urūnum signifies a metal-smelting furnace. Cognate with: Kur. ōrnā to be warm weather, be heated (e.g. iron, body with fever); ōrta'ānā to warm, heat. Malt. órtre to make red-hot; óthre to become red-hot (DEDR 1064)
Santali. Ta. uru (-pp-, -tt-) to burn, smart, be angry; uruppam, uruppu heat, anger; urumam heat (as of the sun, of the atmosphere), sultriness, noon; Ka. uri to burn, blaze, glow, burn with fever, rage, envy, burn or smart as a wound, as mouth from pepper; n. burning, flame, blaze, etc.; urika one who burns (tr.), a passionate, angry man; uripu, urisu to cause to burn, inflame; uruvala, uravala, ural, urlu fuel; uru, urapu, uripu, urupu, uruvu, urpu burning, flame; urugu passion, anger, wrath; ummaḷa heat; grief, trouble; ummaḷike heat; grief, distress; ummaḷisu to be hot; to grieve, be distressed. Koḍ. uri (-v-, -ñj-) burning sensation is felt; uri burning sensation. Tu. uri blaze, flame, heat, acute pain, wrath; uriyuni to burn, blaze, feel a burning sensation, be angry, envious, (belly) is hungry; urkilů prickly heat. Te. (K.) uriyu to burn (intr.), be afflicted, grieve; (K.) uralu to burn (intr.)? Br. hushing to set fire to, burn, scorch, make feverish, burn with rage; hushingingto be burnt, etc. Cf. 568 Ta. ukkaram, 661 Ta. uruku, and 1064 Kui ōpu, Kur. ōrnā. (DEDR 656) Ta. uruku (uruki-) to dissolve (intr.) with heat, melt, liquefy, be fused, become tender, melt (as the heart), be kind, glow with love, be emaciated; urukku (urukki-) to melt (tr.) with heat (as metals or congealed substances), dissolve, liquefy, fuse, soften (as feelings), reduce, emaciate (as the body), destroy; n. steel, anything melted, product of liquefaction; urukkam melting of heart, tenderness, compassion, love (as to a deity, friend, or child); urukkiṉam that which facilitates the fusion of metals (as borax). Ma. urukuka to melt, dissolve, be softened; urukkuka to melt (tr.); urukkam melting, anguish; urukku what is melted, fused metal, steel. Ko. uk steel. Ka. urku, ukku id. Koḍ. ur- (uri-) to melt (intr.); urïk- (urïki-) id. (tr.);ukkï steel. Te. ukku id. Go. (Mu.) urī-, (Ko.) uṛi- to be melted, dissolved; tr. (Mu.) urih-/urh- (Voc. 262). Konḍa (BB) rūg- to melt, dissolve. Kui ūra (ūri-) to be dissolved; pl. action ūrka (ūrki-); rūga (rūgi-) to be dissolved. Kuwi (Ṭ.) rūy- to be dissolved; (S.) rūkhnai to smelt; (Isr.) uku, (S.) ukku steel. Cf. 656 Ta. uru.(DEDR 661) Fusing metals: āˊvartayati ʻ causes to turn round ʼ RV. 2. āvártana -- n. ʻ turning round ʼ RV., ʻ stirring, melting of metals ʼ lex. 3. āˊvr̥tta -- ʻ stirred ʼ. [√
Sumerian. Nagga [AN.NA], Akk. Annaku was tin, an additive to copper to produce the alloy bronze (Sum. Zabar, Akk. Sipparu). urudu-luh-ha signified refined copper. urudu-sig5 signified refined copper. urudu, unrefined matte or black copper ingots were imported from Meluhha. "Benno Landsberger and other Assyriologists argued that by examining the structure of Sumerian names of occupations, as well as toponyms and hydronyms, one can suggest that there was once an earlier group of people in the region who spoke an entirely different language, often referred to as Proto-Euphratean. Terms for "farmer", "smith", "carpenter", and "date" (as in the fruit), also do not appear to have a Sumerian or Semitic origin...Proto-Euphratean is a hypothetical unclassified language or languages which was considered by some Assyriologists (for example Samuel Noah Kramer), to be the substratumlanguage of the people that introduced farming into Southern Iraq in the Early Ubaid period (5300-4700 BC)." Stone statue of Kurlil, Early Dynastic III, 2500 BC Tell Al-'Ubaid. The statue compares with the Mohenjo-daro and Mari priests.
