The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean

by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz

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  * We would like to thank the Institut National du Patrimoine Tunisie, Roald Docter, the Israel Antiquities Authority, Eilat Mazar, and Antonio Sáez Romero for their assistance in research carried out in preparation for this chapter.

  Chapter 27

  Seafaring and Shipwreck Archaeology

  Jeffrey P. Emanuel

  No other civilization in history is perhaps as strongly associated with the sea as the Phoenicians, whose ships and seafaring ability allowed them to travel, trade, and establish colonies across the Mediterranean Sea. However, though they were known as the “rulers of the sea” (Ezekiel 26:16) and were “famed for their ships” (Hom. Od. 15.415), and despite evidence for colonies and entrepôts from the Levantine coast to Africa and to the farthest western reaches of Europe, relatively little information is actually known about the lives and activities of their seagoing population, or about the development, construction, and use of their ships. They left behind almost no descriptions of their ships or seafaring activities, relegating us to rely on third-party accounts—Egyptian, Greek, Assyrian, and Hebrew—and a limited iconographic corpus, including Assyrian and Egyptian relief, along with representations on smaller media such as Phoenician coins and cylinder seals from Persepolis (Basch 1969; Casson 1971; on the loss of Phoenician literature, see also López-Ruiz, Chapter 18, this volume). Because of the limited scope of documentary and iconographic evidence, close study of ancient shipwrecks has greatly improved our knowledge and understanding of Phoenician and Punic seafaring. Well?preserved deep-water wrecks, like those off Ashkelon, can provide the opportunity for contextual and spatial study (Drap et al. 2015), while shallow-water wrecks can provide evidence for specific activities, such as local exchange and naval warfare (see below).

  Canaanite Seafaring and Maritime Innovation

  Though use of the term “Phoenician” is generally restricted to the first millennium BCE, the seafaring roots of these people extend at least into the Bronze Age. The best?known vessel from this period sank off the coast of Uluburun in the last years of the fourteenth century BCE with a cargo that included glass ingots, elephant and hippopotamus ivory, ostrich eggs, Syro-Canaanite jewelry, faience, and other valuable items, as well as Assyrian and Kassite seals and a gold scarab of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti (Bass 1997). The staple of the vessel’s fifteen-ton cargo was ten tons of copper ingots and another of tin. The second-largest cargo item by volume was terebinth resin, one and a half tons of which was aboard the Uluburun ship in at least 149 Canaanite jars. This resin was used as incense in Egypt, and it may have been added as a preservative to jars whose primary contents were wine (Pulak 1998). Also on board were large pithoi full of Cypriot ceramics, likely intended for a less elite
market segment.

  Aside from illustrating the high-value exchange so vividly described in the fourteenth century bce letters from the Amarna archive in Egypt, the Uluburun shipwreck also provides important evidence for an important development in ship construction, as it serves as the earliest physical example of pegged mortise and tenon joints used to fasten together hull planking. This technique, which replaced sewn-plank joinery, consisted of linking planks (mortises) by their edges via a tenon, which was inserted into the two connecting planks and secured with a wooden peg or nail—an edge-to-edge fastening method commonly used in the ancient Mediterranean. While mortise-and-tenon joinery would become common in the first millennium bce (and would be known into the Roman period as coagmenta punicana, “Phoenician joints”; Sleeswyk 1980), the Uluburun shipwreck demonstrates its developed use on a vessel likely of Syro-Canaanite origin at a much earlier date (Pulak 1997).

  Mortise-and-tenon joinery was also a feature of a ship that foundered a century later, ca. 1200 bce, off of Cape Gelidonya in southern Anatolia. Discovered in 1954 by a local sponge diver and excavated in 1960, this small vessel’s cargo included copper ingots and tin bars, as well as a quantity of scrap metal likely intended for recasting. The stone pan-balance weights on board were based on Near Eastern standards, and personal items found among the wreckage suggested a Syro-Canaanite origin of the vessel and its crew. This was a paradigm-shifting discovery: while it had been assumed up to that point that maritime trade in the eastern Mediterranean was conducted almost entirely by Mycenaeans, and that Canaanites had not taken to the sea with purpose until the first millennium, the Gelidonya shipwreck provided a heretofore unrecognized Bronze Age background for the Phoenicians’ Iron Age maritime activity (Bass 2012) (for the Canaanite background of the Phoenicians, see chapter 4, this volume).

  The development of mortise-and-tenon joinery is a microcosm of the accelerated innovation in maritime technology that marked the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. Many of these innovations likely originated in the pre-Phoenician seafaring communities of the Syro-Canaanite littoral (Emanuel 2014). Perhaps most important was the loose-footed sail and brailed rig, a system by which the sail could be raised, lowered, and adjusted like a Venetian blind, allowing vessels to sail more closely to the wind than their boom-footed square sail-rigged predecessors. The earliest evidence for this rig, found in secondary deposition at Saqqara, is an Egyptian relief of cargo being unloaded from two Syro-Canaanite vessels, while the most famous second millennium depiction can be seen in the naval battle relief on the walls of Ramesses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu (Emanuel 2014). As Shelley Wachsmann has noted, “this rig, more than any other single factor, permitted the remarkable ‘explosion’ in vastly extended sea routes and long-distance colonization that we witness beginning in the early first millennium bc” (Wachsmann 2000: 234).