The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

Although the Indus civilization was technically literate, the script employed by its people has not been deciphered, and no personal names have survived. “Meluhha” is an Old Akkadian word that was used as a personal name and a place name, and a late-third-millennium BCE inscription mentions a village of Meluhhans at the Mesopotamian city of Lagash. Other texts refer to imported Harappan wood, but the most abundant evidence for trade contact between the regions comes from archaeological finds. Harappan merchants’ seals have been found around the Persian Gulf, while the Indus Valley has likewise yielded seals of Mesopotamian origin. Harappan trade routes to the Persian Gulf have also been traced through the distribution of lapis lazuli and carnelian; finished goods fashioned from tin, copper, and marine shells; and arrowheads and jewelry of chalcedony, jasper, and flint.

  The coast between the Indus and the Persian Gulf is for the most part arid and inhospitable, but archaeologists have identified a number of Harappan ports including Sutkagen Dor, about 270 miles west of the Indus delta. Others have been found around the Kathiawar Peninsula in Gujarat, where extensive research has been done at the ancient port of Lothal, about five hundred miles southeast from the Indus, and the dates of which mirror those of the Indus civilization as a whole. Lothal is about eighty kilometers southwest of Ahmedabad and about ten kilometers from the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay), although the sea was probably closer in antiquity. Archaeological finds here include the largest collection of Indus Valley seals and sealings outside of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, the majority of them found among the ruins of a building thought to have been a warehouse.a

  This is one of several structures that have helped identify Lothal as an ancient seaport. The most controversial is a trapezoidal basin lined with burnt brick and measuring 214 by 36 meters, with a depth of 3.1 meters and a sluice gate at one end to prevent it from overflowing. According to one theory, the basin served as a sheltered dock fed by a channel from two nearby rivers. Some have maintained that the ancient rivers could not have filled it. Others argue that while such a basin would have provided shelter from the southwest monsoon, the cost of such an elaborate structure would have been difficult to justify on the basis of trade revenues. Moreover, it would be inconsistent with what is known of the region’s seafaring traditions, and even today many fishermen and sailors in India and Pakistan beach their vessels on the shore without benefit of piers, wharves, or other man-made structures. Mesopotamian writings frequently refer to docks, starting with Sargon’s “dock of Akkad,” but the oldest known structure positively identified as such dates from a millennium after that. Nonetheless, Lothal was clearly a hub of intraregional trade, and whatever their true function, the structures there represent a major investment in time and resources that testifies to the region’s prosperity.

  Persian Gulf Shipbuilding: The “Magan Boat”

  Magan, the second place mentioned in Sargon’s inscription, refers to the lands on either side of the Strait of Hormuz—southern Iran and eastern Oman—at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which Mesopotamian sources occasionally refer to as the “Sea of Magan.” The region was a source of timber, diorite, and copper. Some texts refer to “Dilmun-copper,” but since there is no copper in Bahrain or northeast Arabia the attribution probably came about because ships from Dilmun, or ships that called there, carried copper from Oman. Magan’s strategic significance for the rulers of Mesopotamia is borne out by references to two military campaigns conducted by Sargon’s immediate successors, one of whom built a fleet to sail against a coalition of thirty-two Magan cities. This is one of the earliest mentions of a fleet built for purely military purposes.

