The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (16 page)

Nor did the Cretans exercise hegemony anywhere else in the Mediterranean, where their sailors constituted just one of many groups of traders. At the height of their power and influence, the Minoans traded north to the Aegean islands, west to the Greek mainland, Sicily, and
Sardinia, east to Cyprus, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and south to Libya and Egypt. Egyptians of Sneferu’s time acquired Cretan pottery through trade with Minoan merchants, through middlemen, or both. Tablets in the eighteenth-century
BCE
archives at Mari
refer to merchants from Crete and
Caria (in western Asia Minor) receiving a shipment of tin with the help of an interpreter from
Ugarit, and Babylonian cylinder seals of the same period have been found in Crete, which they probably reached by way of Mari, Ugarit, and Cyprus. By this time, Minoan material culture was reaching its climax, with beautiful and complex palaces, villas, and towns at
Knossos, Phaistos, and more than twenty other sites. Whether these were all subject to a single Cretan overlord is difficult to say. For some, the absence of city walls suggests that the people of Minoan Crete relied on their fleets for security from foreign invaders. Yet in a period when there is no evidence of any seafaring power capable of launching an overseas invasion against such a remote target as Crete, the sea would have been barrier enough even without a fleet.

Archaeological remains and written evidence of Minoan civilization reveal little about Minoan-era ships. The best source of information is a set of
wall paintings excavated in the town of Akrotiri on the Cycladic island of
Thera, about seventy miles north of Crete. In 1628
BCE
, the island was destroyed by a volcanic eruption that seismologists estimate to be one of the largest of the past ten thousand years, and much of Akrotiri was preserved beneath layers of pumice and ash up to twenty-five meters deep. Unlike the citizens of the better known
Pompeii, in southern
Italy, who were smothered in the ash of Mount Vesuvius in 79 ce, the people of Akrotiri had ample warning of volcanic activity and the thirty buildings excavated thus far have yielded no human remains and very few personal belongings, indicating that the inhabitants fled the island before the eruption.

A second-story room in a building known as the West House includes two beautifully executed wall paintings. One shows a procession of seven large and four smaller vessels apparently involved in a cult festival sailing from one town to another where crowds of people are assembled. The ships have long, graceful hulls with elongated bows that rise from the water at almost a forty-five-degree angle and terminate at a point higher than the ships’ masts. The sailing ships carry a single mast amidships, and one is shown with a square sail set between a yard and a boom; all are steered by a pair of
quarter rudders attached to the stern quarters of the hull. In the most lavishly decorated processional ship, eight people sit beneath a canopy and garlands run from the bow and over the masthead to the stern. This and a number of the other vessels have lowered sails. The second painting, poorly preserved, shows similar vessels under oars and with a spearman standing forward, coursing through a sea surrounded by naked corpses. Not surprisingly, some have interpreted this as a battle scene, perhaps showing the repulse of an attack on the otherwise unsuspecting islanders, many of whom are shown going about their normal
pursuits in the background. Others see here a fertility rite involving human sacrifice as part of a reenactment of the death by drowning of an agricultural deity performed to ensure the growing season, a reading supported by comparisons with other aspects of Minoan life.

The decline of Minoan civilization was once linked directly to the explosion of Thera, but Minoan society survived another two centuries. When the end came, it was at the hands of the
Mycenaeans, to whom the Minoans had introduced writing and a host of other cultural refinements. The Mycenaeans take their name from the Peloponnesian city of Mycenae, celebrated by
Homer as the home of
Agamemnon, leader of the Greek armies that invested
Troy in northwest Turkey for ten years. Both Mycenae and Troy were long thought to be products of the Homeric imagination until
Heinrich Schliemann excavated the sites in the nineteenth century. Although he identified the rich cache of ornaments and weapons he found at Mycenae as belonging to Agamemnon, these date to the fifteenth century
BCE
, around the start of the Mycenaeans’ occupation of Minoan Knossos but three centuries before the date traditionally assigned to the
Trojan War (1183
BCE
). The Mycenaeans established a trading network that encompassed the Aegean, coastal Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt and that would survive until the period of destruction and decline associated with the
Sea People in the twelfth century
BCE
. Regional trade and exchange declined precipitously in the ensuing dark age, but the long-distance connections established and maintained by the Minoans and Mycenaeans, among others, survived in an attenuated form until their revival in the eighth century
BCE
.

