Rachael Sparks
Curator, Petrie Palestinian Collection, University College London
The Middle Bronze Age was a period in which relations between Palestine and Egypt intensified, with the development of trade routes in a variety of essential and luxury goods helping to forge economic and cultural links between the two regions. One aspect of this trade was the importation of Egyptian stone vessels, used as containers for a variety of luxury oils and cosmetic preparations. The success of these products appears to have stimulated the development of an imitative industry that made use of local resources to offer an alternative range of goods to Canaanite consumers.
This industry was centred on the Jordan valley, where at least three different workshops appear to have been in operation. Absorption of the region into the Egyptian empire may have encouraged these workshops to expand, as manufacturers took advantage of improved local communication networks to distribute their goods more widely. Existing alongside the imports, Palestinian gypsum vessels were influenced by changing foreign fashions in cosmetic equipment, yet showed no appreciable technological changes to suggest control of the industry was ever taken over by the Egyptian administration. This probably explains why gypsum vessel production continued even after the Egyptians were forced to withdraw from the region at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
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