Mesopotamia’s Bronze Age as a Cosmopolitan Age

The key term of this volume is bronze: in its basic meaning it is an alloy of two metals, copper and tin, even if there are other combinations, such as arsenical bronze. In Mesopotamia, the area I will discuss here, every form of bronze shared a common characteristic, however. To make bronze it was necessary to bring together two metals with origins in separate and distant places. The sources changed over time, but in Mesopotamia itself bronze was never the product of elements found in the same location. The outcome was something special, a compound stronger and deemed to be more appealing than its separate components. My discussion here will not be about metallurgy or material culture, however, but about literate culture, which in the Mesopotamian Bronze Age, I argue, showed a similar amalgamation of elements from sources that were geographically distinct. We can see bronze as a metaphor for literate culture in Mesopotamia.