It was only with watercraft that ancient peoples could discover, explore, colonize, and supply the once uninhabited islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and it was mainly with watercraft that ancient peoples of the bordering African, Asian, and European coasts acquired the raw materials—especially metals and timber—that allowed the rise of Bronze Age civilizations in the Levant.
Of course there were overland caravans and inland caravan cities, but one can scarcely imagine huge cedar logs being hauled overland from Lebanon to the Nile valley or tons of copper and tin being carted from the East across Anatolia to Greece, even had there been a bridge over the Bosporus. It was on the waters of the Red Sea, not across desert and through jungle, that Egyptians sent expeditions to Punt to bring back the exotic goods of tropical Africa.
Maritime commerce turned the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean into a bustling, cosmopolitan entrepôt. Ships sailed from the harbors of Ugarit, Sidon, Tyre, Ashkelon, and Dor, transporting metals, ceramics, resins, and spices southward to Egypt and westward to the Aegean, some at least as far west as Sardinia. The role of Cyprus within this economic sphere has not yet been determined, but it must have been considerable.
The long-distance exchange of goods and ideas by sea was not always peaceful. We cannot imagine Mycenaean Greeks without the knowledge of writing and art they obtained by naval conquest from the Minoans of Crete. And Mycenaean troops did not march but sailed to Troy. Even the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean was marked by destruction wrought along the Syro-Canaanite coast and on Cyprus by raiding Sea Peoples.
Scholarly interest in the ships and boats of these events has not been lacking. But when I, as a young assistant professor, first offered a graduate seminar on ancient seafaring at the University of Pennsylvania in the middle 1960s, there were few general references to which my students and I could turn for the study of early Near Eastern and Aegean watercraft. M. G. A. Reisner’s Models of Ships and Boats (Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire) had appeared in 1913, and from the mid 1920s there were M. C. Boreux’s Études de nautique égyptienne and August Köster’s Das antike Seewesen and Schiffährt und Handelsverkehr des östlichen Mittlemeeres in 3. und 2. Jahrtausund v. Chr. For pre-Classical ships we read Spyridon Marinatos’s “La marine créto-mycénienne” in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique (1933) and G. Kirk’s “Ships on Geometric Vases,” in the Bulletin of the British School of Archaeology at Athens (1949).
More generally, we could consult a few pages each in R. and R. C. Anderson’s The Sailing Ship: Six Thousand Years of History (1963), James Hornell’s Water Transport: Origins and Early Evolution (1946), Björn Landström’s beautiful but speculative The Ship (1961), and the splendid but popular Illustrated History of Ships and Boats and The Ancient Mariners, both by Lionel Casson.
Mostly, however, we had to seek out depictions and ancient written records on our own, slowly building up a bibliography of several hundred titles, carrying heavy armloads of books from the library to the seminar room, each tome often containing but one relevant illustration of an Egyptian painting or relief or model. Working with such primary sources is essential, but we lacked handbooks like those that had proved so useful to me in learning the basics and bibliographies of subjects I had only recently studied—books like William Dinsmoor’s The Architecture of Ancient Greece, Gisela Richter’s The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, or the many comprehensive works on vase painting and coins.
Since that early and perhaps unique seminar on ancient seafaring, the study of ancient ships has expanded rapidly, largely because of the new field of nautical archaeology that reveals ancient ships themselves, both on land and underwater. Graduate programs in nautical archaeology are springing up around the world, with a growing number of undergraduate introductory courses on the history of ships being offered at various universities.
Publications have kept pace. Specialized periodicals, the English International Journal of Nautical Archaeology since 1972 and the French Archaeonautica since 1977, are now devoted solely to the archaeology of ships and harbors, with proceedings of conferences on those subjects published regularly from Australia to India to the Americas. Of special interest to scholars of the early Aegean are those entitled Tropis, published by the Institut Hellénique pour la Préservation de la Tradition Nautique. Small wonder that 75 percent of the nearly thousand references Shelley Wachsmann has listed in this book have appeared in the three decades since my first seminar.
For the Classical period, especially, there are now three outstanding reference works: Lionel Casson’s Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (1971), J. S. Morrison and R. T. Williams’s Greek Oared Ship: 900–300 B.C. (1968), and Lucien Basch’s Le musée imaginaire de la marine antique (1987). These touch on Bronze Age seafaring, as do Marie-Christine de Graeve’s The Ships of the Ancient Near East (c. 2000–500 B.C.) (1981) and J. Richard Steffy’s essential Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks (1994), but none is devoted specifically to it.
For those interested especially in the dawn of seafaring, a book that brings together the earliest writings about and portrayals of seagoing vessels—mixed prudently with ethnographic evidence—has been sorely needed.
When Dr. Wachsmann joined the faculty of the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University, he added a seminar on Near Eastern seafaring to those we already offered on pre-Classical, Classical, medieval, and post-medieval seafaring. We soon realized the overlap between his seminar in Near Eastern seafaring and mine in pre-Classical seafaring, for the Near East and Aegean were so closely tied by ships in the Bronze Age that one cannot study the maritime history of one area without studying that of the other. We combined our two classes into one covering the entire Levant—which encompasses the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean—after which some of our former students, we are told, commented that they especially liked the times when we disagreed, sometimes strongly (but always politely!) in the seminar room.
Now, at last, Dr. Wachsmann’s new book pulls together, in a most thought-provoking manner, all the major evidence about Bronze Age seafaring in the eastern Mediterranean. It is another major step toward the day when courses on ancient watercraft can be taught as regularly as are those on ancient architecture, sculpture, and painting. And how welcome that will be. After all, we cannot imagine the Bronze Age without the ships and boats that played such a critical role in its development and demise.
George F. Bass
Abell/Yamini Professor of Nautical Archaeology Texas A&M University