Mycenaean Trade and Exchange

From about 1700 to 1050 BCE, communities on the Greek mainland and Aegean islands moved food, craft materials and finished goods between settlements and across the sea. During the palatial period, roughly 1400–1200 BCE, officials at centers such as Pylos and Mycenae in southern Greece and Knossos on Crete kept clay records of selected supplies and work. Pottery, metal cargoes and imported materials show how communities moved goods between regions and organized different kinds of shipment.

Containers and recorded produce

Stirrup jars were transport vessels for liquids such as olive oil or wine. Their two handles and false neck form a shape like a stirrup, while a separate opening serves as the pouring spout. The large jars could be carried and stored upright, then poured from when their contents were needed. Painted Linear B inscriptions, a script used to write early Greek in palace administration, occur on the shoulders of some jars before firing. Most surviving inscriptions give a personal or place name.

One painted word, wanaktero, means “royal.” Jeremy Rutter’s account of the inscriptions notes jars marked this way from Thebes, Eleusis, Tiryns and Chania, in western Crete, and interprets them as containers for produce from royal vineyards or olive groves. Many inscribed jars were made and painted around Chania; other examples are known at mainland centers in Boeotia, in central Greece, and the Argolid, in the northeastern Peloponnese. Anna Judson dates the inscribed jars to roughly the late fourteenth to early twelfth centuries BCE in her study of the jars. The inscriptions connect containers with named people, places or royal production, while their spread shows that transport crossed between Cretan and mainland communities.

Vessels also carried Mycenaean products farther east. A Mycenaean stirrup jar in the British Museum, made around 1300–1200 BCE, was excavated at Tell Atchana in the northern Levant, in present-day southern Turkey. In Cyprus, the Met’s Mycenaean jar record notes that large numbers of Mycenaean vases appeared from the early fourteenth century BCE, while some thirteenth-century vessels may have been made by Mycenaean potters working on the island. In that case, people and production moved as well as finished pots. Clay itself could also be traded.

Copper aboard a merchant vessel

At Cape Gelidonya, off the southern coast of present-day Turkey, a merchant vessel sank around 1200 BCE. Its cargo included at least thirty-four large copper ingots with four projecting handles, smaller metal pieces and fragments of bronze tools. The handles made the heavy slabs easier to lift and stack. Matting between some ingots helped separate the stacked cargo; scrap tools had likely been carried in baskets. The wreck’s remains suggest a vessel about ten metres long, carrying at least a ton of durable cargo.

The cargo mixed raw metal with used objects. Copper ingots could be taken to workshops and melted for new tools or vessels; broken bronze implements were valuable as recyclable metal. Around sixty stone and metal weights lay mainly near what archaeologists interpret as a cabin. Weighing helped a trader measure metal and combine copper with tin to make bronze. Rutter suggests the merchant-captain may also have acted as a smith, supplying metal and making finished goods to order. The ingots were not uniform enough to function as fixed currency, and their four handles served a practical lifting purpose. Chemical analysis links the copper in the wreck’s ingots to Cypriot ores, while their shipment to the Anatolian coast places the metal in a wider seaborne route. Rutter’s account of the Cape Gelidonya cargo details the ingots, scrap and weights.

Amber and changing routes

Amber, fossilized tree resin, traveled as a light, workable material. Infrared analysis identifies most amber in Mycenaean contexts as Baltic in origin, from the region around the Baltic Sea in northern Europe. It appears chiefly as beads and rectangular spacer plaques, which held rows of beads apart in necklaces. A Baltic bead in a southern Greek grave therefore traces a chain of exchanges across many communities: the material could pass through short journeys and several hands before reaching the Aegean.

The archaeological distribution changed over time. In the early Mycenaean period, amber was concentrated in a small number of sites, including Mycenae and Pylos. During the thirteenth century BCE it appeared at fewer sites. In the later, post-palatial phase after about 1200 BCE, finds are documented at a wider set of places, including Rhodes, Crete, Alalakh and Egypt.

For the wider economic setting, see The Mycenaean Economy. For jar manufacture and form, see stirrup jars.