  The full significance of the Magan/Oman connection was not realized until a series of archaeological discoveries in the 1980s and 1990s at Ras al-Jinz, the easternmost point in Oman, more than three hundred miles southeast of the Strait of Hormuz. A site identified as a shipyard yielded the remains of more than three hundred fragments from ancient vessels dating from 2500–2200 BCE. These consist for the most part of slabs of bitumen impressed with the remains of reeds, reed bundles, lashings, and mats, and lashed wooden planks to which the bitumen had been applied. Barnacles are found on the smooth outer face of many of the slabs, which proves they were exposed to saltwater, and some of the recycled bitumen has barnacles embedded in it. In addition to confirming part of the written record about ancient shipbuilding in the region, the Ras al-Jinz finds revealed details of ship construction preserved in neither written nor pictorial records. Of particular interest is the ways in which reed bundles were built up and assembled to form vessels capable of supporting a sailing rig and carrying cargoes. The Ras al-Jinz hulls were constructed of lashed reed bundles four to twelve centimeters in diameter. Once assembled, these were covered with either woven reed mats or animal skins coated with a bitumen amalgam. This waterproof sheathing transformed the reed float into a displacement hull, faired the rough surface of the reed bundles, and allowed the hull to move through the water with less resistance. Bitumen also extended the life of the reeds and protected them from barnacles, teredo worms, and seaweeds that could impair the hull’s efficiency or actively destroy the hull. A natural indicator of subsurface oil, bitumen is readily available in surface seeps around the Persian Gulf, and it was a standard ingredient in Mesopotamian shipbuilding. Preparation of the bitumen amalgam poses formidable technical challenges and its application is not simply a matter of smearing liquid tar over the hull. The bitumen has to adhere to the hull when wet; it must be pliant enough to maintain its integrity as the hull flexes in a seaway, but strong enough to withstand the impact of being beached repeatedly; and it has to be relatively lightweight. That the Ras al-Jinz slabs were found where they were suggests that they were being stored to be melted down and reapplied to a new vessel, a less complicated process than preparing new amalgam from scratch.

  A cuneiform list from the twenty-first century BCE describes large-scale operations dedicated to the construction of both reed and wooden hulls, including more than fifteen hundred pine, palm, and tamarisk trees, eight tons of palm fiber rope, twelve thousand bundles of reeds, fish oil, “asphalt for the coating of Magan type boats,” and other materials. These figures give no indication of what was needed for a single vessel, but a replica built at Sur, Oman, in 2005 provides some answers. Working from construction details provided by the bitumen slabs and a study of the 217 surviving boat models and 186 illustrations from seals or sealings of the third millennium BCE, experimental archaeologists built a succession of reed boats, starting with a 1-to-20 scale model, a five-meter-long prototype, and the twelve-meter “Magan Boat.” This had a capacity of about thirty gur (a standard unit of measure for Mesopotamian vessels), or 7.5 tons, probably an average size for wood vessels, though near the upper limit for reed hulls. The most commonly mentioned large vessels ran about sixty gur, and the most capacious ships at the end of the third millennium measured three hundred gur, or about ninety tons.

  The materials list for the modern “Magan Boat” included almost three tons of reeds, thirty kilometers of fiber rope made from date palm or goat hair (the latter is immensely strong and much easier to handle), more than a ton of timber, and two tons of bitumen mixed with chopped reeds. Wood was used for the keelson, frames, and horizontal beams that spanned the gunwales, but the hull was further strengthened by pairs of reed bundles set like frames. A woven mat lay between the bitumen and the reed bundles. The vessel was rigged with a bipod mast setting a square sail hung from a single yard, and steered with a pair of quarter rudders. The bitumen waterproof seal worked as intended, but it was virtually impossible to keep water from sloshing over the sides and as much as three tons of water was absorbed by the reeds, thereby reducing the amount of cargo and stores that could be carried. Nonetheless, sea trials proved the boat a capable sailer, easily handled and relatively fast, attaining speeds of five knots or more in a moderate breeze. With favorable winds one might make the passage from the head of the Persian Gulf to Magan in about a week, depending on th
e number of stops, while returning against the prevailing northwesterlies would be slower. The duration of the passage to Harappa would depend on the strength of the monsoon winds.

  The Magan Boat, a modern interpretation of an Omani ocean carrier of the late third millennium BCE built in 2005. The A-frame mast distributes the downward pressure across the reed bundles that form the hull. The reeds are made waterproof by the application of a bitumen amalgam, the recipe for which was derived from fragments of ancient sheathing found near Ras al-Jinz, the easternmost point of Oman on the Arabian Sea. Courtesy Tom Vosmer.

