This is one of those stories that could have inspired Indiana Jones. At the beginning of the 20th century, German amateur archaeologists were in the middle of Iraq, on an expedition to discover the treasures of Babylon. During an excavation at the great ziggurat of Aššur, on the west bank of the Tigres River, they discovered two tremendously mysterious objects.
They were two beads made of an orange material that researchers from the Royal Museum in Berlin and the German East Society, who had been working in this ancient Assyrian capital for a decade, found in 1914 in a deposit dating from around 1800-1750 before Christ.
Its material was not identified until more than a century later. Just a few weeks ago, experts from the Museum of Prehistory in Halle used a technique called Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) to reveal that the beads were made of amber and represent some of the first specimens of this fossilized resin in the Southwest Asia. But that was not all.
The analyzes in the laboratory served to find the origin of the amber, a place located in the region of the Baltic Sea or the North Sea, thousands of kilometers away from Iraq. Despite severe weathering for centuries, the spectrometry matched that of Baltic amber (succinite).
Aššur (now Qala'at Sherqat) is one of the most important archaeological sites in northern Mesopotamia. The beginnings of this settlement date back to the third millennium BC, and from the 19th century BC, the city became the center of an Assyrian territorial state.
From 1903 to 1914, German archaeologists led by Walter Andrae (1875-1956) excavated the area. Among his objectives was to study the great ziggurat (stepped tower of the temple). In April 1914, while researchers were searching for foundation layers, bulldozers widened an existing old tunnel.
There they discovered several thousand shell, stone, glass and ceramic beads lying directly on the bedrock, below the first layer of adobe. Part of the finds ended up being part of the collection of the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.
Among the objects found were two disc-shaped whose material differed from the rest. Once studied, it has been verified that the amber beads represent a clear example of long-distance cultural contacts during the Early Bronze Age.
“The extreme rarity of amber in both the Mediterranean and the Near East before 1550 B.C. can be explained by the fact that the Únětice culture of Central Germany - whose wealth and importance is expressed, for example, in their richly furnished princely tombs or in the sky disk of Nebra - controlled the paths by which amber could reach the south ”, say the specialists in an article published in the journal Acta Archaeologica.
Amber finds from the early 2nd millennium BC are "extremely rare" and "probably unique gifts from people who traveled extensively from central or western Europe to visit southern elites," they add.
When the Únětice culture came to an end, around 1550 BC, the picture changed and a widespread trade in this fossilized resin of vegetable origin (it comes mainly from the remains of coniferous trees and some angiosperms) was established, which made amber became available in large quantities in the Mediterranean and Middle East.
