Baltic amber beads found in 3,000-year-old urn in Syria

A recent study of beads unearthed in Hama, Syria 90 years ago has identified them as Baltic amber, which means they traveled almost 1900 miles, from the Baltic coasts of Denmark and Poland to the banks of the Orontes river, 3,000 years ago. This is the first direct evidence of Baltic amber at the ancient site of Hama.

The ancient site of Hama is a large mound in the middle of the modern city of Hama in western Syria. It was continuously occupied from the Late Neolithic through the Ottoman period (ca. 6500 B.C.–1400s), and excavations have found remains of dwellings, palaces, plazas from the Neolithic to the Iron Age.

Danish archaeologists led by Harald Ingholt excavated the Hama site from 1931 to 1938. Just south of the mound, they unearthed 1682 cremation graves from the Iron Age. It was in use from 1100 B.C. until the city was raised by the Assyrian king Sargon II in 720 B.C. One of the graves contained the cinerary remains of an adult female and child inside a funerary urn that also contained finger rings, gaming pieces, an amethyst cylinder seal, 10 goat/sheep bones and 51 beads. It was in one of the oldest parts of the cemetery dates to ca. 1075-925 B.C.

The artifacts recovered from the Hama excavations were documented and then divided between the Danish team, who had gotten funding for the excavation from Carlsberg Foundation, and local museums, a system called partage which was common in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Hama Collection went to the National Museum of Denmark where it has been studied, displayed and conserved ever since.

The beads from the cinerary urn were investigated by the museum in the 1930s. Researchers devised a reconstruction that arranged the 51 beads and the cylinder seal into a necklace, but 17 of the beads could not be restrung, as they were too degraded and fragmentary. While dull and cloudy, a glowing orange color did show through some of the broken beads, bore a resemblance to amber, but the question was not pursued at the time.

A new team of researchers took over where the 1930s ones left off, using technology including Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to confirm the beads were indeed Baltic amber.

Identification of Baltic amber beads among the objects within an Iron Age cremation burial at the ancient city of Hama in western Syria provides evidence for long-distance trade between the Near East and the Baltic coast of northern Europe. This bolsters and expands what is already known of the Amber Road networks across Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as emphasising Hama’s role as an important hub in regional and interregional trade networks from at least the Early Bronze Age onwards. The amber finds at Hama add another location to the map of Baltic amber occurrences in the Near East and underline the social and economic value of this liminal and highly sought-after material from ‘a distant foreign land’.

The study has been published in the journal Antiquity and can be read in its entirety here.

* This article was originally published here