I suggest that the expression urudu-luh-ha 'refined copper' is cognate with (and perhaps derived from) Proto-Indo-European (Meluhha) words rudhira, 'red' and loha 'copper, iron, any metal'. Similarly, the Sumerian word AN.NA, annaku, nagga, 'tin' are cognate with and derived from nāga नाग -गम् 1 Tin. -2 Lead; -जम् 1 red lead. -2tin; -जीवनम् tin; -नामकम् Tin.
रुद्र rudra रुद्र -सखः N. of Kubera; -रोदनम् gold; यत्सेवयाग्नेरिव रुद्ररोदनम् Bhāg. 8.24.48; रुधिर rudhira रुधिर a. [रुध्-किरच् Uṇ.1.5] Red, red-coloured. -रम् 1 Blood. -2 Saffron. -रः 1 The red colour.
lōha लोह a. 1 Red, reddish. -2 Made of copper, coppery. -3 Made of iron; भ्रमतश्च वराहस्य लोहस्य प्रमुखे समम् Mb.1. 135.23. -हः, -हम् 1 Copper. -2 Iron. -3 Steel. -4 Any metal; वस्तून्योषधयः स्नेहा रसलोहमृदो जलम् Bhāg.2. 6.24. -5 Gold; यथा सौम्यैकेन लोहमणिना Ch. Up.6.1.5. -6 Blood. -7 A weapon; अद्भ्यो$ग्निर्त्रह्मतः क्षत्रमश्मनो लोह- मुत्थितम् Ms.9.321.
"Sumer was first settled between 4500 and 4000 BCE by a non-Semitic people who did not speak the Sumerian language. These people now are called proto-Euphrateans or Ubaidians, for the village Al-ʿUbayd, where their remains were first discovered. The Ubaidians were the first civilizing force in Sumer, draining the marshes for agriculture, developing trade, and establishing industries, including weaving, leatherwork, metalwork, masonry, and pottery. After the Ubaidian immigration to Mesopotamia, various Semitic peoples infiltrated their territory, adding their cultures to the Ubaidian culture and creating a high pre-Sumerian civilization."
See: http://nautarch.tamu.edu/Theses/pdf-files/JonesM-MA2007.pdf Michael Rice Jones, 2007, Oxhide ingots, coper production, and the mediterranean trade in copper and other metals in the Bronze Age, Thsesis submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University, 418 pages. Abstract. "The production and trade in copper and bronze was one of the major features of the complex societies in the Near East and Mediterranean during the third to first millennia B.C. While finished metal objects are common finds from the period, ancient metal ingots and hoards of scrap metal, as well as archaeological evidence of metallurgical activities, are often more important sources of information for how ancient technology and trade functioned. Shipwrecks, particularly those found off the coast of Turkey at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya, as well as mining and smelting sites in the Mediterranean region, provide invaluable information on the production and trade of copper and tin, the main ingredients of bronze. In this thesis, I examine the evolution of the copper trade in the eastern and central Mediterranean, particularly during the Late Bronze Age, when ‘oxhide’ ingots were widely exported. Finds of oxhide ingots have increased dramatically in recent years, and no synthesis of all of this newly available evidence is currently available. I attempt to analyze this new evidence in relation to older finds and research, with a particular focus on the cargo of the Uluburun shipwreck, the largest collection of Bronze Age metal ingots from a single site in the Mediterranean. The history of oxhide ingot production is complex, but by the Late Bronze Age Cyprus was supplying much of the copper used to neighboring regions, with revolutionary effects on societies in Cyprus and elsewhere. The archaeological evidence shows that oxhide ingots are early examples of a standardized industrial product made for export by emerging state-level societies during the second millennium B.C. and fueled the development of international trade, metallurgical technology, and complex social institutions in a variety of Mediterranean societies from Egypt and the Levant, Greece, Cyprus, to Sardinia in the central Mediterranean."
