Iran and the Bronze Age Metals Trade in the Persian Gulf

Abstract

Archaeometallurgical research in the U.A.E. and Oman has demonstrated that local Bronze Age societies undertook copper production on a very large scale, providing solid evidence for the identification of this region as the land of Magan known in Mesopotamian sources as a key supplier of copper in the later 3rd millennium b.c. However, consideration of the textual, archaeological and archaeometallurgical evidence from across the greater Persian Gulf region indicates a more complex exchange system conditioned not only by raw material sources and trade routes, but by politics and warfare, by technological traditions of manufacture and recycling, by ideologies of elite consumption, and by the social obligations that created and underpinned exchange relationships. A great deal of work remains to be done to demonstrate the likely contribution of Iranian polities to this system.