The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (14 page)

Sumerian king lists include a Gilgamesh who ruled sometime between 2800 and 2500
BCE
, but the oldest extant versions of the Gilgamesh epic date from
the early second millennium. The story has two main parts, the first telling of the friendship and adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and the second relating the story of the flood. Versions of the story survive in the Sumerian,
Akkadian,
Hurrian, and Hittite languages, and details changed over time to suit the expectations and experience of the audience. Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s first adventure is to slay
Humbaba, keeper of the forest. According to the Sumerian version of the story, Humbaba lived in the
Zagros Mountains to the east. In Akkadian retellings from about a thousand years later, the pair headed west for the cedar forests of Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast, a change consistent with the different geographic orientations of the two cultures. In both versions, when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh, fearful for his own mortality, sets out to consult
Utnapishtim, a man who survived a flood sent by the gods to destroy mankind and was rewarded with the gift of immortality.

A Mesopotamian cylinder seal (2.7 centimeters high), and the sealing it makes when impressed into wet clay. Found at Tello, Iraq (the ancient Girsu), on the Euphrates River about 250 kilometers southeast of modern Baghdad and 80 kilometers north of Nasiriyah, the third millennium
BCE
seal shows the god Ea, identified by his goat head, and two other figures on a
riverboat. Courtesy of the Louvre Museum, France/Art Resource, New York.

To reach Utnapishtim on the island of
Dilmun, Gilgamesh has to ride with the ferryman, for whom he cuts 120 poles preserved with a coating of bitumen. (Canal vessels were propelled by poling, and orders for wooden poles up to six meters long survive.) They travel for three days until they reach the waters of death and in crossing the shallows Gilgamesh breaks all the punting poles. “
Then Gilgamesh stripped himself and as a sail / held up the animal
skin he had been wearing, / and so the little boat sailed on the waters”—a means of propulsion not unlike windsurfing, a sport invented four thousand years later. Learning that Gilgamesh seeks to know whether he, like Enkidu, must die, Utnapishtim offers an explanation of human mortality that reads like an accountant’s take on
Ecclesiastes: “
How long does a building stand before it falls? / How long does a contract last? How long will brothers / share the inheritance before they quarrel?…/ From the very beginning nothing at all has lasted.” He then tells Gilgamesh how he achieved immortality in a story that anticipates that of
Noah and the ark.

One day, the gods decided to destroy the city of Shurrupak on the Euphrates, one of the five cities that ancient Mesopotamians believed antedated the flood. Ea (the Akkadian Enki), a god of wisdom well disposed toward mankind, told Utnapishtim to build a boat big enough to take a sample of every living thing. The vessel was huge, its width equal to its length (not unlike an enormous
quffa
) with six or seven decks. Utnapishtim waterproofed the hull inside and out with a mixture of oil, pitch, and
asphalt. Because of its inordinate size, the vessel had to be launched with the help of rollers, a method that suggests a flat-bottomed hull. After a storm that lasted seven days, the waters covered the earth, but the boat came to rest on Mount Nimush. A week later, Utnapishtim sent forth in turn a dove, a swallow, and a raven to look for land. The first two
birds returned to the ship, but the last did not, signifying it had found dry ground where the flood was receding. After offering sacrifices, Utnapishtim and his wife left the ship and were granted immortality on Dilmun, which probably refers to the island of
Bahrain.

Dilmun also figures in the economic records of early Mesopotamia. The Persian Gulf had been a conduit for trade in metals, wood, stone, and other commodities from lands bordering the Indian Ocean as early as the fifth millennium
BCE
, but until about 2900
BCE
the Sumerians seem to have had more contact with and influence on Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. Thus their identification of an abode of immortality somewhere in the Persian Gulf may reflect the Mesopotamians’ shifting gaze in the third millennium
BCE
. Lying midway between the head of the Persian Gulf and the
Strait of Hormuz and peppered with approximately one hundred thousand burial mounds, as well as the ruins of a substantial city, Bahrain had abundant stocks of fish, dates, and freshwater. On the arid Persian Gulf, the last would have been as much a lubricant of long-distance trade
in antiquity as oil is today. Dilmun’s natural resources were not insignificant, but its prominence at the time depended on the ability of its merchants to capitalize on their geographic position and to make themselves indispensable middlemen in the trade between two richer regions. The merchants of Dilmun acted as intermediaries in Mesopotamia’s
overseas trade. One king “
had ships of Dilmun transport timber from foreign lands” for building temples; there are numerous receipts for copper carried by Dilmunite traders; and votive models of ships on the Dilmun run have been found in temples in
Ur.

The best known reference to
Mesopotamia’s overseas trade describes how the founder of the Akkadian Dynasty, Sargon, triumphed over his neighbors to make his city a center of interregional commerce around 2300
BCE
: “
Ships from
Meluhha,
Magan, and Dilmun made fast at the dock of Akkad.” Sargon’s capital has not been located, but Akkad was probably in the vicinity of modern
Baghdad, about five hundred kilometers from the Persian Gulf. Magan refers to the lands of the lower Persian Gulf, and Meluhha the Indus Valley civilization. According to tradition,
Sargon was born in the highlands of the upper Euphrates, of humble origins but with a miraculous infancy not unlike that of
Moses about eight hundred years later: “
My mother, the
entum,
conceived me, in secret she bore me; / She placed me in a basket of rushes, she sealed ‘my door’ [the lid] with bitumen; she cast me into the river which did not rise over me; / The river bore me up and carried me to Aqqi, the water-drawer.” During his half-century reign, Sargon continued a policy of expansion that began with the defeat of his predecessor, who had unified southern
Mesopotamia and expanded Sumer’s traditional worldview by “opening the way” for merchants to travel in safety from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, or “
from the Lower Sea by the Tigris and Euphrates unto the Upper Sea.” For the time being, however, the Akkadians’ faced firmly eastward.

Sargon’s reign opened a vibrant period in the history of Mesopotamia’s overseas relations. Meluhha, the first place mentioned in Sargon’s inscription, lay at the farthest limit of Mesopotamia’s overseas contacts and encompassed the coasts of modern Pakistan and northwest India. (The distance from the head of the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the
Indus River is 1,150 nautical miles.) It thus included the seaports of the Indus Valley or
Harappan civilization, the primary centers of which were
Mohenjo Daro, about 225 kilometers up the Indus, and Harappa, about 640 kilometers northeast of Mohenjo Daro. The
Indus civilization flourished between 2500 and 1700
BCE
and spread across parts of modern Pakistan,
Iran,
Afghanistan, and northwest India as far south as
Gujarat, a much greater area than any of the early Mesopotamian states or Egypt before the Eighteenth Dynasty. The ruins of Harappan society show a high degree of sophistication and organization, with large urban areas divided
into neighborhoods apparently distinguished by occupation. Harappan trading networks reached overland into
Central Asia and west across
Persia and by sea to the Persian Gulf.

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.
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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.

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.