A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (5 page)

Directed in its first season by Bass and for ten subsequent seasons by Dr Cemal Pulak, the excavation was one of the most intensive ever carried out underwater. By the end, 22,413 dives had been logged, second only to the excavation of King Henry VIII's flagship the
Mary Rose
with 27,831 dives – but with the Uluburun wreck being four times deeper than the
Mary Rose
, at the limit of the safe depth for breathing compressed air. More so than at Cape Gelidonya, dive times were restricted by the risk of the ‘bends', and divers also had to contend with the narcosis – likened to alcohol intoxication – that comes from breathing nitrogen under pressure. The team worked from a camp built on the rocky shore beside the site and from INA's research vessel
Virazon
, with artefacts taken to the Bodrum museum for conservation and display. The scientific rigour of the recording underwater, in which the positions of all artefacts were mapped by triangulation before being moved, has been matched by the scholarship on the finds in the years since, with many specialist reports having been published and the wreck being among the most frequently discussed and debated of all Bronze Age sites in the Mediterranean.

The ship is estimated to have been 15–16 metres long from the size of the wreck deposit; the surviving wood fragments showed that it had been built shell-first with mortice-and-tenon joinery similar to later ships of the classical period in the Mediterranean. The planks and keel were of cedar of Lebanon, a tree indigenous to Cyprus, southern Turkey and Lebanon, and famous from references in the earliest literature of the Near East – in the
Epic of Gilgamesh
the hero Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu go to the ‘cedar forest' to cut down the trees and kill its guardian, and in the Old Testament Solomon uses cedar of Lebanon to build the Temple at Jerusalem, acquiring the wood from the king of Tyre near the present-day border with Israel (1 Kings 5:6).

Laid on a dunnage of twigs were a staggering 354 copper oxhide ingots and 151 copper ingots of other shapes, amounting to about 10 tons of copper altogether, and about a ton of tin ingots – the correct ratio to make about 11 tons of bronze, more than ten times the weight
of the Cape Gelidonya cargo. Lead-isotope analysis shows that most or all of the copper came from Cyprus, but as we shall see, the tin may have come from a much more distant source. Of the other cargo, three of the pottery pithoi had been packed with more than 130 items of Cypriot fineware, including bowls, jugs and lamps, perhaps picked up in a port in Cyprus at the same time as the ingots. There were also at least 149 amphoras – two-handled transport jars – of Canaanite shape, the earliest examples in a wreck of the ubiquitous transport container of the ancient Mediterranean. Many of them were filled with resin from
Pistacia terebinthus
, another tree mentioned in the Bible and well known for the aromatic quality of its resin – the fourth-century
BC
philosopher Theophrastus in his
Enquiry into Plants
judged it the best resin, for ‘it is the most fragrant, and has the most delicate smell'. The clay used in the Uluburun jars has been sourced to the area of southern Lebanon or northern Israel; amphoras of this general shape are seen in a fourteenth-century
BC
depiction in the Tomb of
Ḳ
en-Amūn in Thebes showing the arrival of a Syrian ship, and analysis of resin found in sherds of Canaanite jars from Amarna shows that it was terebinth identical to that from the wreck.

The association with Amarna is seen in two other cargo commodities, both unique finds for this period, and the earliest examples known. Almost 200 circular glass ingots, many of them a deep cobalt-blue, have been shown by chemical analysis published in 2022 to be of Egyptian origin and are probably from Amarna. Glass beads of Mycenaean manufacture found on the wreck – probably the belongings of a passenger – have the same chemical signature, meaning that the ship was carrying not only raw glass from its source but also items manufactured from an earlier shipment. Perhaps the most extraordinary cargo find was a segment of an elephant tusk and thirteen hippopotamus teeth, the source of ivory used for carvings. Indian elephants roamed the Near East in the Bronze Age – the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III hunted elephants for ivory in North Syria – and the discovery in Israel of skeletons of hippopotamuses of Iron Age date suggest that they may have been present in swampy areas in the Bronze Age as well. Elephant tusks were also imported into Egypt from Nubia, in present-day Sudan, and a land called ‘Punt', a fabled kingdom in the area of Ethiopia that was probably the location of Aksum in the Roman period and a conduit for goods brought from equatorial Africa, including ivory and gold. The discovery of logs of
African ebony in the wreck provides further evidence of goods transhipped through Egypt from the south, and the mention of both glass and ivory in the Amarna letters shows that they were part of royal exchanges involving the pharaoh and other rulers in the Near East.

