Bronze, the defining technological material of the era, required the combination of copper and tin — but good deposits of each were in completely different parts of the world.

Cyprus produced copper in enormous quantities.

Tin came from as far away as Afghanistan or possibly the British Isles.

Getting both materials to the craftsmen who worked them required a trade network of remarkable reach and efficiency.

The ship found in the Uluburun wreck off the coast of Turkey — a Late Bronze Age merchant vessel that sank around 1300 BCE — carried a cargo that illustrates this global reach: ten tons of Cypriot copper, one ton of tin, dozens of amphoras of Canaanite goods, Mycenaean pottery, Egyptian scarabs, African ebony, Baltic amber, Canaanite gold jewelry, and objects from at least seven different cultural regions.

This was international trade operating at a scale that most of the world would not see again for millennia.