West Asian Bronze Age
Bronze Age tin ingots
from a shipwreck near Haifa
When people first began to use bronze, about 3000 BC, they had to trade a lot more than they had before, because they needed tin to make the bronze. You don't find tin just anywhere. At first there was some tin in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), but they used that up pretty soon, and then to get more tin they had to trade with people in Afghanistan and India.
People floating cedar logs down the Euphrates in the Iron Age
Because by the Bronze Age people in West Asia had invented writing, we know more about what they were trading and where and how. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is about a king who ruled in 2500 BC, describes how people from Sumer (modern Iraq) travelled all the way to Lebanon, on the Mediterranean coast, to get cedar wood for building. Probably they floated the big logs down the Euphrates river to the Sumerian cities.
Later on, around 1500 BC, Assyrian traders were going from Assyria (modern Iran) north-west to the Hittites (in modern Turkey) to sell cloth. Mainly men travelled with donkeys to the Hittite kingdom, while women stayed home and ran the business in Assyria. These men and women sent letters to each other with instructions about the business.
To find out more about West Asian trade in the Bronze Age, check out this book from Amazon.com or from your local library:
Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture, by William H. Stiebing (2002). Expensive, and hard to read, but it's a good up to date account.
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(a project)
West Asian Economy - Dark Age
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