Scientists have unexpectedly discovered on one of England's oldest ships traces of the Middle East supplying oil and petroleum products to its current European customers as early as the 7th century AD, according to an article published in PLoS One.
Archaeologists have been successfully using the methods of chemistry for several years to solve various archaeological and historical mysteries. For example, in 2012, British researchers managed to find out that Europeans started making cheese 7.5 thousand years ago, when their contemporaries from Africa just started drinking milk, and in 2014, they discovered the secret of the embalming compounds used by the ancient Egyptians to prepare mummies., and calculate the time of the appearance of this art.
Pauline Burger (Pauline Burger) from the British Museum in London (UK) and her colleagues completely unexpectedly found and solved yet another similar chemical riddle, pointing to unusually developed trading networks in Europe in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, studying one of the most famous ships of medieval England.
This ship, according to scientists today, never sailed - it is a "funeral boat" in which the ancient Anglo-Saxons buried their leaders and nobility. The mound and this vessel were found in the town of Sutton Hoo in 1939 in the east of England, which today have become a place of pilgrimage for lovers of archeology and culture of the Anglo-Saxons.
Thanks to long and almost unsuccessful excavations with a touch of detective and mysticism, humanity and England have acquired the first untouched tomb of this type in history with a huge amount of treasures. Some of them, for example, the golden ceremonial helmet and the funerary mask of the "captain" of this ship, became symbols of the Anglo-Saxons and can be seen on the covers of virtually any history textbook of that period.
One of the most unsightly "artifacts" found in the wreck of this ship were pots of black, half-frozen substance, which were displayed in a prominent place inside this tomb. Scientists originally thought that this "oil product" was used to seal the cracks in a land ship and that it was imported from somewhere in Sweden, which is why they called it "Stockholm tar".
A chemical analysis by Burger and her colleagues showed that this was not at all the case - this material was actually not tar, but real bitumen brought to England, judging by the ratio of isotopes and various types of hydrocarbons, from the Middle East. Its source, as indicated by the unusual proportion of asphalt compounds in this bitumen, was likely from the Dead Sea hydrocarbon deposits in Israel or Syria.
Why the ancient Anglo-Saxons needed bitumen, scientists do not yet know - in principle, it could be used to impregnate the ship's hull, and for a number of other purposes, including as fuel. His presence in the burial ground of one of the rulers of Suffolk in the "dark ages" suggests that he played an important role in the life of his tribe and was highly valued by the locals.
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The presence of Middle Eastern hydrocarbons on the coast of England in the 7th century suggests that even then there was a system of established trade relations that allowed the inhabitants of the future Britain to buy goods produced at the opposite end of Europe. Scientists hope that studying the chemistry of other artifacts from Sutton Hoo and other medieval corners of England and the continent will help to understand how this network originated and why it later disappeared.