The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Times had changed. Tjekerbaal was no longer subject to the pharaoh, as his ancestors had been, and he was under no obligation to cut wood for Wenamun. He pointed out that Egypt’s trade was not even carried in Egyptian ships, as before, but in Levantine vessels. Despite Wenamun’s protestations that his ship and crew were Egyptian, Tjekerbaal suggested that this was the exception rather than the rule. Most of the ships carrying Egypt’s trade came from her trading partners, including twenty from Byblos and fifty from neighboring Sidon. This may have always been the case, but in the eleventh century BCE the inferiority of Egypt’s fleet seemed emblematic of the pharaoh’s waning prestige. Eventually, Tjekerbaal allowed Wenamun to send seven finished ship’s timbers to Egypt to secure an advance with which to pay for the remainder of the wood. Shortly after Wenamun sailed for home, a storm blew his ship off course to Cyprus where, mistaken for a pirate, he was brought before the queen and pleaded his case through an interpreter. Here the manuscript stops, and of his subsequent travails we know only that he lived to tell the tale. Wenamun’s misadventures reflect the growing weakness of Egyptian authority beyond its traditional borders. Yet the distress suffered by the larger states of the Near East was offset by the comparative health of the Levantine ports. Having survived the upheaval associated with the Sea People, local rulers boasted fleets considerably larger than those available in Egypt where during the reign of Ramesses III, for instance, the temple of Amon-Re had had a fleet of eighty-eight ships.

  Egyptians would continue to play a role in the maritime realm of the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea, but the initiative passed to the Phoenicians and Greeks, who fanned out across the Mediterranean in the first episode of sustained maritime colonization of which a clear record survives, and who would also attempt to discover for themselves the secrets of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans.

  a A seal is a stamp (such as a signet ring) inscribed with letters or a device indicating its owner; common images on seals include people, animals, boats, and geometric patterns. A sealing is the impression made by such a seal.

  b A shekel was a silver coin weighing between nine and seventeen grams. Two shekels were the equivalent of twelve days’ rent.

  c Rules of the road—that is, a roadstead or narrow stretch of open water where ships ride at anchor—were so called before the development of the automobile.

  Chapter 4

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  Phoenicians, Greeks, and the Mediterranean

  The destruction that engulfed the Bronze Age Near East at the hands of the Sea People and other invaders was followed by a centuries-long dark age, the end of which is signaled by the rise of the Phoenician city-states of the Levant in the ninth century BCE and of Greek city-states shortly thereafter. The pace of maritime activity on the Mediterranean then quickly surpassed that of the most prosperous centuries of the previous millennium. Operating from small autonomous port cities with little or no hinterland or river networks, merchants plied ever longer sea routes and wove increasingly complex trade networks across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. These maritime movements led to sustained two-way traffic in commodities, people, and culture, as distinct from one-way migrations or trade in prestige goods intended principally for elite consumers.

  The Phoenicians and Greeks were the first people to create sea-based colonial empires, the implications of which have inspired imitators and fascinated observers down to the present. Over the course of five hundred years, Phoenician and Greek mariners founded or nurtured ports many of which still pulse with trade almost three thousand years later: Tyre and Sidon; Carthage (now a suburb of Tunis), Cádiz, and Cartagena; Piraeus, Corinth, and Byzantium (now Istanbul); and Marseille. They were the first people to build ships specifically for war and develop strategies for their use; to erect port complexes dedicated to facilitating commerce; and to systematically explore the waters beyond the Mediterranean. Our debt to the Phoenicians is immeasurable, but while they invented the alphabet upon which the Greek and Latin alphabets are based, they left virtually no writings of their own. That the Greeks had a more pronounced impact on the historical development of the ancient world arises partly from the fact that they wrote about everything; but they also expanded from a more centrally located and larger demographic base than that of the Phoenicians. In purely maritime terms, they were also the first people to articulate social distinctions between mariners and landsmen, and to perceive rigid distinctions between seafaring and continental states.

