Silver, Ships And The Making Of A Trading People

AThe cities of the Phoenician coast — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad — occupied a strip of shoreline seldom more than thirty kilometres deep, hemmed in by mountains behind and by larger neighbours on either side, and they lived by moving other people's goods. Almost nothing survives of what they themselves wrote about that business. Their clerks kept accounts on papyrus, a material that rots within a few decades in a damp maritime climate, and the archives of Tyre have never been recovered. What remains is testimony written by outsiders: tribute lists compiled by the Assyrian officials who taxed the cities, Hebrew prophets who denounced them, and Greek historians working five centuries after the events they describe. The evidence that survives in quantity is therefore not written at all but material — pottery, ingots, timber and the metal itself. Out of that material one question has to be answered: why, from the ninth century BC, ships from these harbours began to work the far western Mediterranean. Whether that movement was driven by pressure from an imperial neighbour, or was the slow commercial drift of independent merchant houses, is what divides the field.

BHana Barsoum, an archaeometallurgist at the Institute for Mediterranean Economies in Palermo, argues that the pressure is visible in the metal. The Assyrian annals record tribute in silver taken from Tyre from 841 BC onward, and the sums demanded rose through the century that followed. Her group measured lead isotopes in 168 silver objects drawn from 14 hoards buried along the Levantine coast, a technique that fixes the ore field a metal was cut from even after it has been melted and reworked. The proportion whose signature matched the ore fields of southern Iberia rose from about 12 per cent among objects deposited before 850 BC to 68 per cent among those deposited after 780 BC. No new harbour was cut in the interval and no change in hull design has been identified for it; the metal travelled in the ships already in service. A demand made in one metal, Barsoum maintains, was answered by a search for that metal, and it was answered at a distance of four thousand kilometres because the nearer sources could not meet it.

CThe claim carries a boundary, and Barsoum has drawn it herself. If merchants were answering a fiscal demand, the answer ought to appear only in the commodity in which that demand was denominated. Her second study followed nine other classes of traded goods — tin, ivory, wine, timber, purple dye and worked bronze among them — through the deposits of 900 to 700 BC, and found no comparable shift in timing in any of them. Ivory and wine moved in volumes that rose and fell with local consumption and bore no relation to the sums entered in the annals. She is careful to describe the alignment as a statement about silver, and about the period in which silver was being demanded, rather than as an account of the expansion as a whole.

DIván Serralta, who works on colonial chronology at the Coastal Archaeology Unit in Cádiz, regards the argument as sound in everything except its order. Whatever the annals demanded, he points out, a demand cannot explain a voyage that had already been made. He assembled 34 radiocarbon determinations from 11 western sites with published stratigraphy, among them Huelva, Utica and the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and calibrated them against a single curve; the median date returned was 868 BC, and the earliest secure horizon at Huelva fell earlier still. Two limits attach to the series, and he states them himself. Only sites whose excavators had published a stratigraphic sequence could be admitted, which leaves out the majority of known findspots; and most of the samples were charcoal, which may have been cut from timber already old when it burned, so that a date can run ahead of the deposit containing it. He presents the series as a limit on how early the traffic can be placed, not as an account of why it began.

EThe dispute left the seminar room long ago. National museums in Beirut and Tunis present the Phoenicians as a people of merchants rather than of armies, school curricula on both shores repeat the description, and a good deal of public money now rests on it; meanwhile under 4 per cent of the relevant seabed has been surveyed to modern standards and only three wrecks of the period have been excavated in full. Barsoum accepts, awkwardly for her own case, that an isotope records where an ore was cut and nothing else, so that her series cannot say whether a cargo was shipped by a king's agent or by a family firm working on its own account. Serralta answers that the distinction cannot be maintained in practice, because in Tyre the temple, the palace and the merchant house drew on the same families and the same credit. Both treat the foundation dates supplied by Greek authors five centuries after the fact as the least neutral evidence in the field.

FWhat is emerging is less a verdict than a division of labour, in which the two accounts are attached to different questions rather than ranked against each other. Asked when the western traffic began, the radiocarbon series answers, and it places the first voyages before the tribute that is supposed to have caused them. Asked how heavy that traffic became after 800 BC, and why it settled on one metal rather than another, the fiscal explanation answers, and no rival reading of the isotope figures has been put forward. What remains unresolved is whether the earliest voyages were already trading ventures or reconnaissance that only later turned into trade, and no method now available can separate the two, because the same deposits contain the first exchanges and the first settlements. What both researchers reject is the reflex of reading a people's character from whichever of their goods happens to have survived.