"The Bronze Age produced the world's first consumer societies." "Ancient civilizations with a thoroughly modern obsession:" "the pursuit of luxury goods." "We have gold, we have ebony, we have ostrich eggs that are moving between the elite of the different societies of this period throughout the eastern Mediterranean between the palaces, between the kings." "To meet the demand, merchants and middlemen traveled by land and sea creating a highly connected ancient world, one where distant cultures made contact and international trade first began, generating extraordinary wealth at a whole new level." "Throughout the early Bronze Age, most people lived in small settlements scattered around the Mediterranean and Near East." "But as the middle Bronze Age advanced, and populations increased, connections began to form between royal houses and urban centers." "We start to see the development of communities that are at a whole different scale, at a regional scale, at what we can call an international scale." "In fertile capitals, like Thebes in Egypt and Uruk in Mesopotamia, an abundance of food created a rich class of landowning elites who were eager to trade their surplus for stones, metals, and raw materials from other lands." "With the growth of cities and the growth of hierarchical society, there came to be an elite that wanted to advertise its status and also wanted to decorate the palaces and the temples, and to do that you needed things like copper" "and precious stones and precious woods, and things like that." "So Mesopotamia was the great market for raw materials and indeed, when Mesopotamia became urbanized they seem to have sent out expeditions far into Iran and Anatolia specifically looking for the raw materials and setting up little trading posts in order to acquire these raw materials." "And from there that's where it all took off and these networks became all the more robust through the centuries" "To the west of Mesopotamia, where the cultures of the Aegean and Mediterranean rim developed, the terrain made it more difficult to move goods by land, so the ancients took to the sea for long distance travel." "Revolutionary innovations marked a booming era of maritime trade." "One of the most important was the sail." "The sail was probably first used in the fourth millennium, perhaps in southern Mesopotamia, by about 2000 BC it's found its way to Crete, probably via Egypt, where we know that there were sailing ships by about 3200 BC" "because we have representations of them in Egypt." "So innovations in maritime travel really brought these areas together, and this is also the time when we see the emergence of the first superpowers in the world," "Egypt and Mesopotamia, so they are traveling on the seas and they are engaged in trade." "The people on the Aegean, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, are plugging into these networks, and that's facilitated by the sail." "Now they can actually travel to these places, and they get plugged in." "As civilizations became increasingly sophisticated during the middle to late Bronze Age their need for raw materials drove a thriving trade in metals, and developed interconnected relationships never seen before in the ancient world." "We know that during the bronze age, Cyprus, the name itself actually comes from the word for copper." "We know that Cyprus was one of the largest sources of copper in the eastern Mediterranean, so in the mountain ranges and the foothills of the mountain ranges, that's where we find copper sources." "In other places in the Aegean there's some copper, farther to the east in Mesopotamia, also in Anatolia, so copper could be found." "The real problem was tin, tin is very rare, and the sources of tin are nowhere near the Mediterranean." "There are a few disputed sources in Anatolia, but it seems that the tin was coming mainly from well to the east, near Afghanistan or central Asia." "In the west it could come from Spain, and even farther from Britain, and whether they were exploiting those sources in the Bronze Age we're not sure." "As these regional trade networks flourished, they fueled an even wider exchange of goods from foreign lands." "Everything from women and wine to ivory, precious gems, and art work." "Copper and tin were traded as pillow shaped ingots and may have been used as a form of currency." "This expansion in trade created a ripple effect of economic and cultural influences across the region." "Some of these ideas about writing, about religion, are moving around or being passed by, you can imagine, merchants who are telling stories as they're landing at a harbor." "The figures that are behind the scenes, not necessarily the king sitting on his throne, but the people who actually make up the activities of social life, the crafts people, the peasants, the merchants, the traders." "They're interacting and they're creating this kind of social network and interaction that really sees the changes of the Bronze Age." "The Minoan civilization arose on the Greek island of Crete during the middle Bronze Age and flourished for over 1000 years." "Named after the mythic King Minos, the Minoans are considered Europe's first advanced civilization." "By 2000 BC, they began building a string of palaces on the island." "Their capital at Knossos was a hub of commercial and cultural activity." "The Minoans during the middle Minoan period to the late, early late Minoan period, kind of monopolized trade in the area." "They had the biggest ships, they controlled the flow of people and goods from several centers and they were trading with the Syro-Palestinians, they were trading with the Hittites, the Cycladic islanders, the Egyptians." "They were even trading as far west as southern Italy and north to the Balkans so there was quite a large network." "There is this idea that there was a Minoan Thalassocracy, a kind of rule of the sea." "That the Minoans, as incredible sea persons, were able to rule the entire eastern Mediterranean." "I think more and more we've worked away from that idea." "What we do know is that culturally," "Minoan Crete had a very big impact on areas beyond its shores." "We see this, for example, in the spread of wall paintings throughout the Cycladic Islands and again into the northern