  The Phoenician Mediterranean: Tyre, Carthage, and Gadir

  The invasion by the Sea People brought the prosperous interregional trade of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age to a near standstill for about two centuries. By the start of the tenth century BCE, the territory of the Canaanites—the name by which the Phoenicians called themselves—had been reduced to an area roughly the shape of modern Lebanon. To the south lay the Israelites and Philistines in mountain and coastal Palestine, respectively, while Aramaeans occupied the region of modern Syria. Confined to a narrow stretch between the Mediterranean and the Lebanon Mountains, between Acre (Akko, Israel) in the south and the island of Aradus (Arvad, Syria), Phoenicia included some of the best natural harbors on the coast. During the crisis of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE, Byblos and Sidon had retained their identity, while Tyre all but vanished from the historical record. In the following century, however, their fortunes reversed as Byblos and Sidon entered a period of decline and Tyre prospered under Hiram I.

  Situated on an island half a mile offshore—“at the entrance to the sea,” as the prophet Ezekiel later wrote—Tyre comprised two harbors, south and north, and an agrarian settlement on the mainland. This arrangement, in which the port was the dominant town, was unusual. In Judah and Israel, most ports were considered “daughter cities,” established to serve towns located a few kilometers inland, either because the coastal lands were inadequate for agriculture or because they were too exposed to raids from the sea. Thucydides describes a similar phenomenon in Greece where “Because of the wide prevalence of piracy, the ancient cities … were built at some distance from the sea.” Despite its small size and reliance on trade, Tyre had a wealth of valuable resources and specialized manufactures at its disposal: pine and cedar for shipbuilding and export, a metalworking industry, and murex, a shellfish that produced a much prized reddish dye. As important was her strategic location near the boundaries between several wealthy states whose interests her merchants served.

  For all their advantages, the Tyrians depended on imported grain, and it was with this in mind that Hiram negotiated to furnish the materials for the construction of the house of David and the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Details of Hiram’s work for David are scant, but the Book of Kings reveals what Tyre had to offer in the way of cedar and cypress timber, which was made up into rafts and ferried down the coast. The volume of wood and wheat exchanged was considerable. Hiram allowed Solomon to send ten thousand people a month to the Lebanon Mountains to cut and haul wood down to the sea, and in exchange received 4,500 tons of wheat and 4,600 liters of fine oil “year by year.”

  An alabaster relief from a frieze in the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II (reigned 722–705 BCE) in Khorsabad, Iraq, showing the transportation of cedar logs on the Phoenician coast. The scene recalls descriptions from the Hebrew Bible of Hiram of Tyre’s shipments of wood to Solomon for the construction of the temple at Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE. The horse-head bow design is presumably the same as that of the hippoi that Eudoxus found on his attempted circumnavigation of Africa in the fifth century BCE. Photograph by Hervé Lewandowski; courtesy of the Louvre Museum, Paris/Art Resource, New York.

  Twenty years later, Solomon and Hiram collaborated on a project to send a fleet to Ophir and Sheba for frankincense and myrrh, essentials in the religious rites of the day. Like the Egyptians’ Punt, neither Ophir nor Sheba has been positively located, and scholarly guesses range from Sudan and Yemen to the Indus Valley. The Phoenicians supplie
d the ships, which were carried overland in pieces to the Gulf of Aqaba, and the fleet returned from Ophir with gold, spices, ivory, and precious stones—which recall the cargoes of the ships of Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha—and sandalwood, which is native to southern India. In later centuries, the Yemeni ports of Aden and Mocha would be celebrated entrepôts of east–west trade, and the identification of Ophir and Sheba with Yemen is credible. These expeditions probably stopped after Solomon’s death and the division of the monarchy between Israel and Judah. Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, attempted to revive the Ophir trade in the mid-800s BCE, but, according to the Hebrew Bible, God condemned his collaboration with Israel and destroyed the fleet at Aqaba. Little is heard about shipping on the Red Sea for centuries thereafter, but the Egyptians doubtless benefited from, if they did not control, such trade as there was. Although Phoenician seafarers were always in demand in foreign fleets, Levantine city-states were too small and far removed from the Red Sea to capture its trade directly.

