CHAPTER EIGHT
BABYLONIAN SOURCES OF
EXOTIC RAW MATERIALS
D. T. Potts
INTRODUCTIONB
elonging to another country, foreign, alien’. This is how the Oxford English
Dictionarydefines exotic. It is interesting to note that the intrinsic worth of an
object or resource plays no role in determining whether or not it is exotic. This is
particularly apt in the case of ancient Babylonia since, for the most part, the goods
we think of as exotic were not necessarily valuable, either in a financial sense (something
of an oxymoron in discussing a pre-monetary economy) or in a functional sense (as
in the case of something which was essential to a particular industry, timber being
perhaps the most obvious exception). Rather, for the most part, the exotics which
were imported played a symbolic role, imbuing their owner – whether a deity’s cult
image in a temple, a merchant, or a member of a royal household – with a set of
attributes capable of conveying messages to any discerning observers. The colour of
a semi-precious stone, its religious aura and associations with specific deities; the
distance travelled by a material; the hardships involved in its procurement; the status
of the bearer – these and other overtones were undoubtedly heard and understood by
those who witnessed the conspicuous display of materials which came to Mesopotamia
from, in many cases, great distances.
While materials probably flowed into Babylonia from all directions, this chapter
will concentrate on those that arrived from the east and the south, either overland
through what is today Iran, or by sea up the Persian Gulf. For convenience these may
be classified as inorganics and organics. In the first category belong metals and stones,
while in the latter are materials such as shell, ivory, timber and aromatics.
INORGANICSBase metals: copper and tinCopperThe Babylonian use of base metals was part of a pattern of great antiquity. Leaving
aside a malachite pendant from a ninth millennium BCcontext at Shanidar cave in
‘