Haaretz Photo by Pavel Shargo: Unique flasks dating from the 11th and 9th centuries B.C.E., found at Tel Dor. Dor appears to have been within the territory of the tribe of Asher, though allocated to Menashe (Yehoshua 17:11; Shoftim 1:27). It was one of Shlomo's commissariat districts (Shoftim 1:27; 1 Melakhim 4:11).
The story begins with a series of unique flasks dating from the 11th and 9th centuries B.C.E., found at Tel Dor (Tantura) on the coast south of Haifa. These flasks were small, symmetrically decorated collection vessels with narrow openings with a capacity of about 50 milliliters (about three tablespoons). Their walls were thick, indicating that the liquid they held was precious: effort had been made to keep the vessels from breaking. They held wine or oil that seems to have served a ritual, medical or cosmetic purpose, to which various spices were added.
Dr. Ayelet Gilboa of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa: Namdar and her colleagues found that 10 of the flasks, which made up more than a third of the flasks we sampled from various sites, had traces of cinnamaldehyde. This molecule is naturally found in significant amounts only in the cinnamon plant, mainly in the bark. In ancient times, the cinnamon tree grew only in southern and southeast Asia. Dvory Namdar, the project’s chief chemist, never found any traces of cinnamon in any of the other ancient vessels she examined before. Like any other organic material, cinnamon bark breaks down almost completely, and the chance of finding it or other spices in an archaeological excavation is extremely slim. We were lucky that someone in Phoenicia apparently started a side business, adding spices such as cinnamon or perhaps also nutmeg (which grew only on the Banda Islands in Indonesia, and we may have found traces of it in the flasks as well) to valuable liquids such as wine or oil. That’s how we learned about the cinnamon trade. It’s also clear that the spices did not go from place to place in the trade networks that were developed and controlled by large political powers such as Assyria or Egypt, or Rome later on. Rather, it was conducted via connections and cooperation between small companies that transported the spices over thousands of kilometers from the east.
The cinnamaldehyde found inside the vessels is the first archaeological evidence of regular trade between the Levant and southeast Asia between the 11th and ninth centuries B.C.E.
