Glossary Metals, materials and technology
Oxhide ingot
A flat copper slab with four projecting handles, weighing about 24–30 kg: the standard form in which Late Bronze Age Cyprus exported copper.
The name comes from a supposed likeness to a stretched animal hide. The corner projections served as carrying handles. Oxhide ingots were cast in a single pour into an open mould, which leaves one face rough and pitted. Their weight is close to a talent in the weight systems of the period, although it varies too much for the ingots to have served as money. Many carry marks, some of them Cypro-Minoan signs.
Lead isotope analysis links essentially all oxhide ingots dated after about 1400 BCE, from Crete, Sardinia, Anatolia and shipwrecks, to Cypriot copper from the Apliki area. The Uluburun wreck of about 1300 BCE carried some ten tons of copper, mostly in this form. The earliest oxhide ingots, from Crete, are not Cypriot. See copper metallurgy.
Full entry: Copper Metallurgy in Ancient Cyprus
Related terms
- Ore
Rock containing enough metal to be worth mining and smelting; Cypriot copper ore is mostly chalcopyrite, a copper-iron sulphide.
- Uluburun shipwreck
A merchant ship wrecked off southern Turkey at the very end of the fourteenth century BCE, carrying about ten tons of Cypriot copper.
- Alashiya
A copper-rich Late Bronze Age kingdom named in Near Eastern texts and widely identified with all or part of Cyprus.
- Amarna letters
Diplomatic letters on clay tablets, mostly in Akkadian cuneiform, found at Akhenaten's capital of el-Amarna in Egypt and dating to the mid-fourteenth century BCE.
Where it appears
- Village Life in Late Bronze Age Cyprus
- Hittite Empire and Cyprus
- The Minoans
- Climate and Landscape in Ancient Cyprus
- Egypt
- Gold, Silver, Tin, Arsenic and Iron in Ancient Cyprus
- Late Bronze Age Cyprus
- Red Polished Zoomorphic Vessels and Animal Figurines
- Seafaring and Ships in Ancient Cyprus
- The Mycenaeans and Cyprus
- Ugarit and the Levant