At the same time that the Thebans were advancing against the Hyksos in the north, they were also campaigning against the kingdom of Kush, which had expanded northward from Nubia. Egypt’s southern boundary had moved back and forth between the First and Second Cataracts since the Old Kingdom, but the New Kingdom pharaohs’ conquest of Kush was remarkable for its extent and duration. The Barkal Stela recounting Thutmose III’s exploits in Syria was erected at Napata, twenty kilometers downstream from the Fourth Cataract, which remained Egypt’s southern boundary for four hundred years. The kingdom was now at the height of its imperial reach, which extended 2,200 kilometers from Napata to Ugarit (Ras Shamra, Syria). The Egyptians concluded alliances with the Hittites of Anatolia, and the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Mitanni of Mesopotamia. In the eastern Mediterranean, the consolidation of Egyptian authority led to increased trade not only with Levantine ports but with Crete, and images of traders in Minoan dress first appear in a tomb painted for Thutmose III’s high steward, Rekhmire, in which they are identified as “The People of the Isles in the midst of the Sea.” Interest in the Levant waned under Thutmose’s successors but revived in the Nineteenth Dynasty. At the end of the thirteenth century BCE, however, mass migrations swept southward by land and sea and destroyed the established order of the Bronze Age Near East and threatened the integrity of Egypt itself.
The birth, expansion, and longevity of pharaonic Egypt depended on harnessing the Nile as a highway of internal communication, while the seas were a filter through which its people absorbed foreign goods and influences, a buffer against invasion, and a thoroughfare for projecting political and military power. Overland communication with Mesopotamia was possible, but saltwater and freshwater navigation facilitated communication between Egypt and the region’s leading powers, most of the distance being covered on the Mediterranean and, after a portage of less than a hundred miles, the Euphrates River. What is most striking about the varied maritime endeavors of ancient Egypt is the impetus they gave to the development of maritime communities across the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, which remained a preeminent center of maritime culture and commerce for nearly four thousand years.
a The verb “to govern” derives from the Greek word meaning “to steer” by way of the Latin gubernare, which means “to steer” and “to govern.”
Chapter 3
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Bronze Age Seafaring
Southwest Asia constitutes one of the most vibrant cultural and commercial crossroads in the world. Overland routes converge there from Anatolia and the Caucasus, Central and South Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. Lying at the head of the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia is connected by sea to the lands that ring the Indian Ocean and its subsidiary seas from the Red Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The Tigris and Euphrates also provide a direct connection from the gulf to the heart of Southwest Asia. While these rivers are more erratic than the stately Nile, they were vital arteries of communication by which the trade of the Indian Ocean reached Asia Minor in the north and the Mediterranean in the west. Astride these roads and rivers, the people of Mesopotamia developed some of the refinements of civilization such as writing and city dwelling in the late 3000s BCE, several centuries before the start of dynastic Egypt. The Sumerians and their successor states never achieved the political continuity characteristic of the Egyptians, but the people of Mesopotamia were pioneers in maritime and commercial law, and their oldest literature, including the story of King Sargon’s origins and the Epic of Gilgamesh, has echoes in later Greek myth, Judeo-Christian and Muslim scripture, and Persian and Arabic folktales. These stories were carried via the Euphrates to the Levantine coast and from there by ship to the rest of the Mediterranean. Older still were Mesopotamia’s maritime links to the east, via the Persian Gulf to the lands of Bahrain, Oman, and southern Iran, and the maritime frontier of the Harappan (Indus Valley) civilization of Pakistan and India, which reached its height in the late third millennium BCE. Traces of this long-range traffic, carried out in sailing vessels built of wood or bound reeds, are faint but unmistakable.
Merchants dealt chiefly in precious and exotic goods, however, and such long-distance trade for elite customers could not survive the unexplained downturn in Harappa’s fortunes in the first centuries of the second millennium BCE. Little wonder that Mesopotamian merchants and rulers turned their attention to the Mediterranean, which may help account for Minoan Crete’s great prosperity at about the same time, when the island’s merchants were trading with Greece, the Levant, and Egypt. The Cretans in turn left their mark on the mainland Greek culture of Mycenae, which emulated and eventually succeeded them as the dominant culture of the Aegean world. The Mycenaean Age lasted until the Sea People—the name given to northern migrants of obscure origin—swept through their territories en route to the Near East and Egypt. The next two centuries evince little of the cultural vitality of the Bronze Age, but the maritime connections endured and it is along these that we can trace the Phoenician and Greek revival that began in the tenth century.
