Page 247 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
Makan, the legendary Copper Mountain of the old Sumerians.
There is no copper nearer to Mesopotamia/
I recalled how Geoffrey Bibby had taken us down between the
walls of the prehistoric city port he had excavated on the island of
Bahrain, to show us where he had found all the scraps of unworked
copper in the open square just behind the gate in the sea wall. He had
emphasised that this was evidence to prove that local merchants had
sailed to ports outside the gulf in Sumerian times to fetch this
important metal, so dearly required by all Bronze Age cultures. The
import of copper had been of paramount importance to the found­
ers of Mesopotamian civilisations, as copper was not locally avail­
able in the twin-river country or elsewhere in the gulf.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Bibby had speculated on the
origins and transport routes of the Mesopotamian copper trade, and
showed how texts on the ancient tablets recorded that the imports
had come by sea from a land known to the ancient Sumerian scribes
as Makan or Magan. Two tablets slightly over four thousand years
old, found at Ur, represent receipts left by a Sumerian merchant for
goods received by him from the main temple. One listed sixty
talents of wool, seventy garments, one hundred and eighty skins,
and six kur (nearly two thousand litres) of good sesame oil, as
‘merchandise for buying copper’. The second tablet is more
specific, garments and wool were received as ‘merchandise for
buying copper from Makan’.
Bibby had found references to Makan in Mesopotamian inscrip­
tions dating from the days of Sargon of Akkad, about 2300 bc,
when he boasted of ships from Makan tying up alongside his quay
together with ships from Dilmun and Meluhha. King Sargon’s
grandson claimed that he ‘marched against the country of Makan
and personally took captive Mannu-dannu, King of Makan’. And
Gudea, a governor of Lagash around 2130 bc, imported diorite
from the mountains of Makan to fashion numerous stone statues,
and some of these still exist with incised inscriptions recording the
fact. But references to ‘copper from Makan’ or to merchandise ‘for
the purchase of copper, loaded on a ship for Makan’ petered out
about 1800 bc, according to Bibby. From then on, he found, there
seemed to be no more direct sailings to Makan; now all the copper
trade went through the markets of Dilmun. But Makan was still
known as the primary producer. There were still listed references to
‘diorite: produce of Makan’, and ‘copper: produce of Makan’, as
distinct from ‘palm-trees: produce of Dilmun, produce of Makan,
produce of Meluhha’.2 Whereas the Mesopotamian supreme gods,
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