Aegean, even to coastal Anatolia, so a very distinctive style of Minoan wall painting is showing up in these places." "We also find it throughout the Levant and also in northern Egypt." "In exchange for copper, tin, gold, ivory, silver, and precious stones, the Minoans traded olive oil, wine, food, and textiles." "They may have also been the first to develop the so-called "purple" trade, centuries before the Phoenicians." "People in the Aegean became aware of the fact that certain types of sea mollusks, the Murex, has a gland that creates an incredible purple dye." "Early excavations on Crete and in the Aegean would turn up shells, and people did not exactly know what to make of this." "We now can kind of go back to these early excavation reports and understand them very likely as being processing sites for this purple dye made from the Murex, and there have been some very interesting recent finds of this dye" "actually being used, essentially creating a color in paint." "The world was being colored by this purple in various different places, not only in cloths but also on the walls and doubtlessly in other places too." "The Minoans enjoyed relative peace and prosperity through much of their reign as grand masters of trade." "But by the beginning of the late Bronze Age," "Minoan society began to decline." "A major volcanic eruption on nearby Thera, or some other natural disaster, may have contributed to their fall." "Over time the Mycenaeans, a group of early Greeks from the mainland, moved in and took over trade in the region." "The Mycenaeans, once they supercede the Minoans, circa 1450 BC or so, they don't seem to have as strong a connection with Egypt, and so they are oriented in to the east, more to the Hittites and the Cypriots." "But the Mycenaeans also have a strong interest in southern Italy and Cicely, more so than the Minoans." "So they're developing contacts with places on the southern Italian coast and Cicely looking for different kinds of products." "We know that the Mycenaeans were trading with southern Italy, with the Balkans, we have Balkan amber in Mycenae." "We know that they continued to trade with Cyprus, they continued to get copper ore from the places that the Minoans did." "We can actually trace the source of copper by lead isotope analysis, because veins of metal in the earth typically possess the same sort of signature and the sources of copper continue into the Mycenae era they continue to kind of extract at a high level" "and higher and higher." "As the demand for copper grew, so too did the quest for more luxury goods." "This in turn fueled the demand for stronger ships, capable of carrying heavier cargo." "Initially most ship builders used twine to join the planks of wood together." "But these craft were too fragile for the open sea." "Eventually a new technique was developed in the late Bronze Age, using mortise and tenon joints to connect planks, creating stronger boats that helped expand trade beyond rivers into the open sea." "The earliest evidence of this major advance in ship construction was discovered off the southwest coast of Turkey in 1982 in an area called Uluburun." "The ship was nearly 50 feet long and carried more than 20 tons of cargo, from at least seven different cultures." "The Uluburun shipwreck is unique in so many ways." "We have only a few actual wrecks from the Bronze Age and this is so unique because, first of all the preservation" "We have a kind of moment frozen in time." "Everything went down with the ship was meant to be with the ship, and so we can study that particular moment and we can study the range of objects, the range of products, that are being shipped around the Mediterranean at about 1300 BC." "And this is really extraordinary." "We have these large ingots of copper for example." "We have beautiful ingots of glass." "Glass would've been used, and then would've been sent throughout the eastern Mediterranean and then turned into different types of objects by crafts people in the different societies." "Among the more than 18,000 artifacts was a cache of exotic objects." "Ebony from Egypt, elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth, ostrich egg shells and Baltic amber beads from northern Europe." "This ship was likely a mixed enterprise, a trade ship that sold raw material and goods from port to port while transporting a special cargo of elite goods." "During the late Bronze Age, royal gift giving was a vital part of international trade and critical to ancient diplomacy." "To maintain good relations, the ruling elite of the day traded what they had for what they coveted most." "They really treasured gold just like we do, and indeed there are texts from the late Bronze Age where the kings are writing to each other and saying, the king of Babylon he writes to the king of Egypt," ""I know that gold is like dust in your country," ""why aren't you sending me more gold?"" "The inherent, shiny beauty, sunlike beauty of gold, was just as impressive to them as it is to us." "By the late Bronze Age, the trade networks that brought great wealth to the ruling elites were being disrupted." "Scholars believe that climate change in the Aegean may have been a factor." "A series of intense droughts could've dramatically affected agriculture, and led to great social unrests and upheaval." "Ultimately what we end up seeing is the destruction of palace after palace very widely throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and I think the scope of that suggests two things." "One, that the climate very possibly is playing a role, that this is, you know, climate is something that can cause such a widespread synchronous event." "But also these are societies that are very interconnected, and so we can see that the livelihood of one is going to affect the livelihood of another." "Much like the global financial meltdown in 2008, the disruption caused a ripple effect across the region." "The flow of luxury goods and raw materials for the ruling elites eventually ceased altogether." "The vibrant trading networks forged in the ancient world would not be seen again for centuries, but they set the stage for a remarkable expansion of international trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange that continues to this day."