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 twentyfive 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 Sea People and Warfare at Sea, 1200–1100 BCE
The loss of the Cape Gelidonya ships took place around the st
art 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:
My father, now enemy ships are coming and they burn down my towns with fire. They have done unseemly things in the land! My father is not aware of the fact that all the troops of my father’s overlord are stationed in Hatti [central Anatolia] and that all my ships are stationed in Lukka [Lycia?]. They still have not arrived, and the country is lying [open] like that!…Now, the seven enemy ships that are approaching have done evil things to us. Now then, if there are any other enemy ships send me a report somehow, so that I will know.
These letters were among dozens found in the ruins of the city, which the invaders pillaged and abandoned. Many city-states suffered a similar fate, yet despite the widespread destruction survivors of the turmoil managed to maintain at least some maritime connections between the Levant and other shores of the eastern and central Mediterranean. In the first three centuries of the Iron Age that followed, these were far less robust than they had been, but they formed the basis for the Phoenician and Greek overseas expansion in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE.
Inscriptions at Medinet Habu describing Ramesses III’s repulse of the Sea People present the most complete pictorial record of a Bronze Age naval engagement. The earliest reference to such a sea battle is on a stele erected at Tanis, in the Nile delta, and refers to Ramesses II’s victory over a fleet of “Shardana, rebellious of heart … and their battleships in the midst of the sea,” around 1280 BCE. The Shardana are depicted subsequently as fighting both for and against the Egyptians, and they were among the “northern” allies of the Libyans defeated by the Egyptians in 1218 BCE. The next naval battle in the historical record is described in slightly more detail in a letter from the last Hittite king, Suppiluliumas II, around 1210 BCE. “Against me the ships from Cyprus drew up in line three times for battle in the midst of the sea. I destroyed them, I seized the ships and in the midst of the sea I set them on fire.” Whoever these Cyprus-based sailors were, their momentum was little disturbed by this setback, and Suppiluliumas goes on to write that they later landed “in multitudes.” Shortly thereafter, the Hittite empire collapsed.
The record of Ramesses III’s victory over the Sea People in around 1176 BCE is more substantial, although where the battle took place is a mystery. The traditional view is that it was fought somewhere in or near the Nile delta, but the Egyptians may have intercepted the enemy somewhere on the coast of Canaan, perhaps near Ashkelon. As for the enemy ships that survived the initial battle, “Those who came upon the sea, the consuming flame faced them at the Nile mouths … they were dragged up, surrounded and cast down upon the shore, slaughtered in heaps from head to tail.” The Sea People may have had the advantage of iron weapons in land fighting, but in this battle their weapon of choice was the spear, while the Egyptians had long-range composite bows and grapnels for use at close range. This meant that the Egyptians could open fire on the enemy ships at a distance and so reduce their fighting effectiveness while remaining relatively unscathed. When the ships closed with one another, the Egyptians threw their grapnels into the enemy’s masts and rigging and then backed their vessels away to capsize the Sea People’s ships.
Taken together, the accounts of Suppiluliumas II and Ramesses III reveal a good deal about ship-to-ship fighting at the time. Three sorts of weapons are indicated: fire, in the accounts of Suppiluliumas and Ramesses; spears belonging to the Shardana; and bows, slings, and grapnels in the hands of the Egyptians. A fire out of control is one of the most feared and deadly calamities that can befall a ship. If one has the wind at one’s back, it can be an effective means of terrifying the enemy and destroying ships, but fire is notoriously indiscriminate and despite scrupulous handling the smallest mistake or the slightest wind shift can turn it back on its user. For this reason, fire is best used at the longest possible range. There is no indication of how either the Hittites or the Egyptians employed fire, but it may have been delivered via flaming arrows. Until the end of the age of sail in the nineteenth century, most naval engagements were decided in boarding actions in which ships served as little more than floating battlefields. Before the development of the ship’s gun, bows and arrows and spears could be employed when the ships were still some distance apart, but sea fights generally involved closing the range between vessels so that they lay together hull-to-hull. The use of grapnels to capsize enemy ships as shown at Medinet Habu
is rare. More commonly they were employed to lash ships together so that crew sweeping onto the enemy’s decks would not fall between the ships and be crushed or drowned.
Throughout the New Kingdom, the Egyptians exploited their shiphandling ability and their dominance on the coastal sea-lanes to establish an effective naval force capable of providing logistical support for long-distance campaigns both at home and abroad. They also used their maritime forces for amphibious operations, as seen in the campaigns against the Hyksos in Avaris and the Mitanni along the Euphrates. Against the Sea People they had the advantage of organization, hierarchical command, and military discipline. The enemy was probably little more than an improvised fleet cobbled together from disparate groups of raiders, well suited for attacking smaller ports and groups of merchantmen in piratical raids, but less capable of seizing larger objectives. Naval warfare between centralized states with comparable fleets, strategies, and tactics would not appear until the next millennium.
Although Ramesses III defeated the Sea People, Egypt’s influence over its Asian territories eroded over the course of the twelfth century BCE. This is nowhere better illustrated than in “The Report of Wenamun,” the long-suffering agent of the temple of Amon at Thebes dispatched to purchase cedar for “the great and noble riverine barge of Amon-Re” in about 1050 BCE. Wenamun’s account demonstrates both the loss of Egypt’s prestige and the importance of strong political and military power to safe trade. Sailing from the delta port of Tanis, Wenamun stopped at Dor, where one of his crew absconded with half a kilogram of gold and more than two kilograms of silver. When the local ruler refused to compensate him, Wenamun sailed for Tyre, where he took about three kilograms of silver from a merchant ship that probably hailed from Dor, before continuing to Byblos. Prince Tjekerbaal ordered him repeatedly to leave, but Wenamun refused. A month later, the two entered into negotiations during which Tjekerbaal reminded Wenamun that when the pharaohs of old approached his ancestors for wood, they sent gifts and payment.
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