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Stunning glass beads – with a rare blue color due to Cobalt impurities in the glass composition – were found in Danish Bronze Age burials dating to 3400 years ago.
The blue glass beads were analyzed using plasma-spectrometry, a technique that enables comparison of trace elements in the beads without destroying them. The result proved that the rare blue beads came from a glass workshop in Nippur, Mesopotamia, about 50 km southeast of today’s Baghdad in Iraq. This glass workshop was the same workshop that made the blue beads buried with the famous boy-king Tutankhamen in Egypt.
The discovery proves that there were established trade routes between the far north and Levant as early as the 13th century BCE. (Link courtesy Eleanor Wynn)
The Mesopotamian glass beads found in the graves in Denmark indicate that trade between Nordic countries and Egypt-Mesopotamia was established already 3000 years ago. Conversely, Nordic amber has been found as far south as in Mycenae, Greece and at Qatna, near Homs in Syria.