Although Mycenaean images are often crude compared with those of their Minoan predecessors, the pictorial record of their ships is extensive. Confirming the Mycenaeans’ reputation for belligerence, many decorated vases depict oared galleys with armed soldiers on an upper deck. These galleys are also rigged with a single mast setting a square sail, but rowers and sails are not generally shown in the same illustration, because the two means of propulsion were rarely used at the same time. Mycenaean hulls are generally more elongated than crescent-shaped, and their sails are loose-footed, unlike those depicted at Akrotiri. Despite the Mycenaeans’ preference for celebrating their martial prowess, the archaeological record draws our attention to more peaceful pursuits at sea.

Two impressive underwater wrecks reveal a great deal about the richness and variety of the sea trade of the Mycenaeans and their Levantine contemporaries. Dated to about 1315
BCE
, the
Uluburun site is the most spectacular
Bronze Age shipwreck found thus far—though more celebrated for the cargo rather than for the light it sheds on ancient shipbuilding. A portion of the vessel was preserved beneath the cargo—part of the keel, edge-joined
planking, and fragments of a wicker bulwark—but not enough to determine the ship’s dimensions. The site was identified in the 1980s by a Turkish sponge diver who came across a heap of copper ingots lying at a depth of more than forty meters off the promontory of Uluburun, near the town of Kas˛. The ship probably carried around fifteen tons of freight, along with stone ballast and twenty-four stone
anchors weighing a total of four tons. The bulk of the surviving cargo consisted of about ten tons of Cypriot copper ingots and a ton of tin. This discovery more than doubled the number of Bronze Age copper ingots previously found in the Near East, and it is about thirty times the quantity of copper mentioned in the earliest known order for Cypriot copper from four centuries before the ship sank. Other items include objects of Mycenaean and Cypriot manufacture, but most were of Near Eastern origin: an ivory writing tablet, a gold chalice, a faience drinking cup in the shape of a ram’s head, and many pieces of jewelry. Unfinished goods included glass ingots (most of them cobalt-colored and probably from the Levant), ebony and cedar logs, unfinished hippopotamus horn and elephant ivory, ostrich eggs, amber from the Baltic, and amphorae containing the ingredients for incense and pigments. The provenance of the ship’s equipment and the
personal possessions of the sailors and merchants—tools, weapons, balance-pan weights, and cylinder seals—suggests that the ship was bound from the Levant for
Crete or the Greek mainland.

About a century later, another small merchantman sank east of Uluburun off Cape Gelidonya, a place of strong, unpredictable currents that swirl through jagged, half-submerged rocks and that was described in antiquity as “
fraught with disaster for passing vessels.” Discovered in the 1950s, the
Cape Gelidonya ship was the first excavated by adapting land-based archaeological techniques to an underwater site, a major advance in the investigation of submerged sites. Without a disciplined and orderly approach to the identification and removal of the remains of ships and their cargoes, divers inevitably overlook, lose, or destroy outright clues vital to a more complete understanding of the nature and conduct of maritime culture, trade, and warfare. Little of the Cape Gelidonya hull survived, but the ship likely measured between eight and ten meters long. The cargo consisted of at least a ton of unworked bronze and tin, along with bronze farm tools, weapons, and household objects. Most of these were broken and may have been scrap pieces en route to being recycled—the site also yielded a variety of metalworking tools.
Amulets, balance-pan weights, and a finely carved hematite cylinder seal are among the items that likely belonged to the ship’s merchant-owner. Like the Uluburun ship, the vessel was most likely sailing along the Anatolian coast en route to the Aegean. Its last port of call may have been on Cyprus, about 150 miles southeast, a major center for ancient bronze production and distribution.