Between the Rivers and the Seas in the Third Millennium BCE
Situated at the head of the 550-mile-long Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia was the home of the world’s first literate people, the Sumerians, who settled in the region by about 3200 BCE. Living in small cities, by the end of the fourth millennium BCE the Sumerians were probably more technologically advanced than the Egyptians in many respects. If the Nile is a river between two deserts, Mesopotamia is, according to its Greek name, a land “between the rivers.” The Euphrates and Tigris are turbulent streams fed by the snowmelt from the Taurus Mountains of Asia Minor and the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, and prone to chaotic flooding in their lower reaches. About 160 kilometers from the Persian Gulf the rivers merge to form the Shatt al-Arab, a marshland that separated the southernmost cities of ancient Mesopotamia from saltwater. Dramatic changes in water levels and currents caused the rivers to meander; some cities once situated on the banks of the rivers are now far from them, while other sites have been wiped out as watercourses twitched across them like a garden hose in geologic time. Early efforts to harness the rivers for agriculture and transportation led to extensive canalization, a development that both required and nurtured sophisticated patterns of social organization. This is reflected in everything from the laws governing the control, use, and navigation of canals to the Mesopotamian pantheon. Enki, one of the Sumerians’ most important deities, is portrayed as flooding the rivers with his life-giving semen and using the canals for transportation, while Ennugi, one of the gods who conspired to send the flood against mankind, was inspector of canals.
The oldest evidence for ships with masts comes from southern Mesopotamia and Kuwait and dates from the sixth millennium. Nonetheless, whereas environmental conditions in Egypt encouraged the use of sails, those in Mesopotamia did not. Not only do the Tigris and Euphrates flow faster than the Nile, over numerous rapids and shallows, but both their currents and the prevailing winds go from north to south making upstream travel very difficult. Consequently, the Mesopotamians developed vessels they could use to best effect on a river system that favored downstream navigation. Boats were an essential means of transportation, but they never achieved the status that they did among the Egyptians. The Mesopotamian boat was a thing of this life, never exalted enough to serve as a vehicle of the gods.
The earliest vessels for which any evidence survives were lightweight boats made of reeds or skins that ran less risk of hitting bottom in the shallows than would a heavier wooden boat and were less susceptible to damage if they did, and which could be easily towed upriver once their cargoes had been offloaded. The Mesopotamians also made use of disposable rafts supported by either inflated animal skins or airtight ceramic pots. When vessels reached their destination, they could be unloaded, their timber decking sold with the cargo, and the floats either sold or carried upstream to be used again. Watercraft of such simple design were employed well into the twentieth century, when one of the most c
ommon vessels found on the Tigris and among the Marsh Arabs of the Shatt al-Arab was still the quffa, a circular boat of coiled reeds, like an enormous basket reinforced with wooden ribs and waterproofed with a coat of bitumen, or asphalt pitch. These materials may suggest fragility, but a quffa could carry as much as three horses and their handlers, or five tons of cargo.
The record of Mesopotamian maritime accomplishment also differs significantly from that of Egypt. Although there is an abundant supply of economic texts such as contracts and orders or receipts for goods, merchant seals, and illustrations, the only boat remains are fragments of bitumen used to waterproof hulls. Models and pictures of vessels are scarce, and there are few sustained narratives describing the role of ships and navigation. Among the sources that do open a window on the maritime life of ancient Mesopotamia are the legends associated with the birth of Sargon in the 2300s BCE and the Epic of Gilgamesh, a quasi-historical hero of the third millennium whose exploits remained popular in the Near East for more than two thousand years, and echoes of which can be found in the stories of Moses, Noah, and the flood in the Hebrew Bible; Homer’s Odyssey; and The Arabian Nights.
Sumerian king lists include a Gilgamesh who ruled sometime between 2800 and 2500 BCE, but the oldest extant versions of the Gilgamesh epic date from the early second millennium. The story has two main parts, the first telling of the friendship and adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and the second relating the story of the flood. Versions of the story survive in the Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Hittite languages, and details changed over time to suit the expectations and experience of the audience. Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s first adventure is to slay Humbaba, keeper of the forest. According to the Sumerian version of the story, Humbaba lived in the Zagros Mountains to the east. In Akkadian retellings from about a thousand years later, the pair headed west for the cedar forests of Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast, a change consistent with the different geographic orientations of the two cultures. In both versions, when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh, fearful for his own mortality, sets out to consult Utnapishtim, a man who survived a flood sent by the gods to destroy mankind and was rewarded with the gift of immortality.
A Mesopotamian cylinder seal (2.7 centimeters high), and the sealing it makes when impressed into wet clay. Found at Tello, Iraq (the ancient Girsu), on the Euphrates River about 250 kilometers southeast of modern Baghdad and 80 kilometers north of Nasiriyah, the third millennium BCE seal shows the god Ea, identified by his goat head, and two other figures on a riverboat. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum, France/Art Resource, New York.
To reach Utnapishtim on the island of Dilmun, Gilgamesh has to ride with the ferryman, for whom he cuts 120 poles preserved with a coating of bitumen. (Canal vessels were propelled by poling, and orders for wooden poles up to six meters long survive.) They travel for three days until they reach the waters of death and in crossing the shallows Gilgamesh breaks all the punting poles. “Then Gilgamesh stripped himself and as a sail held up the animal skin he had been wearing, and so the little boat sailed on the waters”—a means of propulsion not unlike windsurfing, a sport invented four thousand years later. Learning that Gilgamesh seeks to know whether he, like Enkidu, must die, Utnapishtim offers an explanation of human mortality that reads like an accountant’s take on Ecclesiastes: “How long does a building stand before it falls? How long does a contract last? How long will brothers share the inheritance before they quarrel?…/ From the very beginning nothing at all has lasted.” He then tells Gilgamesh how he achieved immortality in a story that anticipates that of Noah and the ark.
