opposite in what is today the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia,^1 Dilmun was an
emporium which transhipped copper from further east, principally from Magan.
In the Old Akkadian period (c. 2350 – 2200 BC) Mesopotamian royal inscriptions
refer to Magan as a place with metal mines, and in the Ur III period ( 2100 – 2000
BC) a merchant at Ur named Lu-enlilla was actively involved in importing copper
from Magan to Ur in return for textiles (often of a very coarse quality). The supposition
is strong that even though Magan is not mentioned during the early second millennium,
it was, in fact, the source of the copper sold by Dilmun’s merchants. Although some
scholars long believed that Magan (Akkadian Makkan) could be identified with Makran
(south-eastern Iran and the adjacent portion of south-western Pakistan), the evidence
for its identification with the Oman peninsula (south-eastern Arabia) is compelling.^2
From the late fourth to the early first millennium BC, the output of finished copper
weapons, tools, jewellery and ingots in Oman was prodigious and hundreds of sites
with slag, testimony to millennia of copper smelting, have been located in the northern
United Arab Emirates (Fujairah) and Oman (Potts 1990 ; Weeks 2003 ).
Although ships from Meluhha docked at the capital of Agade during Sargon of
Agade’s reign, we are not told what they transported (but see below). A few centuries
later, however, copper from Meluhha is attested at Ur and in lexical sources naming
different sorts of copper. The location of Meluhha is not as certain as that of Dilmun
and Magan, but because of its association with carnelian (abundant in Gujarat around
Khambat) and ivory (which in most cases came from the Indian elephant), and because
it seems to have lain further east than Magan, most scholars have identified it with
the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. Small numbers of typical Harappan artefacts
- principally seals and beads – have been found in southern Mesopotamia, attesting
to the existence of contact between the two civilizations.^3
Kimash is mentioned twice in the inscriptions of Gudea, governor of Lagash around
2100 BC, as a mountain range where copper was mined. Although the location of
Kimash is uncertain, it is likely to have been in western or central Iran. While earlier
suggestions favoured a location somewhere in the western Zagros mountains, this is
not an area particularly rich in copper. On the other hand, the Anarak-Talmessi region
on the central Iranian plateau, south of Tehran, which has been exploited for its
copper, antimony, arsenic, cobalt, iron, lead and nickel since antiquity (Ladame 1945 :
299 ), has recently been suggested as the possible location of Kimash (Lafont 1996 ).
Metallurgists have long recognized that the copper of the Anarak-Talmessi sources
in Iran, which is particularly rich in arsenic, constituted in effect a ‘natural’ bronze
(often referred to as ‘arsenical bronze’) which was used for thousands of years.
Finally, the Old Akkadian king Rimush is said in one royal inscription to have
dedicated 36 , 000 minas(roughly 18 , 000 tons) of copper to the god Enlil following
a campaign against Marhashi. Although not otherwise attested as a regular source of
copper, Marhashi – which new evidence suggests can be located in eastern Kerman
on the Iranian plateau^4 – could well have supplied that much copper since there are
extensive areas of copper mineralization in Kerman province (Ladame 1945 ).
When we enter the period after the mid-second millennium BCwe have very little
information on actual sources. Cyprus is scarcely attested as a source of copper used
in Mesopotamia (Millard 1973 ) and while the Nairi-lands of eastern Anatolia (which
included Lake Van) yielded large quantities of copper and metal objects as booty to
Assyrian kings such as Ashurnasirpal II (Moorey 1994 : 246 ), this really only indicates
— Babylonian sources of exotic raw materials —