as was certainly the case with softstone and alabaster vessels in the Greco-Roman era
(their properties for doing so were extolled by ancient authors such as Pliny and
Strabo), then the chances are good that the stone itself would have absorbed the
contents. This being the case, analysis by gas chromatography ought to be able to
produce a spectrum that could give some indication, at least broadly speaking, of the
nature of those contents. To date, such work has not been carried out on the Iranian
or Omani softstone found on sites in Mesopotamia. It is likely, however, that the
vessels themselves arrived in Mesopotamia as containers for something that was a
desired commodity. In other words, the contents were probably of greater interest to
ancient Mesopotamian consumers than the containers themselves, even though the
latter have been the focus of modern archaeologists’ attentions.
ORGANICSWoodArchaeologists working outside of hyper-arid regions such as Egypt or the coastal
desert of Peru traditionally have much more difficulty identifying organic than
inorganic materials. To some extent this problem is alleviated in Mesopotamia because
of the rich corpus of texts. Nevertheless, even in the generally humid conditions of
Iraq, wood has been known to survive across the millennia, as discoveries in the Royal
Cemetery and some of the private graves at Uruk attest.
Mesopotamia was not nearly as devoid of wood as most people think. The Tigris
and Euphrates supported not only marshy areas with important stands of reeds
(principally Phragmites australis) but also ‘gallery forests’ with willow, poplar, tamarisk,
boxwood and other species. Nevertheless, foreign woods were imported into
Mesopotamia as well. Around 2500 BC, Urnanshe, king of Lagash, boasted that ‘ships
of Dilmun’ brought ‘timber from foreign lands’ to him. We have no real idea what
type of timber may have been involved, but it is likely to have been a higher grade
wood than that which was available locally. One is reminded of the flourishing trade
in mangrove poles (Prins 1966 : 6 – 11 ) which, prior to the oil boom in the Persian
Gulf, brought mangrove logs from the Lamu coast of east Africa to Sur in Oman and
Kuwait at the head of the Gulf for the building industry.
While nothing suggests that east Africa was a source of wood for Mesopotamia in
the third millennium BC, the coasts of India may well have been. As with the copper
and tin trade, however, the fact that the cuneiform texts record Dilmun as the source
of the timber imported by Urnanshe does not oblige us to think of native timber
that may have grown on Bahrain (in which case, date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) would
be the most likely candidate). Rather, Dilmun was probably transhipping timber
from further east, just as it did with copper.
Among the rarer, foreign woods that appear in Babylonian sources are sissoo wood
(Dalbergia sissoo, commonly called Pakistani rosewood), which grew in the Indo-Iranian
borderlands, and which appears, for example, in Old Babylonian dowry documents
(Dalley 1980 : 66 ), and ebony, a wood attested in contemporary inheritance documents
(Groneberg 1997 : 54 ). Texts from Mari reveal just how expensive ebony was. In one
instance 14 minas (roughly 14 × 500 g) of ebony were valued at 20 shekels of silver
(Kupper 1982 : 116 ).
— Babylonian sources of exotic raw materials —