iberia is a likely explanation for the rapid development of lead mining in eastern Iberia during the eighth–seventh centuries bce (Renzi and Rovira 2015).
Metallurgical Technologies During the Iron Age
The Phoenician expansion in the late ninth and eighth centuries bce led to the rapid spread of Levantine metallurgical technologies. These had been under development for several millennia in the Near East, surging in the second millennium bce owing to extensive interaction and competition between the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt. Current evidence dates the earliest Near Eastern copper extraction using furn
aces capable of producing liquid slags to the fifth millennium bce, and soon pure copper and arsenical copper alloys (arsenical bronze) became common across the region. Alloying of copper with tin to form bronze began by the end of the fourth millennium bce, but only became widespread in the mid-third millennium bce (Lehner and Yener 2014; Thornton 2014). Trade in tin is widely attested in Old Assyrian textual records (Larsen 1982), as well as by physical tin ingots recovered from the Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey (Pulak 1998). Production of silver, like copper, began early in the Near East, and was attested in Syria by the third millennium bce (Renzi and Rovira 2015). The earliest iron objects in the east were made from native telluric and meteoric iron deposits as early as 5000 bce. This changed in the latter part of the second millennium bce, when iron smelting technology took off, and by the tenth century bce, there was a marked intensification of iron production throughout the Levant (Gottlieb 2010; Waldbaum 1989, 1980).
In the western Mediterranean, indigenous metallurgical traditions were far less developed before the first Phoenician contact. Copper and tin ores were mined and refined, while silver and iron metallurgy were essentially nonexistent. Silver objects in the second millennium bce Iberian Peninsula were made from native, not smelted, silver. Nuraghic (Sardinian) and Ibero-Celtic cultures reduced copper rich-ores in small clay crucibles, a practice dating back to the Chalcolithic period (Renzi and Rovira 2015), and which had achieved considerable sophistication by the Iron Age as evidenced by archaeometric analyses at the site of Castro dos Ratinhos in Portugal (Valério et al. 2010). By the late second millennium bce (the Late Bronze Age), tin bronze and copper were being produced and regularly traded at a regional level along both the western and eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula between Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, and central Italy. This Bronze Age trade in tin bronze and copper reached as far east as Mycenae and Cyprus, and was a major catalyst in Phoenician interest in the western Mediterranean.
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