Exotic food exchange in the second millennium BCE
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Trade flourished long before the Silk Routes were established
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Ancient commerce: Trade and cultural ties took place between the East and the West even in the Bronze Age .
| Photo Credit:
Asela Don
Trade flourished long before the Silk Routes were established
We are familiar with the ‘Silk Route’ that connects Chinese and Central Asian regions with Southern Asian and West Asian regions of the world and how trade between these regions had started over 4,000 years ago, or the second millennium BCE. It was then that the King of Babylon (the region near the Euphrates River) Hammurabi ruled and had strict moral laws for his subjects. In this connection, the remarkable and ‘must read’ book ‘The Silk Roads: A New History of the World’, written by Peter Frankopan mentions how even before that time, trade and cultural ties were going on between the East and the West in the Bronze Age
New
evidence that spices, fruits from Asia had reached the Mediterranean earlier
than thought
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München
Bronze Age market scene at the Levant. Illustration: Nikola NevenovAsian
spices such as turmeric and fruits like the banana had already reached the
Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
A
team of researchers working alongside archaeologist Philipp Stockhammer at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (LMU) has shown that even in the
Bronze Age, long-distance trade in food was already connecting distant
societies.
A
market in the city of Megiddo in the Levant 3700 years ago: The market traders
are hawking not only wheat, millet or dates, which grow throughout the region,
In new research, an international team of scientists examined the dental calculus of individuals who lived during the 2nd millennium BCE in the Southern Levant. Their results provide clear evidence for the consumption of expected staple foods, such as cereals, sesame, and dates, and unexpected turmeric, banana, and soybean. The discovery pushes back the earliest evidence of these exotic foods in the Mediterranean by centuries (turmeric) or even millennia (soybean).
Aerial view of Tel Megiddo in northern Israel. Image credit: Avram Graicer / CC BY-SA 3.0.
“Exotic spices, fruits and oils from Asia had thus reached the Mediterranean several centuries, in some cases even millennia, earlier than had been previously thought,” said senior co-author Dr. Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist in the Institute for Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology and Archaeology of the Roman Provinces at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Inst
Prof. Israel Finkelstein
A new international study, which included researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority, reveals significant global trade between India & Southeast Asia and the Land of Israel as early as the 16
th century BCE. Traded goods included exotic foods like soybeans, bananas and turmeric – almost one thousand years before any previously known availability of these foods in our region.
The study focused on food remains identified in the dental calculus of people buried at Tel Megiddo and Tel Erani (near Kiryat Gat). Examination of the teeth, dated from the 16
th century BCE at Megiddo and the 11