Pella: A Bronze Age hub unveiling ancient networks

Pella: A Bronze Age hub unveiling ancient networks

AMMAN — On the foothills of the East Bank is located the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BC) site Pella. Pella was a hub for trade with Egypt and Cyprus, Anatolia and Babylonia. Significant movements of populations throughout the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) were evidenced through funerary rituals and architecture.

Scholars specialised in the Bronze Age Levant speculated that the trade between different regions was organised through a network of smaller settlements and towns.

“Some researchers have asserted that within the general network, particular nodal sites were more critically important to the direction and regulation of trade-flow, deeming these sites ‘gateway communities’,” noted Chris Chantis from the University of Utah, adding that more specific to the MBA southern Levant was trade with Egypt.

When the Thirteenth Dynasty took over in Egypt, it adopted a more outward-facing stance which directly reflected on the commerce with southern Levant in general and Pella in particular.

Maritime trade along the Levantine coast with littoral ports as the essential nodes (the “port-power” model) is the assumed model, Nina Maaranen from The University of Sheffield said, adding that in the later Middle Bronze Age, when the Hyksos rose to power in the Nile Delta, more particular links between the central driver