“As a general rule it can be assumed that smelting, the initial refining of copper ore, took place at or close to the source area in order to obviate the high cost of transporting raw ore. On the other hand, the fact that cuneiform texts consistently distinguish refined (urudu-luh-ha) from unrefined copper (urudu strongly suggests that it was matte and not refined copper that was often imported into the country. Old Assyrian texts concerned with the import of copper from Anatolia distinguish urudu from urudu-sig5, the latter term appearing when written phonetically as dammuqum, ‘fine, good’ (CAD D:180, s.v. dummuqu), and this suggests that it is not just ‘fine quality’ but actually ‘refined’ copper that is in question. A comparable concern with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ingots appears in the Old Babylonian correspondence of the copper merchant Ea-nasir of Ur, probably the most well-known figure in the early second-millennium trade with Dilmun (Oppenheim, A.L., 1954, Ancient Mesopotamia, Chicago:100). It is only logical to assume that if ‘good’ ingots referred to already refined copper, these would have been more expensive to purchase than ‘bad’ or unrefined matte ingots. Moreover, the recognition that matte was being imported into Mesopotamia accounts for the otherwise inexplicable results of an analysis of a Neo-Assyrian ingot from Nimrud in the British Museum which was found to contain c. 15.5 per cent iron along with significant levels of antimony, bismuth, lead, silver and zinc. The team which undertook this analysis concluded, ‘It demonstrates that copper was being transported and traded in a raw and unrefined state rather than being refined at or near to the mines’ (Moorey, PRS, JE Curtis, DR Hook and MJ Hughes, 1988, ‘New analysis of old Babylonian metalwork from Tell Sifr’, Iraq 50: 39-48:47), but it seems more likely that a preliminary smelting resulting in the production of the ingot had taken place, for it was an ingot and not as ore that copper was sent to Nimrud. Moreover, the iron content of the Nimrud ingot is hardly surprising given the fact that iron-bearing sulphide ores are even more difficult to refine than ordinary sulphide ores (Muhly, J.D., 1973, Copper and tin: the distribution of mineral resources and the nature of the metals trade in the Bronze Age. [Trans. Connecticut Acad. of arts and sciences, 43.] New Haven, Conn.: Connecticut Acad. of arts and sciences Pp. 155–535:172). As part of the evidence for the distinction between refined and unrefined copper use in southern Mesopotamia derives from several ‘recipe’ texts which give instructions for the making of tin-bronze, it is best at this point to turn to the subject of tin. TIN. In antiquity tin (Sum. Nagga [AN.NA], Akk. Annaku) was important, not in its own right, but as an additive to copper in the production of the alloy bronze (Sum. Zabar, Akk. Sipparu) (Joannes, F., 1993-7, ‘Metalle und Metallurgie. A.I. In Mesopotamien’, in D.O. Edzard (ed.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie, 8, Berlin/New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 96-12:97-8). The exact proportions of tin required to make bronze were somewhat variable. In some cases, ancient recipes (see below) call for a ratio of tin to copper as high as 1:6 or 16.6 per cent, while other texts speak of a ratio 1:8 ratio or 12.5 per cent (Joannes, F., 1993-7, ‘Metalle und Metallurgie. A.I. In Mesopotamien’, in D.O. Edzard (ed.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archaologie, 8, Berlin/New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 96-12: 104). Muhly considers ‘the classic radio’ about 1:9 or 11.11 per cent, noting however that modern bronzes generally contain 10 per cent (and rarely exceed 15 per cent) tin. This is not to say that ancient objects have not been analysed which contain much less tin, but pieces with a tin content of, for example, 1-4 per cent were probably not intentional alloys so much as the result of the uncontrolled melting down of tin-bronze together with copper objects in order to cast new pieces. In cases where copper objects formed the bulk of the material being reused, and no extra tin was added, the smiths produced copper with a smattering of residual tin, rather than intentional, low-tin bronzes. Whether a little tin was considered better than no tin at all we do not know.In spite of new excavations and more analysis, it remains as true today as it did nearly twenty years ago that ‘there is little or no tin bronze’ in Western Asia before c. 3000 BCE (Muhly, JD,1977, The copper ox-hide ingots and the Bronze Age metals trade, in: Iraq 39: 73-82:76; cf. Muhly, JD, 1983, Kupfer B. Archaologisch. RIA 6: 348-64). The presence of at least four tin-bronzes in the Early Dynastic I period (for the date. See {prada. Hansen, Dunham and Babcock 1992: 110) Y-Cemetery at Kish signals the ffirst appearance of tin-bronze in southern Mesopotamia, although one of the pieces analysed contained only 6.24 per cent tin, and Muhly feels ‘this sporadic occurrence of bronze does not constitute a serious use of the new alloy’ since, as noted above, arsenical copper continued in use at sites like Tepe Gawra, Fara, Kheit Qasim and Ur (Muhly, JD, 1993, Copper and Tin: The Distribution of Mineral ... American Journal of Archaeology 97 :129) (Fig. VII.2).
