Cities are places that connect things. Indeed, one of the chief virtues of life in cities is their ‘overwhelming communication advantage’, as urban geographer Peter J Taylor has remarked. Put simply, people in cities are better placed to tap into flows of materials and information, or to find the right associates to make complex tasks happen. This is equally true for the credit networks of Old Assyrian merchant colonies four millennia ago and the apprenticeship of watchmakers in 17th-century Geneva.
Today, this advantage is anchored in the material networks of railways, hyperways, and fibre-optic cables, but even the fortunes of Bronze Age cities relied heavily on their communication networks. Until recently, archaeologists often struggled to trace the details of urban connectivity in the past, but the steady development of scientific methods are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. As biomolecular and isotopic methods turn materials like animal bones or metal fittings into evidence that can be tightly identified and provenanced, so too shifting patterns of past communication are coming into view.
A material that is currently transforming our understanding of past social networks is glass. One of the most striking archaeological showrooms for early glass products is Tell el-Amarna, which was founded in 1346 BC in Middle Egypt as a new capital for the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten and his powerful consort Nefertiti. This city proved a mirage, though, rising and then being deserted in less than 20 years. During that time, the site enjoyed an abundance of ‘stone that flows’: the Egyptian moniker for glass. Glass inlays were a convenient decoration when palaces and temples had to be fashioned from mud-brick on a lightning schedule.
Egyptology: obelisks and ambitions