The astonishing diversity of finds reflects the origins of the ship and those on board: from Syria-Palestine, pottery, mercantile equipment, musical instruments and goldwork; from Mesopotamia, decorated cylinder seals; from Mycenaean Greece, swords, spears, pottery and personal embellishments; and from Egypt, as we shall see, a gold scarab with hieroglyphics that secures a date for the wreck in the final quarter of the fourteenth century
BC
, at the very apex of Bronze Age civilisation. The discovery that convinced George Bass that they were dealing with something more than a travelling metal merchant came in the first weeks of the excavation – a magnificent gold chalice, the greatest treasure ever found in a wreck in the Mediterranean and the weightiest item of gold to be discovered from antiquity since the opening of the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

And upon his head he set his helmet with two horns and with bosses four, with horsehair crest, and terribly did the plume nod from above. And he took two mighty spears, tipped with bronze; keen they were, and far from him into heaven shone the bronze; and thereat Athene and Hera thundered, doing honour to the king of Mycenae, rich in gold.

This passage from Homer's
Iliad
is the first literary reference to Mycenae, the citadel of King Agamemnon in Greece. The
Iliad
describes how Agamemnon led an alliance of Greek city-states against Troy after Helen had been abducted by the Trojan prince Paris from her husband Menelaus of Sparta. Scholars have long debated the historical veracity of the Trojan War, but many agree that the
Iliad
represents a centuries-old oral tradition and a memory of events that took place in the Late Bronze Age. It was this belief that led Heinrich Schliemann in 1873 to the site in north-west Turkey that he identified as Troy, and in 1876 to the ruins of Mycenae at the head of the Argolid plain. With his Greek wife Sophia working tirelessly to excavate many of the artefacts, he identified a burial with a gold mask that led him to telegram the Greek press that it ‘very much resembles the image which my imagination formed long ago of wide-ruling Agamemnon'.
In fact, the mask on the body was not the one that is famous today as the Mask of Agamemnon – that was found close by, in a different shaft grave – and the burials probably dated to the sixteenth century
BC
, too early for the Trojan War. But in a sense Schliemann was right – to a poet in the eighth century
BC
that mask might have been everything they had imagined of Agamemnon, and Homer might have shared Schliemann's excitement had he seen it. Today, standing in front of the famous Lion Gate of Mycenae and its Cyclopean masonry – so-named by the later Greeks because they believed it could only have been built by giants, the one-eyed Cyclopes of legend – it is easy to see how this was a place that brought alive for Schliemann and his contemporaries the world so powerfully evoked in the epithets for Mycenae as ‘well-founded' and ‘rich in gold' in the
Iliad
.

Mycenae was at its peak at the time of the Uluburun wreck, a military stronghold and city of perhaps 30,000 people that dominated mainland Greece and the islands of the Aegean. Much of what is so impressive at the site of Mycenae, including the Cyclopean walls, the Lion Gate and the palace on top of the hill, had just been built – meaning that those on the ship, had it arrived, could have stood before the Lion Gate and seen it much as we do today. Other citadels were built at this time, including the ‘Palace of Nestor' at Pylos, named for another king mentioned in the
Iliad
, and on the Acropolis in Athens, a relatively minor player at this period but with a huge history ahead of it. The Mycenaeans had taken over the palaces of Minoan Crete in the mid-fifteenth century
BC
and had outposts in the east and the west Mediterranean. The Uluburun cargo could have been destined for one of a number of strongholds in the Aegean region, but the greatest likelihood is that it was Mycenae itself. Mycenaean society was run by a warrior elite, and Mycenae was a paramount fortress from which power emanated over satellites and allies. Military strength was based on the control of bronze and the weapons that could be made from it, and from that point of view a cargo as valuable as the Uluburun ingots – and as dangerous in the hands of a competitor or enemy – would be unlikely to have been destined anywhere other than the centre of power, for a King Agamemnon of the late fourteenth century
BC
.

