DIY Basalt
| Meshkan-shapir | 32 29 14.78N 45 14 19.77E | There is nothing to see apart from the possible outline of walls. The site was bisected by ancient canals. |
Ancient technologists were able - just - to heat things up to a temperature of 1200°C. As iron ore melts at around 1500°C, this fact explains why the Bronze Age remained that for so long: the industrialists of the day simply couldn't get things hot enough to smelt iron.
It now appears, however, that they could smelt other things. Archaeologists excavating the Mesopotamian city of Meshkan-shapir, about eighty miles south of Baghdad, have found a 4,000 year old temple that appears to be made of black basalt. As a building material, black basalt is not at all unusual in the Middle East: large swathes of the desert between the Euphrates and Palestine is covered with a layer of black basalt rocks, the remnants of ancient volcanic eruptions. No doubt it would have been possible for some enterprising individual to lead a train of camels out into the desert and bring back as much black basalt as anyone could want.
Unfortunately, owing to processes of erosion since the basalt was laid down, the stones have weathered into nice rounded shapes, similar to the sort of bread loaves that your baker makes when he doesn't confine the dough in a tin but merely places a lump of dough on a tray and sticks it in the oven. While aesthetically pleasing - no doubt that Tate Gallery would pay vast sums of money for someone to arrange piles of these stones, make a nice change from bricks - such shapes are somewhat less than satisfactory as building material. The rounded tops would make for a very unstable wall.
Of course, you may say, you simply take these rounded blocks of stone and chisel them into square or rectangular shapes, the Egyptians did it all the time. This is undoubtedly true, but there are a number of problems with this suggestion. In the first place, basalt is a very hard stone and bronze tools blunt very easily. It is hard to think of anyone making this their material of choice for building anything. Secondly, 4,000 years ago the Egyptians were just coming to terms with stone working themselves; would they have had time to export the technology?
Finally, when they came to take a closer look at the blocks of stone that made up the temple, the archaeologists were unable to discern any marks of tooling. It appeared to them that the builders had just gone out into the desert and picked up nice, large, flat slabs of basalt and used them. As Elizabeth Stone, of the State University of New York in Stony Brook, says, "It's an improbable natural process that would leave large flat rocks of basalt."
The archaeologists, therefore, have come up with an alternative theory. They suggest that the builders made their own rock by forming river silt into blocks and heating it to 1200°C. The artificial rock formed by this method was as hard and as dense as basalt. Thanks to the abundant supplies of oil available in Mesopotamia, the suggestion isn't as off the wall as might at first appear, but I must admit that even so I found myself raising an eyebrow or two. I would like to find the furnaces and the shattered crucibles and moulds before committing myself 100% to this explanation.
The basic problem, it seems to me, is Elizabeth Stone's objection: basalt laid down several million years ago will certainly be well weathered by the time of the Bronze Age, but who says that basalt in the desert is millions of years old? Why could not the Bronze Age builders have wandered out into the desert and found blocks of basalt, possibly even still warm to the touch, cracked into nice, large, flat slabs, and brought them back to use in building their temple?
Geologists will appeal to signs of erosion and weathering as evidence for a great age, but that is to forget the lessons of Surtsey, the volcanic island off the coast of Iceland that rose up from the ocean floor back in the 1960s. Visiting geologists were astounded to find sea cliffs at whose feet lay rounded basalt boulders, exactly as you would expect to find in an ancient landscape several thousands of years old - yet they knew that the whole thing was only a month or two old.
In short, I think we have to say that the jury is still out on this one.