  Maritime Trade to the End of the Babylonian Empire

  The degree to which the uncertainties of long-distance sea trade affected relations between merchants and the political and religious establishment—which were often one and the same—is difficult to gauge. Much of Mesopotamia’s trade was in the hands of individual merchants, although the temples were heavily involved and temple complexes could double as warehouses. A collection of documents from the end of the third millennium BCE describes the transactions of one merchant, Lu-Enlilla, who withdrew from a temple thousands of kilograms of wood, timber, and fish, more than fifteen hundred liters of sesame oil, garments, and hides to trade for copper in Magan. Private investors could lend money either at a fixed rate, thereby minimizing both their risk and their reward, or with the intent of sharing in the profits, thereby assuming more risk if the merchant suffered losses. Mesopotamians did not have the severe restrictions on interest later dictated by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim law, and temples and individuals routinely charged interest rates of 20 to 33 percent. The role of traders not dependent on the temple and state helps explain why, when the Ur Dynasty collapsed within a quarter century of Lu-Enlilla’s time, Persian Gulf commerce continued, although Mesopotamian merchants seem to have lost much of their trade to Dilmun.

  Mesopotamia regained its political cohesion during the First Dynasty of Babylon, which spanned the nineteenth to seventeenth centuries BCE. In the 1700s BCE, Hammurabi ruled much of lower Mesopotamia and as far west as the Amorite trading city of Mari on the upper Euphrates. (The Amorites were a Semitic-speaking people whose spread from Arabia into Syria and Mesopotamia around the turn of the millennium probably stimulated, or was stimulated by, a new emphasis on east–west trade both overland and via the Euphrates.) Hammurabi is best known for his Code of Laws, the most complete to survive from ancient Mesopotamia. Promulgated toward the end of his reign, many of the laws have a direct bearing on merchants’ relations and interest rates, and seven touch directly on shipping. Three specify the rates to be charged for hiring vessels of up to sixty gur. Others dictate the cost of building a sixty-gur ship—two shekels—and guarantee boats for a year.b The pay of sailors was fixed at six gur of grain per year, but sailors were liable for any damages arising from their negligence. The law also includes a rare early example of a “rule of the road,” which in this case mandates that the master of a vessel proceeding downstream has to steer clear of a vessel heading against the current, and making him liable for any damages resulting from his carelessness.c One can trace the evolution of commercial law and the rights and responsibilities of ships’ officers and crew from this point forward, but few navigation rules had the force of law before the advent of steam navigation in the nineteenth century.

  Sumero-Akkadian culture spread fairly evenly across Mesopotamia but political unification was difficult to achieve and harder to maintain, and even Hammurabi’s success was short-lived. Babylon’s imperial demise began in the reign of his son and successor, when the southern Sumerian cities began to reassert their independence. The political situation continued to deteriorate for a century (coinciding with the period of Hyksos rule in Egypt) and in 1595 BCE an invasion by the Hittites of central Anatolia overwhelmed the Babylonians. The north was absorbed into the Mitanni kingdom, which originated in Iran, while southern Mesopotamia fell to the obscure Sealand Dynasty. There was a simultaneous decline in the cohesion of the Indus civilization and the disruptions at both ends of the route led to a thousand-year hiatus in long-distance sea trade between Pakistan and India and the Persian Gulf.

  From Minos to Mycenae, 2000–1100 BCE

  As if to announce the reorientation of Mesopotamian trade toward the Mediterranean, the last surviving text to mention “Dilmun copper,” from 1745 BCE, is also the first to mention Cypriot copper: “12 minas [360 kilograms] of refined copper of Alashiya [Cyprus] and of Dilmun.” Throughout antiquity, the island of Cyprus was a major producer of copper (its modern name comes from the Greek word for copper), which is one of the two primary elements, with tin, of bronze, the most durable alloy available in the ancient Near East, where the Bronze Age lasted roughly from 3000 to 1000 BCE. Most Cypriot copper probably entered the Levant through the ports of Byblos or Ugarit, from where merchants carried it overland to the Euphrates and downstream to Mesopotamia.

