Surviving tomb robbers and time, jewellery owned by ancient Egyptian royalty in around 2600 BC is helping shed new light on the beginnings of the globalised world.
An analysis of bracelets owned by Queen Hetepheres — the mother of King Khufu, who would go on to build the Great Pyramid — has found that Egypt and Greece were involved in long-distance trade earlier than previously known.
Queen Hetepheres' tomb represents the largest and most famous collection of silver artefacts from early Egypt.
While researchers have long-known that the ancient Egyptians traded with other civilisations, the new study provides the first scientific evidence that silver was sourced from the Aegean Islands in Greece, researchers reported on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
"This kind of ancient trading network helps us to understand the beginnings of the globalised world," said the study's lead author Karin Sowada, director of the Australian Centre for Egyptology at Macquarie University.
"For me that's a very unexpected finding in this particular discovery."
Bracelets offer an insight into Hetepheres's life
Born into royalty, Queen Hetepheres was somewhat of an enigma.
Bearing the title 'Daughter of God', she represented the direct royal blood line of the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt, in a period of time known as the Old Kingdom (2700 BC – 2200 BC)
Queen Hetepheres was married to King Sneferu. Together, they had a son and successor, Khufu, who is believed to have commissioned a tomb and pyramid for his mother's body to rest in.
For thousands of years, her place of burial remained a mystery, until expeditioners came across a shaft in Giza in 1925 — where they found her empty sarcophagus.
The expeditioners conjectured that Hetepheres had originally been buried near her husband's pyramid in Dahshur, but her son ordered her tomb be moved to Giza after robbers broke in.
While the whereabouts of her body and gold trappings remain unknown, a number of items were recovered from the tomb, including the bracelets.
"I like to say that the size of the pyramids are almost inversely proportional to the history of what's recorded about these people," Dr Sowada said.
"These objects themselves give us a window into her life and how she lived."
Origins of silver have always been a mystery
The team, which included researchers from France and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where the bracelets are stored, scanned fragments to work out what they were made of.
While the bracelets were last examined decades ago, Dr Sowada said they had never been analysed "scientifically to a high degree."
The new analysis revealed the bracelets consist of silver with traces of copper, gold, lead and other elements.
They were made by hammering cold-worked metal with frequent annealing — which involves heating it to a certain temperature to prevent breakage.
The addition of gold would have helped improve the silver bracelets' appearance and ability to be shaped.
While ancient Egypt was known to be rich in gold, it had no local sources of silver, Dr Sowada said.
"So this period of early Egypt is a little bit terra incognita from the perspective of silver," Dr Sowarda said, noting that the bracelets represented "essentially the only large scale silver that exists for this period of the third millennium BC".
"Silver also has the added disadvantage of corroding more easily."
And it wasn't until the early second millennium BC that "large quantities of silver" were preserved, she said.
While ancient Egyptian literature makes mention of materials like silver and lapis lazuli "in the context of imported commodities", their origins were never preserved, Dr Sowada explained.
For a "very long time" researchers assumed the silver was extracted from local gold with a high silver content.
But the new analysis of these bracelets has cast doubt on that theory, with lead isotope ratios in the silver from this time period found to be consistent with ores from the Cyclade Islands in the Aegean, and to a lesser extent, Lavrion (Attica in Greece).
"So these bracelets represent a very, very unique opportunity to understand not just the metalworking techniques at this time, but also the trade networks that were existing, which are very important to understanding the emergence of Egyptian state," Dr Sowada said.
'We haven't had that scientific evidence before'
Egypt's historical trade networks have been well noted in scientific literature, with the ancient city of Byblos in Lebanon seen as a "key centre" for materials like wood, particularly Lebanese cedar.
The Egyptians had "active ports all along the Delta region" that were transporting goods to and from Egypt, alongside overland desert routes between the Nile Valley and Red Sea, said Melanie Pitkin, senior curator of the Nicholson collection of antiquities at the University of Sydney's Chau Chak Wing Museum.
"The whole east desert was a place for precious metals, so they were using donkeys to do this, and also by foot," she said.
Lebanese cedar can be found in some Old Kingdom structures, and Egyptian artefacts have been excavated from areas known to have been used as trading emporiums, like Ugarit, in modern day Syria, added Brent Davis, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University if Melbourne.
But much more information about Egypt's trade networks was documented as time progressed into the Middle Kingdom (2040 BC –1782 BC) and then New Kingdom (1550 BC –1069 BC).
"In the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom much, much later, we have lots of papyrus that contain administrative records, trade records and so forth," Dr Davis said.
"But for the Old Kingdom, it's just too long ago, those documents for the most part haven't survived."
While lead isotope analysis has been done on other silver objects from the Middle Kingdom — with artefacts stored in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also believed to have come from mainland Greece — we "just haven't had that scientific evidence before" to show that Egypt was active in the Mediterranean region prior to that, Dr Pitkin, said.
"Egypt having international relations at this time is not surprising, but to be able to use robust scientific evidence to show it with the Aegean or mainland Greece, that is interesting," she said.
So how did Egypt acquire this silver?
Rather than source the silver directly from the Cyclades, Dr Sowada believes the ancient Egyptians leveraged their relationship with Byblos's elite to acquire it.
She says the Egyptians were probably aware the source of the silver was beyond their reach, but that they could use their networks to their advantage.
"[Byblos] mediated the the acquisition of this silver from the Aegean, which was then acquired by the Egyptian state at Byblos," Dr Sowada said.
"I think at this early stage, that's really as much as we can say."
The ancient Egyptians were known to procure things like lapis lazuli and other goods that were not available locally, but that "doesn't mean the Egyptians travelled to those faraway places," Dr Davis added.
"They went to these emporium cities, I believe, and procured those materials there."
Bracelets a 'window' into emergence of Egyptian state
While the findings help shed light on the beginnings of the globalised world, Dr Sowada says they also underscore how much there is to learn about ancient Egypt and the trade networks that existed.
"This is the start of a line of research that has got a long way to go."
But, she added, the analysis of the bracelets "offered a window" into the emergence of the Egyptian state.
"These networks wouldn't have happened overnight.
"They would have been built over a long period of time and these bracelets are a window into that wider network."
