Amber — the jewel of the Baltic Sea. This beautiful gem, formed from crystallized tree sap, has been valued for its beauty, its medicinal qualities, and its supernatural associations for millennia. The amber craze did not elude the inhabitants of the Bronze Age Ancient Near East. Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks, Syrians, Hittites — all of them were voracious clients for the gem. But how did it arrive in the Near East over such a long distance? A mix of archaeology and linguistics, including the incredible preservation of a Finno-Ugric word in Akkadian, gives us an idea of the links between the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Europe, the land of Hyperborea.
Amber’s uses
Amber was used for a number of functions in the Near East. Chief of all, was jewelry. Grave goods from Greece, Israel, and Egypt have been found in the form of beads, scarabs, and other valuables that were meant to accompany their owners into the afterlife. Hittite records give several more uses for ritual and medicinal purposes. Hittite ritual texts describe the use of a substance called hustis, which was ground up, mixed with ingredients such as honey and cheese, and burned before the statues of gods as a purification ritual. Royal babies also underwent a sort of purification, in which amber was swung over the infant, a practice with parallels in the Baltic Sea area. From amber’s use among elite Near Eastern circles, whether in ritual or burial, we can deduce that the gem was a valuable prestige item for the ruling class of the Near East, who were willing to import it from the distant North at great expense. But how did the Near East interact with distant, non-literate cultures?
Routes of Trade
By Dr. Richard Resch
Public Domain
Scholars have posited the existence of several routes linking the Baltic with the Mediterranean. Because travel overland was risky, it was always safer to transport goods down the numerous rivers in Eastern and Central Europe, chief among them the Volga, Bug, Dniester, and Danube rivers. From finds of amber in Bernstorf in Bavaria, it can be posited that one of these routes ran down through the Baltic, into Germany, and down to the Adriatic coast. Finds of amber in the Istria Bronze Age site of Moncodogna suggest that Istria and the Dalmatian coast were the final stopping points before the amber passed into the hands of merchants from the Achaean kingdoms of Greece.
From the Adriatic, the amber passed into the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, the Syro-Levantine coast, and Israel. But this route would only explain half of the amber trade. This route would have completely missed Anatolia and the Caucasus region, where the gem is also found. However, archaeological evidence from Bulgaria has revealed that there were likely two additional routes. One used the river systems of Thrace (modern Bulgaria), namely the Danube and the Struma, and Marica rivers, and the other one used the rivers of modern Russia and Ukraine.
The evidence for the Thracian and Ukrainian routes is mostly archaeological. A large hoard of amber from Hordeivka in Ukraine proves that the gem was exported through the country’s river systems to the Black Sea. A hoard called the Vulchitrun Treasure in Bulgaria confirms that the Danube played an important role in the trade beginning around 1500BC. Both of these routes met in the Black Sea. In order to reach the Mediterranean, they had to pass through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, where ships had to stop at a city steeped in legend — Troy.
For the Hittites and other Anatolian customers, Troy was likely the source of luxuries as early as 2500BC. Amber has been found in the Troy II layer, although none was found in later layers. However, the Hittite attestation of the gem means that they must have obtained it from somewhere close. The Black Sea and Bulgaria (via Troy) are the best candidates for a Hittite source of amber, and would in part explain the Hittite obsession with Troy between 1300BC and 1250BC, when the historical Trojan War is believed to have taken place.
A Finnic fossil
So far, archaeological evidence has shown us that amber was indeed imported from the Baltic into the Near East. A linguistic gem completes the puzzle and testifies to the close links between the Baltic and the Bronze Age Near East. The Akkadian language, the language of Assyria, Babylon, and Bronze Age international diplomacy, is a Semitic language with numerous loans from surrounding languages, including Sumerian, Egyptian, Aramaic, and Indo-European. But what are the chances that a language spoken in Iraq and Syria possessed a loan word from Finnic? Incredibly, it does. The Akkadian word for amber is attested as elmēšu. This is clearly not an Akkadian word. Linguists, however, noticed that it was incredibly similar to the Estonian word helmes (bead) and the Livonian el’maz (amber).
Although it is not clear if the Finnic languages borrowed the word for amber from an earlier language, the link between the Akkadian and the Finnic is clear. Somehow, one of the native names for amber, which lives on in Estonian and Livonian today, made its way into the Near East at least 4000 years ago and was preserved almost intact. This linguistic gem is so small yet so significant to reconstructing the contacts of the Bronze Age world. From tracing the fascinating journey of this one beautiful gem, we can see that the Bronze Age Mediterranean, far from existing in isolation, formed part of a vast network that stretched from the Atlantic all the way to Central Asia, across which people, things and language moved, mixed and thrived.