Act 3: Fighting For Gods And Country: The Thirteenth Century Bc

Around 1300 BC, a ship sank off the southwestern coast of Turkey at Uluburun (roughly translated as “Grand Promontory”).

It was:

• sailing from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Aegean.
• discovered in 1982

It was excavated by George Bass at Cape Gelidonya.

He concluded that it was a Canaanite ship en route to the Aegean that had sunk in approximately 1200 BC.

Most archaeologists did not believe that:

• there was any trade and contact between the Aegean and the Near East that far back in antiquity.
• the Canaanites could not sail the Mediterranean

Bass swore to find another Bronze Age ship to prove that his conclusions about the Cape Gelidonya wreck were plausible.

This happened with the wreck at Uluburun, dated to 1300 BC, 100 years older than the Gelidonya ship.

THE ULUBURUN SHIP

Current thinking suggests that the Uluburun ship began its journey in Egypt or Canaan and made stops at Ugarit in northern Syria and possibly at a port on Cyprus. It then headed west into the Aegean, following the southern coastline of Anatolia (modern Turkey).

Along the way, the crew had taken on board raw glass, storage jars full of barley, resin, spices, and perhaps wine, and—most precious of all—nearly a ton of raw tin and ten tons of raw copper, which were to be mixed together to form that most wondrous of metals, bronze.

It was traveling westward from the Levant, apparently bound for a port city in the Aegean—perhaps one of the two or three on the Greek mainland that served the capital center of Mycenae, or maybe one of the other major cities, such as Pylos on the mainland or Kommos or even Knossos on Crete.

Three Bronze Age ships have now been found, but the wreck at Uluburun is the largest, wealthiest, and most completely excavated.

Perhaps the ship was sent by the Mycenaeans on a “shopping expedition” to the Eastern Mediterranean and sank on the return voyage. The merchants on board might have acquired the raw materials and other goods not available in Greece itself, such as the tin and copper, as well as the ton of terebinth resin (from pistachio trees) that could be used in the perfume manufactured at Pylos on mainland Greece and then shipped back to Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. There is obviously no shortage of possible scenarios. If the Mycenaeans were the intended recipients, then they might have been waiting impatiently for the cargo on the ship, for it contained enough raw metal to outfit an army of three hundred men with bronze swords, shields, helmets, and armor, in addition to precious ivory and other exotic items. Clearly, when the boat sank that day in approximately 1300 BC, someone or some kingdom lost a fortune.

The Uluburun ship sank in deep water, its stern is currently 140 feet below the surface.

The end result was a plan of the ancient wreck and its cargo that is as accurate, down to the millimeter, as any made at a land excavation, despite the great depths at which they were working.

The dives also resulted in the retrieval of thousands of objects, which are still being studied.

The boat itself was originally about fifty feet long. It was well constructed, with planks and keel made from Lebanese cedar and using a mortise-and-tenon design for the hull.4 Previously, the earliest-known wreck in the Mediterranean to use this mortiseand-tenon technique was the Kyrenia wreck found off the coast of Cyprus, dating more than a thousand years later, to about 300 BC. The copper ingots, of which there were more than 350, were especially difficult to excavate and bring to the surface. During the three thousand years that they had lain underwater, stacked herringbone fashion in four separate rows, many of them had significantly disintegrated and were now in an extremely fragile state. Eventually, a new type of glue had to be used by the archaeological conservators working on Bass’s team: an adhesive that could be injected into the remains of an ingot, and which would congeal and harden underwater over the course of a year. The glue would eventually bond together the disparate parts of a decomposed ingot well enough so that it could be hauled to the surface.

But there was far more on board the ship than just the copper ingots. It turned out that the cargo carried in the Uluburun ship consisted of an incredible assortment of goods, truly an international manifest. In all, products from at least seven different countries, states, and empires were on board the ship. In addition to its primary cargo of ten tons of Cypriot copper, one ton of tin, and a ton of terebinth resin, there were also two dozen ebony logs from Nubia; almost two hundred ingots of raw glass from Mesopotamia, most colored dark blue, but others of light blue, purple, and even a shade of honey/amber; about 140 Canaanite storage jars in two or three basic sizes, which contained the terebinth resin, remains of grapes, pomegranates, and figs, as well as spices like coriander and sumac; brand-new pottery from Cyprus and Canaan, including oil lamps, bowls, jugs, and jars; scarabs from Egypt and cylinder seals from elsewhere in the Near East; swords and daggers from Italy and Greece (some of which might have belonged to crew members or passengers), including one with an inlaid hilt of ebony and ivory; and even a stone scepter-mace from the Balkans. There was also gold jewelry, including pendants, and a gold chalice; duck-shaped ivory cosmetic containers; copper, bronze, and tin bowls and other vessels; twenty-four stone anchors; fourteen pieces of hippopotamus ivory and one elephant tusk; and a six-inch-tall statue of a Canaanite deity made of bronze overlaid with gold in places—which, if it was supposed to serve as the protective deity for the ship, didn’t do its job very well.5

The tin probably came from the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan, one of the few places where it was available during the second millennium BC. The lapis lazuli on board came from the same area, traveling thousands of miles overland before being brought onto the ship. Many of the pieces, such as the lapis lazuli cylinder seals, were tiny and easy to miss during the excavations, especially when the huge vacuum tubes were used to remove the sand that covered the remains. The fact that they were recovered at all is a testament to the skill of the underwater archaeologists excavating the wreck, led first by Bass and then by his chosen successor, Cemal Pulak.

One of the smallest objects found on board the ship was also one of the most important—an Egyptian scarab made of solid gold. Rare as such an object might be, it was made even more unusual by the hieroglyphs inscribed upon it, for they spelled out the name of Nefertiti, wife of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. Her name is written on the scarab as “Nefer-neferu-aten”; it is a spelling that Nefertiti used only during the first five years of her reign, at a time when her husband may have been at the height of his heretical condemnation of every Egyptian deity except Aten,

the disk of the sun, whom he—and he alone—was allowed to worship directly.6 The archaeologists used the scarab to help date the ship, for it could not have been made—and therefore the ship could not have sailed—before Nefertiti came to power about 1350 BC.

The ship was dated approximately 1300 BC.

It is older by more than 500 years than similar writing boards that had been found at Nimrud in Iraq.

A tablet found on the ship had its itinerary, or cargo manifest.

The ship contained a microcosm of the international trade and contacts that were ongoing in the Eastern Mediterranean, and across the Aegean, during the early thirteenth century BC.

It had goods from at least 7 different areas. There were also at least 2 Mycenaeans on board, even though this seems to have been a Canaanite ship.