Breaking News: Quest for silver drove Phoenician expansion in western Mediterranean - News Paper

About 3000 years ago the Phoenicians began to sail west from their settlement area on the eastern Mediterranean coast, today Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. They established settlements on the coast of North Africa and in many parts of the Mediterranean coast. Their trading network even extended as far as the Atlantic. When and why they built this network has not yet been adequately researched.

The silver hoard found in Ein Hofez, Israel [Credit: Warhaftig Venezian/Israel Antiquities Authority]

Scientists from Israel have now provided an explanation for this expansion: The search for silver. The earliest Phoenician settlements on Sardinia and in the south of the Iberian Peninsula were clearly due to silver production, writes the team from the University of Haifa in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the study, the researchers conducted isotope analyses of silver objects, whereby a chemical signature of the material is generated. The finds came from three early settlements in northern Israel: Tel Dor, Acre and Ein Hofez. From these studies the researchers deduced the origin of the silver did not originate from Phoenicia.

The objects from Tel Dor, the oldest of the three sites, date from the second half of the 10th century BC. According to the authors, the ores that were used at that time originated mainly from the Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and from the Aegean island of Santorini. The researchers also found isolated ores from Sardinia.

The silver of Acre, a settlement from the 10th and 9th century BC, also came from Anatolia and Sardinia. In Sardinia silver was obtained by the process of cupellation. In this process lead is used to absorb impurities leaving the precious metal. The Phoenicians probably introduced the process to Sardinia and then shipped the silver to the Phoenician settlement area, the Levant.

The silver hoard found in Tel Dor, Israel [Credit: Ardon Bar-Hama/
The Israel Museum]

However, the origin of the precious metal changed in the course of the 9th century, as the analysis of the finds from Ein Hofez shows: Here, only two of 29 objects still bear the signature of Anatolian ores. All other pieces come from the Iberian Peninsula.

There, the Phoenicians mainly enriched silver-containing  the sulfate mineral jarosite with lead in order to extract the precious metal by cupellation. The lead was brought from different places to the production sites. Six of the 29 objects originate from Linares in present-day Andalusia. The lead of the remaining 21 objects comes from various other places in today's southwest Spain.

"These results provide a new explanation for the density of Phoenician settlements in the early 8th century BC along the rivers and coasts of southern Iberia," the researchers write. "These served as stations for the transport of lead." The silver from Ein Hofez is evidence of the earliest Phoenician presence on the Iberian Peninsula, the team writes. This silver dominated the Phoenician market for more than a century.

The findings of Ein Hofez showed that silver production was either associated with or even preceded the earliest Phoenician settlements, writes the team. "Iberian silver was perhaps the most important, and probably the earliest, reason for Phoenician activity on the peninsula," they stress. Later, the origin of silver changed once again: from the 7th century BC it came from Lavrio in southeastern Greece.

Source: Spiegel Online [March 10, 2019]



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Breaking News: Quest for silver drove Phoenician expansion in western Mediterranean - News Paper