  Tyrian prosperity owed much to the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (935–612 BCE). Centered on the upper Tigris city of Assur, a major crossroads of north–south and east–west traffic, Assyria was for a time the only major Near Eastern state without direct access to saltwater and maritime trade. This they remedied by conquering Babylon and opening the way to the Persian Gulf and, in the 870s BCE, by forcing the Phoenician cities of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Arvad to pay tribute. Toward the end of the eighth century BCE, the Assyrians moved to control Syria and the Levant directly and they appear to have encircled but not annexed Sidon and Tyre. The price of independence was high—in 732 BCE the Tyrians paid 4,500 kilograms of gold in tribute. In exchange, however, they retained a virtual monopoly of Assyria’s western trade and maintained commercial agents in Ur, Uruk, and Babylon. At the end of the century, the Levantine city-states became pawns in the struggle between Egypt and Assyria. The pharaoh encouraged an uprising by Luli of Tyre, which ended with the city’s fall and Luli’s flight to Cyprus in 707 BCE. Although Tyre remained nominally independent for another two hundred years, the Phoenicians continued to chafe under Assyrian domination.

  The threat of conquest and demands of traders both shaped Tyre’s destiny. In his oracle concerning Tyre, the prophet Isaiah refers to the “exultant city … whose feet carried her to settle far away.” Archaeological and written evidence bears out that the Phoenicians were the first Iron Age traders to cast their commercial net across the Mediterranean. In large part this was a continuation of a Levantine seafaring tradition dating from the third millennium. The coming of the Sea People had disrupted Mediterranean trade, and long-distance routes were broken into shorter segments plied by seafarers sailing within networks of diminished scope, between Phoenicia and Cyprus, and from Cyprus to the Aegean islands, for example. However, legend holds that around 1000 BCE Phoenician voyagers established colonies at Utica in Tunisia, Gadir (Cádiz, Spain), and Lixus, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco about ninety kilometers south of Tangier. While no hard evidence of such early settlement has come to light, the speed of Tyrian westward expansion in the late ninth and eighth centuries BCE suggests a more than passing familiarity with the sea routes and marts of the central and western Mediterranean as well as Atlantic Africa and Europe, where a Phoenician presence can be firmly dated to at least the 700s BCE.

  A bas-relief believed to show the flight of Luli from Tyre to Cyprus in the eighth century BCE. All the galleys are biremes (with two banks of oars) with side steering oars. Those fitted with rams and masts are warships. The presence of warriors and women (who appear larger) supports the theory that this represents a mass exodus from Tyre before the armies of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 705–681 BCE), from whose palace at Nineveh, Iraq, this comes. From Austen Henry Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh: From Drawings Made on the Spot … During a Second Expedition to Assyria (London: Murray, 1849), plate 81.

  Much of Tyre’s westward enterprise can be attributed to trade and commercial interests, but the first colonies of which we have any firm knowledge were founded in the wake of a struggle between sibling heirs to the throne, Elissa and Pygmalion. Following the death of her husband, Elissa (or Dido, as the Romans knew her) fled to Kition, on Cyprus, in about 820 BCE. Six or seven years later, she established Carthage—Qart-hardesht, or “new city”—on the Gulf of Tunis. Unlike other Phoenician settlements, Carthage seems to have been a colony formally modeled on the home city and, apart from Kition, the only overseas settlement in which members of the ruling family and priesthood had a direct hand. The port is strategically located on the southern shore of the seventy-mile-wide Strait of Sicily through which most east–west shipping must pass. As a result, some historians believe that from its inception Carthage was intended as a bulwark against threats to Phoenician aspirations in the central and western Mediterranean. It is difficult to ascribe the fugitive Elissa’s choice of such a strategic location to simple luck, and the city’s founding reinforces the idea that an older Phoenician settlement existed at nearby Utica. The story of Elissa’s flight may be apocryphal, but whether Carthage was founded in response to domestic tensions in Tyre or to oversee her western trade, the colony’s bonds with the home country remained strong through the middle of the sixth century BCE.

