Prices and values of metals in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean

Georgios Papasavvas of the University of Cyprus examines the economic value, exchange rates, and purchasing power of copper, silver, and gold in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. Because Cyprus lacks deciphered administrative archives, Papasavvas uses textual records from Egypt, Ugarit, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia to reconstruct how Cypriot copper was valued at its destinations.

The lecture opens with 18th-century BC Mari texts mentioning Alashiyan copper and moves to the scale of Late Bronze Age trade, exemplified by the Amarna letters and the Uluburun shipwreck, which carried ten tons of Cypriot copper oxhide ingots and one ton of tin. Papasavvas outlines how ancient economies functioned as monetary systems without coinage, using standardized weights of silver and copper as indices of value. At the Egyptian workmen's village of Deir el-Medina, daily goods and wages were priced in copper deben of 91 grams.

Comparing textual records, Papasavvas shows how relative metal values fluctuated by region and period. In New Kingdom Egypt, the ratio of gold to silver to copper stood at 1:2:200, whereas at 14th- and 13th-century BC Ugarit it was 1:4:800, making precious metals four times more expensive relative to copper. By the 12th century BC, copper appreciated against silver in both Egypt (1:60) and Babylonia (1:90), a shift Papasavvas suggests benefited the Cypriot economy.

To illustrate these ratios, Papasavvas contrasts the light weights of Late Cypriot precious metal finds, such as a gold bowl from Enkomi and an inscribed silver cup from Hala Sultan Tekke, with Egyptian royal wealth, and calculates the copper equivalents of several archaeological assemblages. Acquiring the 1,430 grams of gold objects in Enkomi Tomb 93 would have required 10 oxhide ingots at Egyptian rates or 41 ingots at Ugaritic rates, roughly the entire copper cargo of the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck (1,135 kilos). He similarly converts two silver ingots from Pyla (2.6 kilos total), an Amarna hoard, and a silver armlet from Enkomi into copper ingots, and translates the Uluburun cargo into Deir el-Medina grain wages, estimating it could have fed over 6,400 people for a year.

The final section turns to Linear B tablets from Knossos and Pylos and the weights of surviving bronzes to calculate how many weapons and tools the Uluburun cargo could yield, such as 25,000 swords of the type found at Enkomi or 30,000 double adzes, while noting that Ugaritic and Egyptian texts also priced the smith's labour above raw material weight. A lengthy discussion follows, with contributions from Carol Bell, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Susan Sherratt, and Martin Odler on tin prices, domestic versus international exchange rates, and bronze scrap recycling.