You are a Bronze Age Canaanite and you wish to buy an ass. Coinage won’t be invented for well over a thousand years. How are you going to pay for the animal?
Probably by barter. Buying a beast is not a huge transaction. But if it was, say, a ship you sought, you might have paid by forking over its value in silver, according to a new paper by archaeologists at the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University, published last week in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
The use of silver fragments, sheep wool, grain and other stuffs as pre-monetary currency seems to have begun in the third millennium B.C.E. in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Syria, the authors explain, based on cuneiform records and archaeological discoveries.
The practice was thought to have only reached the southern Levant, including today’s Israel, in the Iron Age about 3,200 years ago. Not so, says the team.
The use of silver as currency emerged here as much as 3,700 years ago in the Middle Bronze Age, according to Tzilla Eshel, Ayelet Gilboa, Ofir Tirosh, Yigal Erel and Naama Yahalom-Mack, based on discoveries around Israel from that period – including at Megiddo, Gezer and Shiloh.
To be clear: silver for non-monetary use, in jewelry and vessels, began to trickle through to the southern Levant earlier. The oldest silver hoard found in our area was at a cultic site in Nahariya, Israel’s north, and dates to the early Middle Bronze Age about 4,000 years ago. It doesn’t have the whiff of value exchange. That hoard consisted of silver sheet figurines, metal tools, thin sheets and scrap – apparently for metalworking, not for paying for anything, the team writes. Similar early silver hoards not thought to have hallmarks of commercial use were also found at northern Israeli settlements such as Dan, Beth She’an, Megiddo and Gezer.
The earliest local evidence for silver as currency are hoards found at Shiloh, a different hoard at Gezer and a site called Tell el-‘Ajjul, which are a bit later in the Middle Bronze Age – a period characterized by urbanism.
How does one distinguish an ancient hoard of silver for commercial or noncommercial use thousands of years ago? It’s a matter of inference. The hoards found at Gezer, Shiloh and Tell el-‘Ajjul did not include smithing tools, were not found in the context of a workshop and consisted of bent or broken artifacts – and that in turn suggests that the silver in them was hoarded for its intrinsic value.
These ancient, nonstandard bits of damaged and aesthetically unpleasing pieces of silver used for commerce thousands of years ago are called hacksilber (the German word for bits of cut silver).
Out of Turkey
Note that although copper smelting may have begun in what is today Israel 6,500 years ago (or even earlier elsewhere), silver was not locally produced. Any silver found in Israel had to be imported, including in the Bronze and Iron Ages, because Israel has copper ore (“King Solomon’s” mines), but no silver.
From where did the ancient Levant get silver? Turkey. “Silver does not occur naturally in the Levant and is therefore a proxy of long-distance, usually maritime, trade,” the team observes. The ancients would trade metals as ingots, one discovers from shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.
The earliest silver found in the southern Levant was apparently sourced in Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age, according to isotope analysis of the lead in the silver. Toward the Late Bronze Age, the find at Tell el-‘Ajjul suggests the source shifted slightly to the Anatolian-Aegean-Carpathian sphere.
In one of those small ironies, Mesopotamia does have silver ore but apparently the locals didn’t know it: they also imported silver from Anatolia in the Bronze Age, in exchange for which they would supply tin ore, textiles and other stuffs, going by the records of Assyrian merchants among the roughly 23,500 tablets uncovered at Kültepe-Kanesh in Cappadocia, central Anatolia, from the 18th century B.C.E.
Back in Israel, the silver found in Tell el-‘Ajjul seems to be the same type as that in the contemporaneous Royal Shaft Graves in Mycenae in the Greek Peloponnese, the team marvels. Their thinking is that the silver in both assemblages came from the same source, possibly through early metal machers in Cyprus.
Clearly, ships were plying the Mediterranean coasts throughout the Middle Bronze Age, the writers add. And although the Levant was not a key target compared with, for instance, Egypt, they posit that shipping did take place between the Levant and Anatolia.
In the case of silver pieces hoarded for commercial purposes, it is reasonable to assume that a hoard comes to light after thousands of years because the owner was killed before having a chance to use it, or to recover it after fleeing from some marauding enemy (though other explanations can come to mind). Some treasures, however, would have stayed where they were placed, such as foundational deposits – buried beneath the home foundations to bribe the supernatural powers into protecting the home. Such was a hoard found in Gezer, for instance, Eshel says.
In any case, a hoard was not equivalent to a wallet or pocketbook. “You didn’t go to the market with your hoard to buy a donkey,” she qualifies; it would have been reserved for major deals. She even compares these silver stashes with gold bars held in the Fed, based on which dollars are issued – not used much per se, but rather representing wealth.
Note that the silver in these Bronze Age and Iron Age hoards is not coinage, which was only invented in Libya around 2,700 years ago. The Bronze and Iron Age hacksilber hoards consist of nonstandard bits and bobs that were irregularly cut, or originated for example in broken jewelry, that had value based on weight. The owner of the ass wouldn’t ask for x pieces of silver, they would ask for x weight in hacksilber, Eshel explains. “There was no planning of making pieces of a given weight, for instance,” she says.
In previous work, the same team found that paying in hacksilber even led to a surge of counterfeiting before money was even invented (this was in the Iron Age, mark you).
Hoards predating the great Bronze Age collapse of civilizations around the Mediterranean 3,200 years ago were almost pure silver. Hoards after the collapse were silver again. But hoards dated to the span of the collapse were doctored with cheap copper and the assumption is – dishonestly. Since the silver fragments used in commerce were not uniform in shape or size, the amount of actual silver they contained was crucial to fair business, the archaeologists explain.
One wonders whether counterfeiting also began earlier than expected: say, in the Bronze Age, when hacksilber was already starting to be used. Stay tuned.
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