Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

Deshayes’ extensive and comprehensive model. Like Deshayes, I have excluded a
systematic consideration of Egyptian tools from this study, primarily for reasons of
feasibility but also because most Egyptian types are markedly different from other
regions. 729
In many ways, the current project updates Deshayes’ work for certain
geographical areas. There are 3137 items in Deshayes’ catalogue, spanning three
millennia from the core of the Near East and the Mediterranean as well as their peripheral
areas. For comparison, there are over 5300 objects listed in the current dataset from a
much smaller area and time frame. Much of Deshayes’ inquiries focus on the
development and movement of metallurgical traditions; he emphasizes the importance of
metallurgy in Iran, where innovation of several tool types first occurred. Deshayes argues
that the Levant, Aegean and even Eastern Europe owe some of their traditions to Iran; the
scattering of these tools to the west can be tracked through the materials found in Trans-
Caucasia and Anatolia. The extensive dispersal of metal tools and technologies was
attributed to the movement of Indo-European peoples, who were thought to have moved
in two waves: one to Anatolia/the Aegean and the other to the Caucasus region between
the Black and Caspian Seas.
The research questions that Deshayes addressed were principally concerned with
the beginnings and early stages of metallurgy over an extremely wide area. Although he
includes material from the second millennium, he is not that concerned with the level of
craft interaction among the Aegean, eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia at this time.
Deshayes highlights the variety of tool types in the Aegean and argues that they reflect
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Mellink (1963, 306) notes that regarding tool types, Egypt “behaves rather independently during most of
the Bronze Age.”
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