Bronze Age wreck (14th century BC)
Bronze age wreck (14th century BC)
This page contains additional material and images for Chapter 2 of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.
My involvement with archaeology in Turkey began in 1984 when Alan Hall interviewed me for a travel scholarship from the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara. I can remember the day vividly – it was in the foyer of the Institute of Archaeology in London, and I was planning a full summer of fieldwork and travel in the Mediterranean before starting my PhD at Cambridge that autumn. Alan and I discussed my plans at length and I was delighted when he recommended that I be awarded a grant for a study tour of the main sites of Anatolia. In the event, after a month working with an Oxford University expedition on an Etruscan shipwreck off Italy, I stretched my grant to cover two months of travel that took me from the Aegean coast to the eastern border with the Soviet Union and Iran. A highlight for me was taking a boat to visit the Uluburun Bronze Age wreck excavation near Kaş, something that I had arranged with Dr George Bass after knowing I had been awarded the grant.
In my first term at Cambridge I wrote a report on my experience for the 36th Annual Report of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara – my first-ever academic publication – and then in 1993 the article reproduced below in the Illustrated London News, which had a long tradition of including articles on current excavations. In 1999 as an Adjunct Professor of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology I was invited by the project director, Dr Cemal Pulak, into the conservation lab in Bodrum Castle, where I was able to handle several of the artefacts that I had first seen on my study tour. By that time many of the artefacts were on display in the Bodrum Museum exhibit on the wreck, which includes a very compelling half-scale cross-section of the ship above a reconstruction of the wreck on the seabed. For anyone able to travel to Bodrum, a visit to the museum is highly recommended – it contains not only the Uluburun exhibit but also finds from other wrecks investigated by Bass and his teams since the early 1960s, and is one of the premier museums of underwater archaeology in the world.
Since the beginning of the excavation the Uluburun wreck has probably been the most extensively published of all wreck sites, not only through the excellent reports by George Bass and Cemal Pulak but also with numerous specialist reports on the artefacts and books and articles in which the place of the wreck in Bronze Age trade and society has been debated. Fortunately, several of the most important publications are available to read for free online, including detailed reports on the 1984, 1985 and 1986 campaigns in the American Journal of Archaeology. You can also see much about the wreck and many photos on the Institute of Nautical Archaeology website.
In my chapter I assert that the Uluburun wreck was as great a discovery as Tutankhamun’s tomb or the finds made by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia in the Royal Grave Circle at Mycenae. While I was writing the book I visited Mycenae to get a sense of this perspective, looking out from the citadel over the plain to the sea and imaging how the arrival of the ship might have looked over three thousand years ago. I also became fascinated by recent discoveries in the Near East that shed light on the origins of the cargo and the merchants involved, in particular the individuals revealed in clay tablets from Ugarit in present-day Syria. You can read a detailed account by Yoram Cohen published in 2021 on the ‘House of Urtenu’ archive here, and an article in Archaeology magazine here.
I am very grateful to Dr Cemal Pulak and Dr Rebecca Ingram of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology for permission to publish the two photos of the wreck included in the book.
Click on the images to enlarge:
This article was published on 1 November 1993 in the Illustrated London News.
Map showing the East Mediterranean at the time of the Uluburun wreck, which lay off the coast of southern Turkey below where I have added the red arrow (Simeon Netchev, World History Encyclopedia, Creative Commons License).
View of the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, Greece. Much of the scholarship on the Uluburun wreck has come from the point of view of ancient Egypt and the Near East, reflecting the likely origin of the ship and its cargo as well as the rich backdrop of written and archaeological evidence for trade at the time. My own background as a classical archaeologist inclines me to see things from a Greek perspective, and that was in my mind when I visited Mycenae in February 2023 while I was writing this chapter. There can be no certainty that the ship was heading to Mycenae, but it seems very likely and the finds excavated there show that other cargoes with Egyptian and Near Eastern goods had certainly arrived about that time – including a scarab of Queen Tiye of Egypt, dated not long before the Nefertiti scarab from the wreck, found in a room just along the side of the citadel to the left in this photo. From this viewpoint just outside the grave circle excavated by Schliemann you can see across the Argolid plain to the Gulf of Nauplion where the ships would have arrived. Both the grave circle and the famous Lion Gate that you can see in the banner of this page were already there and would have been seen by merchants and envoys coming up from the plain to visit the king in his citadel.
Head of Nefertiti, found in 1912 at Amarna, Egypt, c. 1345 BC. The Uluburun wreck is the first in history that can be associated with an individual whose image survives - Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother as well as mother-in-law of Tutankhamun. Because the gold scarab with her hieroglyphic name from the wreck was probably old at the time it was lost - either carried as scrap or as a decorative or talismanic item than no longer held power in Egypt but might have done elsewhere - the other individual whose image survives who may actually have been contemporaneous with the wreck was Tutankhamun himself. It would be hard to find two more compelling and significant individuals to be linked with archaeology in this way - the one celebrated through history for her beauty and her heretic husband, and the other for the extraordinary light that the discovery of his tomb has shed on ancient Egypt at the time of its greatest wealth. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin ÄM 21300 (Credit: Berlin State Museums, Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection / Sandra Steiß, Creative Commons License).
Clay tablet from Amarna, Egypt, c. 1346-1332 BC (length 14 cm). Unlike the Bronze Age world of north-west Europe described in the previous chapter, that of the East Mediterranean was one in which writing was widespread and survives to give an extraordinarily rich picture of society at the time – through the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt and the clay tablets in which scribes wrote in wedge-shaped ‘cuneiform’. One of the most important of those archives, from Akhenaten’s short-lived capital of Amarna, gives a remarkable picture of the mechanisms of trade about the time of the Uluburun wreck. In this letter, the King of Alashiya, probably Cyprus, greets the King of Egypt, promising to send him copper in return for an ebony bed encrusted in gold, a golden chariot, horses, linen and oil, and speaks of an alliance between them – evidence that much ‘trade’ may best be seen as tribute or gift-exchange between rulers, creating and cementing alliances that may also have involved royal marriages. British Museum E29789 (© The Trustees of the British Museum, Creative Commons License).