"By the time of the Royal Cemetery at Ur (Early Dynastic IIIa), according to M. Muller-Karpe, ‘tin-bronze had become the dominant alloy’ (Michael Muller-Karpe, 1991, Aspects of early metallury in Mesopotamia, Basel,Boston, Birkhauser Verlag:111) in southern Mesopotamia. As evidence for this statement one can point to the fact that nine out of twelve objects analysed by Pernicka and Paszthry are tin-bronze eight with a tin content of 2-10 per cent and one with over 10 per cent. To these must be added two spearheads from PG 580 in the Royal Cemetery which have tin contents of 10.2 per cent tin and 11.3 per cent, a shaft-hole axe from PG 1751 with over 10.3 per cent tin and a dagger from PG 49 with 9.6 per cent tin, all of which were analysed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Mesopotamian Metals Project (Muhly 1993:129). Interestingly, some of these tin levels are in the range of the levels prescribed by later cuneiform texts which contain information on alloying (see below). On the other hand, as noted above, 42 per cent of the metal objects from the Royal Cemetery analysed by the Pennsylvania project were made of arsenical copper, suggesting that if tin-bronze was beginning to take the lead in southern Mesopotamian metallurgy, it was certainly not by much. Part of the difficulty of judging such figures, however, lies in the fact that we are only speaking in terms of percentages of objects analysed without an appreciation of the size of the entire sample. Moreover, as Muller-Karpe has suggested, it is quite possible that different sites will be found to show different proportions of tin-bronze and arsenical copper in their metal inventories. Thus, at Ur the analysis of metal vessels seems to show a greater tendency to use tin-bronze, whereas metal vessels from the slightly later Cemetery A at Kish (ED IIIb) were predominantly made of arsenical copper. The decision to make an object out of tin-bronze or arsenical copper may have been dependent not just on the availability of tin as opposed to arsenical copper, but on the particular type of object being manufactured. Cast objects from the Royal Cemetery, such as weapons and tools, seem to be made of arsenical copper more often than tin-bronze, whereas metal vessels (Muller-Karpe 1993a, 1993b) exhibit just the opposite pattern. This is a somewhat unexpected observation, however, since metal vessels are normally hammered and not cast. Hammered vessels ought to have been easier to manufacture in arsenical copper than in tin-bronze, whereas tools and weaponry ought to have been easier to cast in tin-bronze rather than arsenical copper. Muller-Karpe suggests that the relative scarcity of tin and the difficulty of obtaining it may have given it a high status, thereby making its use in the manufacture of elite metal vessels more desirable than arsenical copper. Certainly the high cost of tin is readily visible when we compare the equivalency charts showing the amounts of tin and copper procurable for one shekel of silver (Tables VII.1-3).
Finallly, it might have been possible to produce thinner sheet metal out of tin-bronze than arsenical copper and ‘thus lighter and more elegant vessels’ (Muller-Karpe 1991: 112). The sources of the tin used in southern Mesopotamia have been sought from Thailand in the east to Cornwall in the west. Most metallurgists believe that it was cassiterite (SnO2), which occurs as ‘bright black placer crystals’ (for a convenient overview, see Wertime 1978:2) in certain rare alluvial deposits, that was exploited in antiquity, and not stannite (Cu2FeSnS4) (e.g. Charles, J.A. (1979). "The development of the usage of tin and tin-bronze: some problems". In Franklin, A.D.; Olin, J.S.; Wertime, T.A. (eds.). The Search for Ancient Tin. Washington D.C.: A seminar organized by Theodore A. Wertime and held at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Bureau of Standards, Washington D.C. March 14–15, 1977. pp. 25–32:27, 29). Gudea of Lagash sayshe received tin from Meluhha, generally identified with the Indus Valley, and in the Old Babylonian period it was imported to Mari from Elam. Thus, in spite of recent claims for ancient tin mines in Turkey (e.g. Yener, KA, 1989, "Nigde-Çamardè'nda Kalay Buluntularè" IV. Arkeometri Sonuçlarè Toplantèsè (Ankara May 20-24 1988), 17-28. Ankara: General Directorate of Antiquities), the eastern origin of most of the tin used in southern Mesopotamia seems clear. We shall examine some recent work suggesting that tin reached Mesopotamia from Central Asian sources in Chapter XIII.” (Daniel T. Potts, 1997, Mesopotamian Civilization: the material foundations, A&C Black, pp.168-174).