  One of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the foremost Levantine port of the early Bronze Age, Byblos lies about forty kilometers north of Beirut. It has yielded more Egyptian stone work, including statuary, reliefs, and other pieces than anywhere else in the Near East. The disproportionate number of letters from Byblos found in the Egyptian diplomatic archive at Amarna sheds considerable light on the close and enduring ties between Egypt and this maritime gateway to the Near East, especially in the 1300s BCE. Yet archaeological evidence shows that by then Byblite mariners had been trading to Egypt for two thousand years. Byblos’s prosperity long depended on that of Egypt, and when Mesopotamian or Egyptian pioneers developed an overland route through Canaan, the port may have been abandoned briefly. Thanks to the abundant forests in its hinterland, and Egypt’s need for wood, Byblos reemerged as an important trading center in the early third millennium BCE, and it was likely the port through which the first recorded shipment of cedar passed en route to Egypt during the reign of Sneferu in the 2600s BCE. Five centuries later the port was hard hit by the end of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, but it recovered in the second millennium. It was later a major importer of Egyptian papyrus, and the Greeks took the name of the port of Byblos for “papyrus,” “book,” and, ultimately, the Bible.

  An oared ship and fish—perhaps intended as a figurehead—on a roiling sea decorate this Early Minoan (2700–2300 BCE) terra-cotta “pan” buried in a tomb on the Cycladic island of Syros. Though highly stylized, the elongated prow anticipates the more realistically rendered bows seen in the Thera murals 1,500 years later. Photograph by Hermann Wagner, D-DAI-ATH-NM #3701. Courtesy of the Deutsche Archäologische Institut, Athens.

  In about 1600 BCE, Byblos started trading to the west, especially to Cyprus and Crete, the largest Mediterranean islands east of Sicily. The cultural and material exchanges between the Levant and Crete helped shape the Minoan culture that flourished from the late third millennium through the fifteenth century BCE and left its imprint on the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece. Named for the mythical King Minos, the civilization of ancient Crete has enjoyed good press since the fifth century BCE, when both Herodotus and Thucydides depicted Minos as a conqueror of the southern Aegean. Thucydides notes that “Minos, according to tradition, was the first person to organize a navy. He controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic [Aegean] Sea; he ruled over the Cyclades [Islands]…. And it is reasonable to suppose that he did his best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.”

  This theory of a Minoan thalassocracy—literally, “empire of the sea”—has proved remarkably resilient, especially considering that Minos is a mythical rather than an historical character, that the period of the Minoans’ greatest influence ended more than a thousand years before Herodotus and Thucydides, and that the traditions these historians preserve are oral rather than written. There is no doubt that Cretans were sailing to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean as early as the third millennium BCE. But images of a Cretan colonization of the Aegean and as high seas enforcer owe much to Thucydides’ interpretation, whic
h reflects his fellow Athenians’ concerns about suppressing piracy and other threats to their trade by building the most powerful fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. The reception of his ideas today follows from modern notions of sea power and maritime hegemony as articulated by such strategists as Alfred Thayer Mahan, who promoted the development of fleets in the mold of the ubiquitous and omnipotent Royal Navy at the end of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire was at its height. Archaeology has shown Thucydides’ claim of a Cretan colonization of the Cyclades to be overstated at best. The prevailing view is that Neolithic migrants moving west from Anatolia settled the islands and the Peloponnese, to which they introduced new farming techniques and crops, including olives and wine. While contact between Crete and the Cyclades is easy to see, there is little evidence of direct Minoan rule in the archipelago.

  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.