New insights into the ancient world of globalised trade have emerged, revealing the connections between Ancient Greeks and Ancient Egyptians date back to the early Bronze Age around 2600 BC.

A new report published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has analysed silver artefacts from Ancient Egypt, unveiling a trade network with the Ancient Greeks that was not only more extensive but also significantly older than previously believed.

“Egypt has no domestic silver ore sources and silver is rarely found in the Egyptian archaeological record until the Middle Bronze Age,” write the authors – archaeologists from Australia, France, and the United States.

New scientific evidence of early trade between Egyptians and Greeks

The Ancient Egyptians it seems, engaged in a flourishing trade network that extended its reach the Bronze Age Cycladic Islands, and Hellenic cities nestled in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the isle of Crete, and Lavron on mainland Greece. Unveiling the interconnectedness of these two civilizations, is a silver bracelet, discovered of Queen Hetepheres I.

These adornments had, languished without thorough analysis for several decades. The report’s lead author is Karin Sowada from Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney.

The report authors analysed samples from the collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and used “bulk XRF, micro-XRF, SEM-EDS, X-ray diffractometry and MC-ICP-MS” to get essential and mineralogical compositions and “lead isotope ratios, to understand the nature and metallurgical treatment of the metal and identify the possible ore source.”

To their astonishment the minerals they found were “silver, silver chloride and a possible trace of copper chloride.”

The ratios of lead isotopes could only be found from silver from the Aegean, Attica, and Anatolia (Western Asia), all then Bronze Age, pre-Hellenistic regions.

“Surprisingly, the lead isotope ratios are consistent with ores from the Cyclades (Aegean islands, Greece), and to a lesser extent from Lavrion (Attica, Greece), and not partitioned from gold or electrum as previously surmised. Sources in Anatolia (Western Asia) can be excluded with a high degree of confidence,” write the report authors.

Silver Bracelets of Queen Hetepheres I. Old Kingdom, 4th Dynasty, 2575-2550 BC. From the Tomb of Hetepheres I, near the Great Pyramid of Giza. Now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo Photo:Twitter

Mysterious Egyptian Queen’s silver bracelet unveil globalised trade

Imaging from a cross-section of a bracelet fragment owned by Queen Hetepheres revealed that the metal was repeatedly “annealed and cold-hammered during creation of the artefacts.”

The analyses “found that Egypt and Greece were involved in long-distance trade earlier than previously known.”

The new study provides the first scientific evidence that silver was sourced from the Aegean Islands in Greece.

“This kind of ancient trading network helps us to understand the beginnings of the globalised world,” Dr Sowada told the ABC.

“For me that’s a very unexpected finding in this particular discovery.”

Queen Hetepheres the ‘Daughter of God’, represented the direct royal blood line of the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt, in a period known as the Old Kingdom (2700 BC – 2200 BC).

She was married to King Sneferu and had a son and successor, Khufu, who commissioned a tomb and pyramid for his mother’s body to rest in.

Her burial place remained a mystery for thousands of years, until expeditioners came across a shaft in Giza in 1925 — where they found her empty sarcophagus.

They guessed that Hetepheres had originally been buried near her husband’s pyramid in Dahshur, but her son ordered her tomb be moved to Giza after robbers broke in.

The location of her body and other precious artefacts buried with her, remain unknown, some items were recovered from the tomb, including the silver bracelets.

In an interview with the ABC Dr Sowada said that “these objects themselves give us a window into her life and how she lived.”

Significance of silver in understanding Early Egypt’s relationship with Greece

“Egypt was known for its gold, but had no local sources of silver,” Dr Sowada said.

“This period of early Egypt is a little bit terra incognita from the perspective of silver,” Dr Sowarda continued and added that the bracelets represented “essentially the only large-scale silver that exists for this period of the third millennium BC”.

It wasn’t until the early second millennium BC that “large quantities of silver” were preserved, she said.

While ancient Egyptian literature makes mention of materials like silver and lapis lazuli “in the context of imported commodities”, their origins were never preserved, Dr Sowada explained.

These bracelets “are very important to understanding the emergence of Egyptian state,” Dr Sowada told the ABC.

Information about Egypt’s trade networks was documented as time progressed into the Middle Kingdom (2040 BC –1782 BC) and then New Kingdom (1550 BC –1069 BC).

“In the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom much, much later, we have lots of papyrus that contain administrative records, trade records and so forth,” Dr Gillan Davis from the Australian Catholic University, one of the authors, told the ABC.

“But for the Old Kingdom, it’s just too long ago, those documents for the most part haven’t survived.”

Lead isotope analysis has been done on other silver objects from the Middle Kingdom — with artefacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are also believed to have come from mainland Greece — there just hasn’t been scientific evidence before.

Silver from the Aegean and mainland Greece

The silver was not directly sourced from the Cyclades, Dr Sowada said, but through Byblos’ elites which Egyptians had relationships with.

“[Byblos] mediated the acquisition of this silver from the Aegean, which was then acquired by the Egyptian state at Byblos,” Dr Sowada told the ABC.

The findings shed light on the beginnings of the globalised world, Dr Sowada told the ABC, and underscore how much there is to learn about ancient Egypt and the trade networks that existed.

But, she added, the analysis of the bracelets “offered a window” into the emergence of the Egyptian state.

“These networks wouldn’t have happened overnight.

“They would have been built over a long period of time and these bracelets are a window into that wider network.”