The Production of Bronze in Late Third-Millennium Babylonia (ca. 2100–2000 BCE)

Abstract Cuneiform texts dating to the Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2100 – 2000 BCE) contain unusually extensive and detailed data on the manufacture of bronze in ancient Babylonia. Mentions of the objects made of tin bronze (Sumerian zabar ) are comparatively rare. Such examples mainly concern high status items. By contrast, utilitarian objects such as hoes, sickles, and axes, thousands of which were routinely produced, are usually described in texts as being made of copper ( urudu ). This situation is seemingly contradicted by the archaeological evidence, which shows that, the during the late fourth and the third millennium BCE the type of bronze predominantly used in Southern Babylonia and Iran—especially for simple tools—was the arsenical one, with the tin bronze having been used quite rarely. As this contribution argues, the answer to this dilemma is provided by the fact that the manufacture of the allegedly “copper” objects involved the alloying of copper with a material called su gan . We conclude that su gan is to be identified as arsenic, and that, accordingly, the alloys so produced were arsenical bronzes.