Introduction
One of the most fascinating and vibrant facets of the Bronze Age—particularly during its latter half—was the expansion and intensification of cultural horizons. These international contacts resulted in an inevitable exchange in material and cultural concepts that measurably enriched the participating civilizations and significantly influenced the course of history.
For the societies ringing the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, contact was established primarily by sea. By the second part of the Bronze Age, the Mediterranean had been transformed from an impassable barrier into a superhighway by which cultures communicated. This new-found freedom primarily resulted from the ability to build vessels capable of standing up to the rigors of open-water travel and from the seafaring knowledge required to use them.
The study of seaborne exploration, trade, migrations, and colonization depends on understanding the nautical capabilities of the various nations. A knowledge of their ships and seafaring practices is a prerequisite for any understanding of the mechanisms and directions of Bronze Age cultural flows.
This raises numerous directions of inquiry. Why did these peoples go to sea? What types of ships did they build? How efficient were the ships and the seafaring practices of those times? And what insights into a culture can be gleaned from studying its ships and the manner in which it interacted with the sea?
Although innumerable studies have dealt with various aspects of Bronze Age ships and seafaring, there is no single monograph that covers the subject comprehensively. This book attempts to do so.
The Mediterranean Bronze Age encompasses the third and second millennia B.C. Yet in order to understand and to place several of the phenomena discussed below in their proper cultural perspective, it is at times imperative to go beyond these chronological restraints. One example of the need to allow for temporal latitude is the study of the phenomenon of bird-head stem and stern devices that appear on the Sea Peoples’ ships at Medinet Habu.1 These have little meaning if they are removed from a cultural continuum that still manifests itself today. Furthermore, the absolute chronology of Egypt, upon which all Near Eastern dating systems are primarily based, is itself problematic.2
I have divided the study into two parts. The first discusses seagoing ships of the cultures bordering the eastern Mediterranean, country by country. The order follows the trade routes of antiquity in a counterclockwise sweep of the eastern Mediterranean, beginning in Egypt. The second part deals with seven primary aspects of seafaring: ship construction, propulsion, anchors, navigation, sea trade, war and piracy, and laws pertaining specifically to conduct at sea.
When studying evidence for Bronze Age seafaring, one should keep in mind the limitations imposed by the material—and by the types of materials studied. It is well to ponder the Indian proverb relating what happened to a group of blind men, each of whom was commanded to describe the appearance of an elephant by touching only one part of the animal. Each blind man, depending on which part he had touched—trunk, leg, body, or tail—came away convinced that the elephant was most similar to a snake, a pillar, a wall, or a rope, respectively. There is an important lesson in this parable for those of us who would attempt to reconstruct the past, for we have much in common with those blind men. In a very real sense we may touch the past, but we cannot see it. Only by marshaling as many different aspects of the problem as are available to us—metaphorically “touching as many limbs of the elephant as possible”—can we reach conclusions that may approach past realities.
The following research tries to collect, describe, and—most importantly—make sense of a wealth of information. This “raw material” must be studied critically, however, as it can rarely be taken at face value and is often of an ambiguous nature. In most chapters the data are subdivided thematically, often followed by a discussion in which specific problems arising from the material are reviewed. The methodological approach I have chosen here is a synthesis based on four available sources of information.
TEXTUAL EVIDENCE. Contemporaneous written evidence dealing with nautical subjects is of varying intrinsic value to this study. Those texts that indicate the nationality, destination, and other information concerning seagoing ships are particularly valuable. Other texts discuss the construction and repair of vessels, but these are rare.
More common are documents that contain references to sea contacts between trading agents or colonies. A third form of textual evidence, of limited interpretational value, is perhaps best termed “miscellany.” These consist of personal names or linguistic terms that appear, seemingly out of place, on foreign shores. Although such documents are indicative of some form of sea contact, their interpretation remains open.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE. Underwater archaeology has made immense strides in the past three decades. The invention of SCUBA, together with the introduction of a proper methodology of underwater research and excavation, has opened up the seabed to serious archaeological exploration. Of particular importance are the actual remains of ships and their cargoes, retrieved from the sea floor. Two coherent wrecks in particular, at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, have yielded a wealth of information and are discussed in detail below.
The interpretation of wreck sites, however, is problematic. And one of the most difficult things to determine is a ship’s home port. What can be accepted as evidence for the ethnic identity of a ship remains a difficult question, particularly when personal objects of a variety of cultures are found on a single wreck, as at Uluburun. At present it is not possible to define the specific ethnic identity of any Bronze Age wreck with absolute certainty. As a result, the archaeological evidence of wrecks is explored in the various thematic chapters in the latter part of the book.