One day, the gods decided to destroy the city of Shurrupak on the Euphrates, one of the five cities that ancient Mesopotamians believed antedated the flood. Ea (the Akkadian Enki), a god of wisdom well disposed toward mankind, told Utnapishtim to build a boat big enough to take a sample of every living thing. The vessel was huge, its width equal to its length (not unlike an enormous quffa) with six or seven decks. Utnapishtim waterproofed the hull inside and out with a mixture of oil, pitch, and asphalt. Because of its inordinate size, the vessel had to be launched with the help of rollers, a method that suggests a flat-bottomed hull. After a storm that lasted seven days, the waters covered the earth, but the boat came to rest on Mount Nimush. A week later, Utnapishtim sent forth in turn a dove, a swallow, and a raven to look for land. The first two birds returned to the ship, but the last did not, signifying it had found dry ground where the flood was receding. After offering sacrifices, Utnapishtim and his wife left the ship and were granted immortality on Dilmun, which probably refers to the island of Bahrain.
Dilmun also figures in the economic records of early Mesopotamia. The Persian Gulf had been a conduit for trade in metals, wood, stone, and other commodities from lands bordering the Indian Ocean as early as the fifth millennium BCE, but until about 2900 BCE the Sumerians seem to have had more contact with and influence on Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. Thus their identification of an abode of immortality somewhere in the Persian Gulf may reflect the Mesopotamians’ shifting gaze in the third millennium BCE. Lying midway between the head of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz and peppered with approximately one hundred thousand burial mounds, as well as the ruins of a substantial city, Bahrain had abundant stocks of fish, dates, and freshwater. On the arid Persian Gulf, the last would have been as much a lubricant of long-distance trade in antiquity as oil is today. Dilmun’s natural resources were not insignificant, but its prominence at the time depended on the ability of its merchants to capitalize on their geographic position and to make themselves indispensable middlemen in the trade between two richer regions. The merchants of Dilmun acted as intermediaries in Mesopotamia’s overseas trade. One king “had ships of Dilmun transport timber from foreign lands” for building temples; there are numerous receipts for copper carried by Dilmunite traders; and votive models of ships on the Dilmun run have been found in temples in Ur.
The best known reference to Mesopotamia’s overseas trade describes how the founder of the Akkadian Dynasty, Sargon, triumphed over his neighbors to make his city a center of interregional commerce around 2300 BCE: “Ships from Meluhha, Magan, and Dilmun made fast at the dock of Akkad.” Sargon’s capital has not been located, but Akkad was probably in the vicinity of modern Baghdad, about five hundred kilometers from the Persian Gulf. Magan refers to the lands of the lower Persian Gulf, and Meluhha the Indus Valley civilization. According to tradition, Sargon was born in the highlands of the upper Euphrates, of humble origins but with a miraculous infancy not unlike that of Moses about eight hundred years later: “My mother, the entum, conceived me, in secret she bore me; She placed me in a basket of rushes, she sealed ‘my door’ [the lid] with bitumen; she cast me into the river which did not rise over me; The river bore me up and carried me to Aqqi, the water-drawer.” During his half-century reign, Sargon continued a policy of expansion that began with the defeat of his predecessor, who had unified southern Mesopotamia and expanded Sumer’s traditional worldview by “opening the way” for merchants to travel in safety from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, or “from the Lower Sea by the Tigris and Euphrates unto the Upper Sea.” For the time being, however, the Akkadians’ faced firmly eastward.
East of Hormuz: The Eastern Trade, 2500–1700 BCE
Sargon’s reign opened a vibrant period in the history of Mesopotamia’s overseas relations. Meluhha, the first place mentioned in Sargon’s inscription, lay at the farthest limit of Mesopotamia’s overseas contacts and encompassed the coasts of modern Pakistan and northwest India. (The distance from the head of the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Indus River is 1,150 nautical miles.) It thus included the seaports of the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization, the primary centers of which were Mohenjo Daro, about 225 kilometers up the Indus, and Harappa, about 640 kilometers northeast of Mohenjo Daro. The Indus civilization flourished between 2500 and 1700 BCE and spread across parts of modern Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and northwest India as far south as Gujarat, a
much greater area than any of the early Mesopotamian states or Egypt before the Eighteenth Dynasty. The ruins of Harappan society show a high degree of sophistication and organization, with large urban areas divided into neighborhoods apparently distinguished by occupation. Harappan trading networks reached overland into Central Asia and west across Persia and by sea to the Persian Gulf.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 9
