Egyptian beads found in Danish tomb

[Ashmire]

Kind of cool: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/kig-tut-beads-found-in-3-400y-old-danish-graves-1.5414758

Small world.

[Zlote Jablko]

Kind of cool: https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/kig-tut-beads-found-in-3-400y-old-danish-graves-1.5414758

Small world.

I just saw this! It’s very exciting for me. I’ve long been fascinated by the Baltic Amber trade that used to connect Northern Europe to the Mediterranean. I believe Hittite artifacts have also made it to the Baltic region.

It goes a long way to show how interconnected things were prior to the late Bronze Age collapse (around 1177 B.C.) The prevailing idea is that everyone was sort of in contact with everyone give or take a couple degrees of separation. It was the most interconnected that Eurasia had ever been. Then eastern Mediterranean civilization just kind of disintegrated, and the network unwraveled. I’ve long suspected that even distant parts of Europe were impacted by this.

I recall that the trade network was in full swing again by Roman times however. Archaeologists have found evidence of Roman expeditions in Poland, which were probably meant to secure the amber trade. It is a small world.

[Eastling]

It goes a long way to show how interconnected things were prior to the late Bronze Age collapse (around 1177 B.C.) The prevailing idea is that everyone was sort of in contact with everyone give or take a couple degrees of separation. It was the most interconnected that Eurasia had ever been. Then eastern Mediterranean civilization just kind of disintegrated, and the network unwraveled. I’ve long suspected that even distant parts of Europe were impacted by this.

I was reading a study recently about the spread of furnace metallurgy technology in the late Neolithic that has some interesting implications here. The argument being made was that while crucible metallurgy (simpler, but also only really functional on native metal, not raw ore) had evolved independently all over the world, furnace metallurgy (which allows the smelting of raw ore into precious metals) was invented just once, in the southern Levant, and from there radiated out all over Eurasia and Africa. The main evidence presented: only in the southern Levant do we see a progression of metallurgical remains from "these people just invented furnace metallurgy and have no idea what they're doing" to "wow, these people have really mastered this technology." Everywhere else, the technology shows up in its most refined stages from the first known archaeological evidence of its appearance.

While it's not a closed case (after all, we might just not have found the other relevant archaeological remains yet), it strikes me as a pretty convincing argument. It also goes to show the power of useful ideas to both propagate themselves across disparate communities as well as connect the people in them. After all, when the metallurgists brought their new technology on the road, they took their beliefs and practices with them.

[Zlote Jablko]

I was reading a study recently about the spread of furnace metallurgy technology in the late Neolithic that has some interesting implications here. The argument being made was that while crucible metallurgy (simpler, but also only really functional on native metal, not raw ore) had evolved independently all over the world, furnace metallurgy (which allows the smelting of raw ore into precious metals) was invented just once, in the southern Levant, and from there radiated out all over Eurasia and Africa. The main evidence presented: only in the southern Levant do we see a progression of metallurgical remains from "these people just invented furnace metallurgy and have no idea what they're doing" to "wow, these people have really mastered this technology." Everywhere else, the technology shows up in its most refined stages from the first known archaeological evidence of its appearance.

While it's not a closed case (after all, we might just not have found the other relevant archaeological remains yet), it strikes me as a pretty convincing argument. It also goes to show the power of useful ideas to both propagate themselves across disparate communities as well as connect the people in them. After all, when the metallurgists brought their new technology on the road, they took their beliefs and practices with them.

I didn’t know that. That makes a lot of sense though. In the past, it was common to say that all civilization spread from the Middle East. That’s very simplistic obviously. There were native innovations like rice domestication in East Asia. But you can’t overestimate the importance of the middle eastern civilization “package” that was inherited by the rest of the continent.

[Eastling]

I didn’t know that. That makes a lot of sense though. In the past, it was common to say that all civilization spread from the Middle East. That’s very simplistic obviously. There were native innovations like rice domestication in East Asia. But you can’t overestimate the importance of the middle eastern civilization “package” that was inherited by the rest of the continent.

There were quite a number of innovations and technological developments elsewhere, but certainly the ancient cultures of the Middle East exerted an enormous influence over later societies.

If you're interested in the study I was talking about, you can find it here. It's one of the core pieces of evidence in this scholar's pet theory about the origins of the Abrahamic God, but I find his ideas and speculation fascinating from a pagan perspective as well.