Few artifacts found in foreign archaeological contexts allow us to determine the nationality of the ships that transported them. Cargoes are generally useless in this regard: they indicate that trade had taken place but do not identify the carrier. On occasion, however, an artifact can actually indicate “beyond reasonable doubt” that a ship originating in a specific country brought it to a foreign shore. Because of the limitations of shipwreck archaeology described above, the archaeological evidence is limited to artifacts of this nature as discussed in the chapters dealing with the ships of the various cultures. As we shall see, these artifacts are exceptionally rare.
On a different level, stone anchors, found in large quantities on the eastern Mediterranean sea floor, are an important source of information for the study of ancient seafaring. These bear witness to trade routes and to seafaring practices. Dating and identifying anchors found out of archaeological context, however, remain problematic unless they can be linked to diagnostic anchor shapes found in firmly dated stratified land sites or on shipwrecks.
ICONOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE. Contemporaneous depictions of ships, their construction, and their uses are an invaluable third type of information, particularly for those elements of ships that will not normally be preserved in the archaeological record. Iconographic evidence presents numerous problems of interpretation, however.
Some depictions were created by master craftsmen working under strict artistic canons, while others were no more than simple graffiti or rough models fashioned by unskilled hands. In some depictions, scholars disagree even as to which end is the bow or the stern. When trying to interpret ships drawn by ancient artists, one sometimes feels compassion for the proverbial Martian who was given the task of reconstructing an earth-woman based on a collection of Picasso paintings retrieved by a scout mission.
In discussing the scenes of foreigners in the Theban tombs of Eighteenth Dynasty nobles, Norman de Garis Davies voices a warning that rings equally true for the study of ancient ship iconography:3
If the study of written documents and that of excavated objects have their special difficulties and limitations, the interpretation of pictured records, forming a third division of historical research, also offers scope for philological and archaeological knowledge, as well as wide experience and some psychological sense. We may ask then what measure of truth can be reached in this third field. . . .
It is all important, therefore, that an inquiry should be made into the reliability of these pictures, and it is as well to realize at the outset, to prevent disappointment, that modern standards of historical exactness will have to be imported by us into the study of these records. We shall not find them ready for us there. Hence the task cannot consist merely of collecting and arranging the items offered and then deducing the solution, as if by an operation in mathematics or chemical analysis.
In Magritte’s famous series of paintings (Les deux mystères, L’air et le chanson, and so on), he placed the following statement beneath the painting of a smoker’s pipe: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” When studying ship iconography we must keep in mind the same simple fact: an iconographic depiction is not the object itself.
In ship iconography, we see not ships but representations of ships “refracted” through the eyes, culture, schooling, mental attitudes, and skills of their creators. The result at times departs considerably from the prototype.4 There are a variety of reasons for this: the artist’s capability, familiarity with the prototype, sources of information, difficulties in translating the shape and details of the prototype into the chosen medium, and art canons, to name but a few.
Because of these considerations, we should not be surprised if we find that elements of a ship’s architecture have been telescoped, compressed, or otherwise exaggerated in a representation. Some details may be portrayed disproportionately small or be totally ignored.
It is basic common sense, therefore, to always turn first to the clearest and most detailed depiction of any given ship type, irrespective of its chronological standing relative to other ship renderings in the group. This aids considerably in deciphering other illustrations that are more difficult to interpret. Although each representation must be studied critically, when this is done we are often rewarded with valuable insights that cannot be derived from any of the other forms of available evidence.
ETHNOLOGICAL EVIDENCE. The ancients perceived their world in a manner that seems at times inexplicable to the modern mind. Because of this, modern ethnological comparisons are invaluable in helping us enter the conceptual world of the ancients when dealing with ships and seafaring practices. By studying the manner in which traditional ships are built and used today and in the recent past, we are offered possible solutions to seemingly enigmatic pieces of evidence. The ethnological materials are not treated as a separate subdivision of data but are instead incorporated directly into the context of the iconographic evidence or the discussions on seafaring practices.
The purpose for bringing ethnological parallels here is not to argue for a continuation of traditions in these cases. Instead, it is based on the consideration that the psyche of man, given the same problems and similar materials, will tend toward kindred solutions and expressions regardless of their location in space and time.