The merchants of Ugarit: oligarchs of the Late Bronze Age trade in metals? (original) (raw)

Ugarit’s location at the nexus of land based routes that delivered tin from Central Asia and Eastern Mediterranean maritime trade circuits, together with its close proximity to Cyprus, from which it received abundant supplies of copper, make it a unique vantage point from which to study trade in the components of bronze in the LBA. Added to this, it is indeed fortunate that, at the close of the LBA, the merchants of Ugarit were literate and recorded their business transactions on tablets that have been excavated in their hundreds since the 1950s. This extraordinary survival means more is known about the activities of Ugarit’s merchants than, for example, their European counterparts in the early Middle Ages. This paper explores the role the merchants of Ugarit played in supplying metals to the Eastern Mediterranean world in the closing years of the LBA, drawing on recent philological work and attempting to integrate this with archaeological and scientific data. It also considers how a business oligarchy comprised of powerful merchants, functioning alongside Ugarit’s Palace, may have provided the foundation for the development of entrepreneurial trade.