The volume and diversity of the goods associated with the Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya ships make it unlikely that either was destined for one particular port or merchant, although it is possible that at least some of the prestige goods in the Uluburun ship were en route from one ruler to another, either as tribute or as part of a commercial venture. While there are many ancient references to shipments made and received on the basis of firm orders, as in the case of the cedar for Egyptian pharaohs, these ships should probably be seen as floating markets, tramping from port to port.

The loss of the Cape Gelidonya ships took place around the start of the Greek Dark Ages, a period of wrenching transformation throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptians blamed this upheaval on invaders they called the Sea People, a mix of tribes and other groups of uncertain origin who swept across the region in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries
BCE
fleeing before an overland migration of people equipped with iron tools and weapons moving southward from the
Balkans and Black Sea region. By the time their force was spent, the political landscape of the eastern Mediterranean world had changed irrevocably. In Greece, Pylos and
Mycenae were sacked and the ranks of the Sea People may have been swelled by Mycenaeans fleeing before them or following in their wake. The landlocked
Hittite Empire of Anatolia was overthrown and countless smaller states were crippled by famine or civil war. Of the region’s major powers, only Egypt remained, although the pharaoh’s power no longer reached into
Canaan and Syria, and his influence over Levantine ports was dramatically less than it had been.

The only contemporary sources of information about the origins of the Sea People are Egyptian, which name a total of nine distinct “countries” or groups of people. The first record of them appears in an account of an Egyptian defeat, around 1218
BCE
, of a Libyan invasion supported by
“northerners coming from all lands” and “the countries of the sea,” five of which have been identified with areas in southwest Anatolia, the Aegean, and mainland Greece. Forty years later,
Ramesses III stopped an invasion from the northeast involving some of the same people. Thanks to an account of the latter contest from a temple in
Medinet Habu (Thebes), the Sea People have received the lion’s share of the credit for the onset of the dark age that engulfed the region until the eighth century, but their migration was likely a symptom as much as a cause of the period’s widespread economic, political, and demographic disorder.

The broader regional consequences of this upheaval are easy to gauge from the record of imperial survival and collapse, but a more intimate picture of the anxious final days of a smaller coastal state survives in a cache of letters written on clay tablets hardened in the flames of the burning city of
Ugarit. Situated in the contested frontier between rival empires about ninety miles north of
Byblos, Ugarit was politically subject to the Hittites in the fourteenth century
BCE
, but her prosperity depended largely on her role as an intermediary in the trade between Egypt, Cyprus, and the Aegean. As the dangers mounted at the start of the twelfth century
BCE
, Ugarit was called upon to supply troops for the defense of the Hittites fighting in western Anatolia, and of
Carchemish, a Hittite stronghold on the Euphrates about two hundred kilometers from the Mediterranean. With a population of perhaps thirty-five thousand people and an economy geared to agriculture and trade rather than combat, any levy of troops was bound to be costly in terms of manpower and morale. Whether keeping these soldiers at home would have enabled Ugarit to defend itself is moot, but the surviving correspondence between the last king,
Ammurapi, and the unnamed ruler of Alashiya hints at the invaders’ hit-and-run tactics and the desperation of the besieged.

Writing to Ammurapi about the situation on Cyprus, the chief prefect of Alashiya reports that “
twenty enemy ships even before they would reach the mountain shore have not stayed around but have quickly moved on, and where they have pitched camp we do not know. I am writing to inform and protect you.” Another letter from the king of Alashiya advises Ammurapi to “make yourself as strong as possible” by mustering troops and chariots and reinforcing the city walls. Almost as an afterthought, he asks, “Now, where are your own troops and chariotry stationed? Are they not stationed with you? If not, who will deliver you from the enemy forces?” More than three millennia later, Ammurapi’s reply still reeks of fear: