Gold, Fool’S Gold, And High-Level Trade

Egypt had gold from the mines in Nubia.

More than one king wrote to Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, requesting shipments of gold while acting as if it were nothing out of the ordinary—the refrain “gold is like dust in your land,” and similar phrases, are seen again and again in the Amarna Letters.

In one letter, Tushratta of Mitanni invokes the family relationship and asks Amenhotep III to “send me much more gold than he [you] did to my father,” for, as he says, “in my brother’s country, gold is as plentiful as dirt.”29

But it seems that the gold wasn’t always gold, as the Babylonian kings in particular complained. In one letter sent by Kadashman-Enlil to Amenhotep III, he said, “You have sent me as my greeting-gift, the only thing in six years, 30 minas of gold that looked like silver.”30 His successor in Babylon, the Kassite king Burna-Buriash II, similarly wrote in one letter to Amenhotep III’s successor, Akhenaten: “Certainly my brother [the king of Egypt] did not check the earlier (shipment of) gold that my brother sent to me. When I put the 40 minas of gold that were brought to me into a kiln, not (even) 10 minas, I swear, appeared.”

In another letter, he said: “The 20 minas of gold that were brought here were not all there. When they put it into the kiln, not 5 minas of gold appeared. The (part) that did appear, on cooling off looked like ashes. Was the gold ever identified (as gold)?”31

On the one hand, one might ask why the Babylonian kings were putting the gold sent by the Egyptian king into a kiln and melting it down. It must have been scrap metal sent for its value only rather than nice finished pieces being given as gifts, much as today one sees advertisements on late-night television urging the viewer to sell old and broken jewelry for cash, with the clear implication that it will be melted down immediately. They must have needed it to pay their artisans, architects, and other professionals, as indeed some of the letters state.

On the other hand, we also have to ask whether the Egyptian king knew that the shipments he was sending were not actually gold, and if the action was deliberate, or whether the real gold was swapped out en route by unscrupulous merchants and emissaries. Burna-Buriash suspected the latter in the case of the forty minas of gold mentioned above, or at least offered Akhenaten a diplomatic way out of the uneasy situation, and wrote: “The gold that my brother sends me, my brother should not turn over to the charge of any deputy. My brother should make a [personal] check [of the gold], then my brother should seal and send it to me. Certainly my brother did not check the earlier (shipment of) gold that my brother sent to me. It was only a deputy of my brother who sealed and sent it to me.”32

It also seems that the caravans loaded with gifts and sent between the two kings were frequently robbed en route. BurnaBuriash writes of two caravans belonging to Salmu, his messenger (and probably diplomatic representative), that he knows have been robbed. He even knows whom to blame: a man named Biriyawaza was responsible for the first heist, and a man supposedly named Pamahu (possibly a place-name mistaken for a personal name) perpetrated the second. Burna-Buriash asks when Akhenaten is going to prosecute the latter case, since it is within his jurisdiction, but he received no reply, at least as far as we know.33

Moreover, we should not forget that these high-level gift exchanges were probably the tip of the iceberg of commercial interaction. An analogous, relatively modern, situation may be the following. In the 1920s, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski studied the Trobriand Islanders who were participating in the so-called Kula Ring in the South Pacific.

In this system, the chiefs of each island exchanged armbands and necklaces made of shells, with armbands always traveling one way around the ring and necklaces circulating in the other direction. The value of each object increased and decreased depending upon its lineage and past history of ownership (now referred to by archaeologists as an object’s “biography”).

Malinowski discovered that while the chiefs were in the ceremonial centers exchanging armbands and necklaces according to traditional pomp and circumstance, the men who served as crew on the canoes that transported the chiefs were busy trading with the locals on the beach for food, water, and other necessary staples of life.34 Such mundane commercial transactions were the real economic motives underlying the ceremonial gift exchanges of the Trobriand chiefs, but they would never admit to that fact.

Similarly, we should not underestimate the importance of the messengers, merchants, and sailors who were transporting the royal gifts and other items across the deserts of the ancient Near East, and probably overseas to the Aegean as well. It is clear that there was much contact between Egypt, the Near East, and the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age, and undoubtedly ideas and innovations were occasionally transported along with the actual objects. Such transfers of ideas undoubtedly took place not only at the upper levels of society, but also at the inns and bars of the ports and cities along the trade routes in Greece, Egypt, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Where else would a sailor or crew member while away the time waiting for the wind to shift to the proper quarter or for a diplomatic mission to conclude its sensitive negotiations, swapping myths, legends, and tall tales?

