Cultural Metallurgy—A Key Factor in the Transition from the Chalcolithic to Bronze Age in the Southern Levant

Abstract

The causes of the disappearance of Late Chalcolithic society (Ghassulian) in the early fourth millennium bc remain obscure. This study identifies the collapse as the consequence of a change in the approach to metallurgy from cosmological fundament (Late Chalcolithic) to a practical craft (EB1). This endogenous transition accounts for the cultural recession characterizing the transitional period (EB1A) and the discontinuity in ritual practices. The new practical approach in metallurgy is firstly observed in the southern margin of the Ghassulian culture, which produced copper for distribution in the Nile valley rather than the southern Levant. Nevertheless, the Ghassulian cultural markers visible in the newly emerging areas of copper working (southern coastal plain, Nile valley) denote the survival of the old cosmological traditions among metalworkers of the EB1 culture. Their religious expression unveils the extension of the Ghassulian beliefs attached to metallurgy and their metamorphosis into the esoteric fundaments of the Bronze Age religions.

Smelting Metals, Enacting Rituals. The Interplay of Religious Symbolisms and Metallurgical Practices in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean

“…In pre-industrial societies ritual often plays a crucial role in coordinating craft production, especially when this embodies newly established cultural and social identities. In the case of the Ghassulian Chalcolithic communities, the production of astonishing ceremonial and ritual objects is directly connected by these scholars to the gradual formation of new social structures, in a complex entanglement that links the act of manufacture itself, and the skilled craftsman behind it, to the negotiation of communal socio-cultural fabric through ritual and magic ontologies (Amzallag 2019;Amzallag 2022). While the emphasis on the role of metal artifacts as crucial status-markers is certainly important, one cannot help but wonder if, and in which ways, the inarguable skills required to produce them also led to a (re) negotiation of the social role of metal craftsmen.…”