New research analyzing the chemical and isotopic composition of silver deposits found in archaeological excavations in Israel offers new answers to the question of the spread of Phoenician culture.
The study Isotopes of lead in silver reveal the first Phoenician search for metals in the western Mediterranean , was published on February 25 in the prestigious journal PNAS, signed by scientists from the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
It focuses on three large deposits of Phoenician silver found in Israel, at Tel Dor, Acre, and Ein Hofez. The goal was to find the origin of that silver, since the metal is not found naturally in the region.
The cities where the silver finds were made were part of the Phoenician empire along the coasts of Lebanon and northern Israel, and all had similar material cultures, according to Tzilla Eshel, lead author of the paper.
Archaeological excavations show that the Phoenician culture was widespread in the region from the 11th century BC. But the commonly accepted theory that they reached the Iberian Peninsula only in the second half of the 9th century BC. and Sardinia even later, in the 8th century, remains in question in light of the analysis of silver deposits.
Most of the silver was produced from lead ores that contained small amounts of silver, and using isotopic analysis of the lead that remained it was possible to identify where the metals were extracted from.
The silver from the oldest find, from the second half of the 10th century BC, found at Tel Dor on the north coast of Israel, came from eastern Anatolia and Sardinia. In contrast, the silver from Ein Hofez, which is 50 to 100 years younger than the previous find, comes almost entirely from the Iberian Peninsula.
Scientists say this provides clear evidence about the route and speed of Phoenician expansion, which would have started about a century earlier than archaeological excavations in the western Mediterranean have so far shown. This means that the Phoenicians began to establish their colonies in the west only after a long exploratory phase during which the foundations of precious metal mining were laid in Sardinia and the Iberian Peninsula.
The new research supports the theory that it was the presence of the metal that pushed the Phoenicians to expand and that the search for silver was an important trigger for a long phase of pre-colonization , during the 10th to 9th centuries BC