Globalisation may be a modern term, but the long-distance economic links it epitomises are thousands of years old. Recent research has shown that blue glass beads found in two Danish Bronze Age burials were made in Pharaonic Egypt more than 1,300 years ago, while other Danish finds came from ancient Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq. The Egyptian glass matched that of artefacts in Tutankhamun’s tomb, dating to the same period, including glass inlays on his great gold death mask.
The Danish beads were found more than 130 years ago in early excavations by the noted prehistorian Sophus Müller: excellent drawings show the log coffin from Olby with a woman’s skeleton stretched out inside. She wore a skirt decorated with small bronze ornaments, which, says Jeanette Varberg of Aarhus University, must have “shone like gold in the sun”.
She had a bronze collar and large round belt-plate, c 1400-1300 BC, while on her left arm were a blue glass bead and two amber beads strung together with small bronze spirals. The blue came from traces of cobalt, and the bronze would, like the amber, have had a golden hue.
In a second burial, at Hesselagergard, the woman had similarly impressive bronze ornaments, and five amber beads and one of blue glass at her throat. The combination of glass and amber may have been of religious or cultural significance: “It is striking how often golden amber and blue glass from distant places occur together,” Varberg says, noting their co-occurrence in central Germany, Transylvania, central Italy and Corsica. Perhaps, they speculate, the blue represented the sky and the amber the sun.
The “Amber Route” from the Bronze Age Baltic to Mycenaean Greece was defined in 1925 by JM De Navarro, but what went northwards in exchange was unclear. The land route over the Brenner Pass reached the head of the Adriatic near Venice, and plugged into maritime routes going south to the Nile Delta and to Ugarit on the Syrian coast.
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As well as Egyptian beads, Mesopotamian glass was also found in Denmark in graves at Kongehoj and near Bramminge. These were of turquoise glass.
The measurement of trace elements in the glass, including zirconium, titanium, chromium and lanthanum, distinguishes Mesopotamian from Egyptian manufactures. It confirms that the Egyptian beads were made at Malkata near Thebes, or Amarna: production started at Malkata in the reign of Amenophis III shortly after 1400BC, and continued at Akhenaten’s new capital of Akhetaten (Tel el-Amarna) after 1,350BC.
Blue glass was used in Tutankhamun’s grave goods a few years later: but amber was also present in his tomb, in the form of a carved scarab. Ancient globalisation may have involved not just the transfer of goods, but also a sharing of ideas.