  The Phoenicians’ drive to the west was doubtless fueled by a search for metals, particularly Sardinian iron and Spanish tin and silver. Tyrian traders established themselves on a group of islands on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain by the 760s BCE. The archaeology of the area is complicated by the fact that the site has been occupied continuously since before the Phoenicians arrived, and silt deposits long ago joined the islands to the mainland. Called simply Gadir—the Phoenician word for fortress or citadel—it was known to the Romans as Gades, and eventually Cádiz. Gadir’s primary attraction was its proximity to the Guadalquivir River and the Río Tinto, which offered access to the silver mines of the Sierra Morena and Huelva. Silver, gold, and tin had been mined in the region since the Bronze Age, but smelting operations in Huelva intensified around the seventh century BCE, probably in response to Phoenician demand for silver. As one historian has put it, “only high economic returns can explain the eccentric location of Gadir”—that is, more than two thousand miles from Tyre, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar on the shores of the Atlantic, and without another major trading partner in the region. Certainly it is a long way to ship olive oil, perfumes and scented oils, textiles, jewelry, and the other Phoenician and Greek exports for which evidence survives, and it was not until the later eighth and early seventh centuries BCE that Phoenicians began settling along the Andalusian coast of southeast Spain, the Balearic island of Ibiza, and Malta. Phoenician shipping also reached the Portuguese coast, while Gaditeans sailed south to the rich fishing banks between Mauritania and the Canary Islands, about four days from Gadir. The most substantial of the settlements on the African coast was at Lixus, at the mouth of the Loukkos River in northern Morocco, which flowed from the western Atlas Mountains with their wealth of gold, ivory, salt, copper, and lead. Farther south, the Phoenicians reached the island of Mogador (near Essaouira, Morocco) about 380 miles from Gibraltar, where the primary activities seem to have been fishing and whaling.

  Even after the bitter fighting that accompanied the fall of the Neo-Assyrians and the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire at the end of the seventh century, the Tyrians remained important players in the far-flung network of Near Eastern trade. Writing during his captivity in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel described Tyre’s imports at considerable length. As it had in the days of Hiram four centuries before, Israel supplied “wheat, millet, honey, oil, and balm,” but virtually all the other goods he mentions are high-value or luxury items: silver, iron, tin, and lead from Tarshish (perhaps one of Tyre’s overseas colonies); slaves and bronze statues from Ionia and central Anatolia; horses from Armenia; ivory and ebony brought by merchants of Rhodes; turquoise, linen, embroidered cloths, coral, and rubies from the Negev Desert; wine and wool fro
m Syria; cassia, iron, saddlecloths, lambs, and goats from Arabia; spices, gold, and precious stones from Yemen and Africa; and so on. Ezekiel also describes the diverse sources on which the Tyrians drew to build and man their fleets, gathering cedar, fir, and oak from the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountains, Cyprus pine, and linen sailcloth from Egypt, while her crews and shipwrights came from Sidon, Arvad, and Byblos. In short, the web of Tyrian enterprise embraced nearly the entire Near East and Mediterranean.

  For all their enterprise, Phoenicians did not have a monopoly of Mediterranean trade. The most important evidence of other merchants, including Greeks and possibly Cypriots, comes from Al-Mina, a neutral trading center at the mouth of the Orontes River just north of the modern Syro-Turkish border. The port, which may have been little more than a landing beach, had been overrun in the twelfth century BCE but was revived later by Phoenicians. Many believe that Al-Mina was the first Levantine port frequented by Greeks and thus the point from which a range of oriental influences such as metalworking techniques, religious ideas, literature, and writing infiltrated the Greek world. By 800 BCE, the date of the earliest Greek pottery found there, it seems to have been a rendezvous for Greek merchants, many of them from the island of Euboea, “famed for its ships” and the launching pad of the first wave of overseas expansion from Iron Age Greece.

  Homer and Greek Maritime Expansion, Eighth Century BCE

  The oldest image of a ship from post-Mycenaean Greece is on a late-ninth-century BCE jar found on Euboea. While the Phoenicians were the preeminent seafarers of the time, such evidence suggests the involvement of sailors from Euboea in Mediterranean trade. Perhaps more convincing is the sudden diffusion of a Greek alphabet modeled on a Phoenician original. Just as some of the earliest Phoenician writings outside the Levant have been found along their trade routes—in Cyprus and Crete from the tenth century, and Sicily and Sardinia from the ninth—two of the oldest known specimens of Greek writing come not from the Greek mainland or islands but from areas visited by Euboean merchants in southern Italy. Thus the distribution of the alphabet—the last word in low-volume, high-value cargo and the most transformative agent of change in the ancient Greek world—must be credited to ninth-century Euboean merchants frequenting ports across the eastern Mediterranean.