Such events may perhaps have contributed to cultural influences spreading between Egypt and the rest of the Near East, and even across the Aegean. Such an exchange between cultures could possibly explain the similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s later Iliad and Odyssey, and between the Hittite Myth of Kumarbi and Hesiod’s later Theogony.

We should also note that gift exchanges between Near Eastern rulers during the Late Bronze Age frequently included physicians, sculptors, masons, and skilled laborers, who were sent between the various royal courts. It is little wonder that there are certain similarities between architectural structures in Egypt, Anatolia, Canaan, and even the Aegean, if the same architects, sculptors, and stonemasons were working in each area. The recent finds of Aegean-style wall paintings and painted floors at Tell ed-Dab‘a in Egypt, mentioned in the previous chapter, as well as at Tel Kabri in Israel, Alalakh in Turkey, and Qatna in Syria, indicate that Aegean artisans may have made their way to Egypt and the Near East as early as the seventeenth century and perhaps as late as the thirteenth century BC.36

From the Amarna Letters that date specifically to the time of Akhenaten, we know that Egypt’s international contacts expanded during his reign to include the rising power of Assyria, under its king Assur-uballit I, who had come to the throne in the decade before Amenhotep III died.

There are also eight letters to and from the king of the island of Cyprus, known to the Egyptians and others of the ancient world as Alashiya, which provide confirmation of contact with Egypt.

These letters sent to and from Cyprus, which probably date to the time of Akhenaten rather than Amenhotep III, are of great interest, in part of because of the staggering amount of raw copper mentioned in one of the letters.

Cyprus was the primary source of copper for most of the major Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean powers during the Late Bronze Age, as is made clear by the discussions found in the letters, including that in which the king of Alashiya apologizes for sending only five hundred talents of copper because of an illness that is ravaging his island.38 It is currently thought that such raw copper was probably shipped in the shape of oxhide ingots, such as those that have been found on the Uluburun shipwreck discussed in the next section. Each of the oxhide ingots on board the ship weighs about sixty pounds, meaning that this one consignment mentioned in the Amarna Letter would have consisted of some thirty thousand pounds of copper—an amount for which the Cypriot king is (ironically?) apologetic because it is so small!

As for Assyria, there are two letters in the Amarna archive from Assur-uballit I, who ruled that kingdom from ca. 1365 to 1330 BC. It is not clear to which Egyptian pharaoh these two letters were addressed, for one simply begins, “Say to the King of Egypt,” while the name given in the other is unclear and the reading is uncertain. Previous translators have suggested that they were probably sent to Akhenaten, but at least one scholar proposes that the second one might be addressed to Ay, who came to the throne after the death of Tutankhamen.39 This seems unlikely, given the late date for Ay’s accession to the throne (ca. 1325 BC), and, in fact, the letters are much more likely to have been sent to Amenhotep III or Akhenaten, as were the vast majority of letters from other rulers.

The first of these letters is simply a message of greeting and includes a brief list of gifts, such as “a beautiful chariot, 2 horses, [and] 1 date-stone of genuine lapis lazuli.”40 The second is longer and contains the by-now-standard request for gold, with the usual disclaimer: “Gold in your country is dirt; one simply gathers it up.” However, it also contains an interesting comparison to the king of Hanigalbat, that is, Mitanni, in which the new king of Assyria states that he is “the equal of the king of Hanigalbat”—an obvious reference to his position in the pecking order of the socalled Great Powers of the day, of which Assyria and its king strongly wished to be a part.41

It seems that Assur-uballit was not idly boasting, for he was more than an equal to the then-current Mitannian king, Shuttarna II.

Assur-uballit defeated Shuttarna in battle, probably about 1360 BC, and ended the Mitannian domination of Assyria that had begun a little more than a century earlier, when the earlier Mitannian king Saushtatar had stolen the gold and silver door from the Assyrian capital and taken it to the Mitannian capital of Washukanni.