The artefacts of Mycenaean origin from the wreck are of great interest for revealing the connection to that world, for the dating evidence provided by the pottery and for the possibility that they reflect individuals on board. The pottery includes a beautiful ‘kylix' and
several different sizes of stirrup jar, the former a two-handled cup on a stemmed base and the latter a distinctively Mycenaean shape with an offset spout and small handles that connect in the shape of a stirrup, used for olive oil. A similar kylix was found in Ugarit in the cemetery of Minet el-Beida beside the harbour, showing the esteem in which these vessels were held and suggesting that they were brought to Ugarit as cargo; the same is probably true of the stirrup jars, which may have been manufactured in Crete and filled with a high-quality oil. The presence of these items on a ship heading back towards the Aegean suggests that they were for shipboard use or the belongings of crew or passengers, after having been picked up on a previous voyage from Greece.

The other Mycenaean artefacts were probably the belongings of two individuals, each armed with a sword and spears and with elaborate pectorals and dress. They have been interpreted as emissaries of a Mycenaean king but are perhaps best seen as guards, stationed at Ugarit to accompany ships back to Greece or on board through the entire voyage; such a valuable cargo would have merited protection, and the presence of Mycenaean warriors with their weapons and finery would have sent out a strong message. These two sets of equipment, if correctly interpreted as such, may be the closest we can come to seeing particular individuals on the ship other than the merchant – the artefacts are similar in that respect to those found in a warrior grave, but instead of being intended for the afterlife they would have been in use up to the moment of shipwreck.

One of the other great treasures found at Mycenae by Sophia and Heinrich Schliemann was the ‘Cup of Nestor', an elaborate gold goblet with birds perched on the handles as if drinking from the cup. To Schliemann, immersed in Homer, this evoked a reference in the
Iliad
to the cup of King Nestor of Pylos: ‘A beauteous cup, that the old man had brought from home, studded with bosses of gold; four were the handles thereof, and about each two doves were feeding.' Whereas this cup is of Mycenaean manufacture, the Uluburun gold chalice may have its closest parallels among cups made of stone and faience – a form of glass – from the Near East and Egypt. Gold cups were a very visible form of wealth display, in a society where feasting was an important part of elite interaction and gold cups could be given as royal gifts; one of the Amarna letters lists a gold goblet among gifts to
the pharaoh from the king of Mitanni, who also sent slaves and horses and chariots.

Fascinatingly, a similar use of gold cups is seen in another of the wrecks in this book over two thousand years later at Belitung off Indonesia, where a gold cup was also discovered, and Chinese records show that they were used as gifts in diplomacy and trade. An alternative explanation for the Uluburun cup is that it was the belonging of the merchant rather than an item of trade or royal gift-exchange, to be used by him in his own participation in wealth display and feasting as a way of facilitating transactions. Its simplicity of design without any decoration might count against it being a royal gift – it was perhaps meant to impress by the sheer weight of the gold alone. Some of the other prestige items in the wreck may be seen in this light, as items to impress and entertain, but that might also be given as gifts, by a merchant who may also have been an agent for a king – projecting royal wealth and power as well as his own.

The clearest evidence for a merchant on board was 19 zoomorphic and 120 geometric-shaped balance-pan weights, conforming to a Near Eastern weight standard like those from Cape Gelidonya and the earliest example of a seaborne merchant's equipment that we shall see virtually unchanged in the wreck of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
three thousand years later. Several of the other high-value objects could have been the belongings of the merchant but are open to other interpretations. A gold-foil clad bronze figurine of a naked goddess of Canaanite type could have been a protective deity; another image of a naked female goddess was found on a gold pendant, holding a gazelle in each hand. Three other pendants are decorated with a four-pointed star that may have been a Canaanite version of the Mesopotamian ‘Star of Ishtar' or ‘Star of Inanna' or a sun symbol, of particular interest at a time when the pharaoh Akhenaten had attempted to replace traditional Egyptian religion with worship of the Aten and his own distinctive sun symbol had been ubiquitous in Egypt. A similar pendant is seen hanging round the neck of a Syrian in a painting from the fifteenth century
BC
tomb of Puyemrê in Egypt. Two items from Mesopotamia that might seem obvious mercantile equipment – small rock-cut cylinder seals, rolled over a clay or wax surface to leave an imprint – were probably on board for trade or as gifts. One of them, an Old Babylonian seal from the eighteenth century
BC
, making it the oldest artefact on the wreck, had originally shown a bearded and kilted
king facing a goddess, but had been recut in the fourteenth century
BC
with a fearsome griffin-demon. Like Egyptian scarabs, Near Eastern seals are recorded on clay tablets as gifts, desirable for their exquisite engravings and perhaps also as amulets to avert evil or bad luck.