The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (15 page)

A cuneiform list from the twenty-first century
BCE
describes large-scale operations dedicated to the construction of both reed and wooden hulls, including more than fifteen hundred
pine, palm, and tamarisk trees, eight tons of palm fiber rope, twelve thousand bundles of reeds,
fish oil, “
asphalt for the coating of Magan type boats,” and other materials. These figures give no indication of what was needed for a single vessel, but a replica built at Sur, Oman, in 2005 provides some answers. Working from construction details provided by the bitumen slabs and a study of the 217 surviving boat models and 186 illustrations from seals or sealings of the third millennium
BCE
, experimental archaeologists built a succession of reed boats, starting with a 1-to-20 scale model, a five-meter-long prototype, and the twelve-meter “
Magan Boat.” This had a
capacity of about thirty
gur
(a standard unit of measure for Mesopotamian vessels), or 7.5 tons, probably an average size for wood vessels, though near the upper limit for reed hulls. The most commonly mentioned large vessels ran about sixty
gur,
and the most capacious ships at the end of the third millennium measured three hundred
gur,
or about ninety tons.

The materials list for the modern “Magan Boat” included almost three tons of reeds, thirty kilometers of fiber rope made from date palm or goat hair (the latter is immensely strong and much easier to handle), more than a ton of timber, and two tons of bitumen mixed with chopped reeds. Wood was used for the keelson, frames, and horizontal beams that spanned the gunwales, but the hull was further strengthened by pairs of reed bundles set like frames. A woven mat lay between the bitumen and the reed bundles. The vessel was rigged with a bipod mast setting a
square sail hung from a single yard, and steered with a pair of
quarter rudders. The bitumen waterproof seal worked as intended, but it was virtually impossible to keep water from sloshing over the sides and
as much as three tons of water was absorbed by the reeds, thereby reducing the amount of cargo and stores that could be carried. Nonetheless, sea trials proved the boat a capable sailer, easily handled and relatively fast, attaining speeds of five knots or more in a moderate breeze. With favorable winds one might make the passage from the head of the Persian Gulf to Magan in about a week, depending on the number of stops, while returning against the prevailing northwesterlies would be slower. The duration of the passage to
Harappa would depend on the strength of the monsoon winds.

The Magan Boat, a modern interpretation of an Omani ocean carrier of the late third millennium
BCE
built in 2005. The A-frame mast distributes the downward pressure across the reed bundles that form the hull. The reeds are made waterproof by the application of a bitumen amalgam, the recipe for which was derived from fragments of ancient sheathing found near Ras al-Jinz, the easternmost point of Oman on the Arabian Sea. Courtesy Tom Vosmer.

The degree to which the uncertainties of long-distance sea trade affected relations between merchants and the political and religious establishment—
which were often one and the same—is difficult to gauge. Much of Mesopotamia’s trade was in the hands of individual merchants, although the temples were heavily involved and temple complexes could double as warehouses. A collection of documents from the end of the third millennium
BCE
describes the transactions of one merchant,
Lu-Enlilla, who withdrew from a temple thousands of kilograms of wood, timber, and fish, more than fifteen hundred liters of sesame oil, garments, and hides to trade for copper in Magan. Private investors could lend money either at a fixed rate, thereby minimizing both their risk and their reward, or with the intent of sharing in the profits, thereby assuming more risk if the merchant suffered losses. Mesopotamians did not have the severe restrictions on interest later dictated by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim law, and temples and individuals routinely charged
interest rates of 20 to 33
percent. The role of traders not dependent on the temple and state helps explain why, when the
Ur Dynasty collapsed within a quarter century of Lu-Enlilla’s time, Persian Gulf commerce continued, although Mesopotamian merchants seem to have lost much of their trade to
Dilmun.

Mesopotamia regained its political cohesion during the First Dynasty of Babylon, which spanned the nineteenth to seventeenth centuries
BCE
. In the 1700s
BCE
,
Hammurabi ruled much of lower
Mesopotamia and as far west as the Amorite trading city of
Mari on the upper Euphrates. (The
Amorites were a Semitic-speaking people whose spread from Arabia into Syria and Mesopotamia around the turn of the millennium probably stimulated, or was stimulated by, a new emphasis on east–west trade both overland and via the Euphrates.) Hammurabi is best known for his Code of Laws, the most complete to survive from ancient Mesopotamia. Promulgated toward the end of his reign, many of the laws have a direct bearing on merchants’ relations and interest rates, and seven touch directly on shipping. Three specify the rates to be charged for hiring vessels of up to sixty
gur.
Others dictate the cost of building a sixty-
gur
ship—two shekels—and guarantee boats for a year.
^b
The
pay of
sailors was fixed at six
gur
of grain per year, but sailors were liable for any damages arising from their negligence. The law also includes a rare early example of a “rule of the road,” which in this case mandates that the master of
a vessel proceeding downstream has to steer clear of a vessel heading against the current, and making him liable for any damages resulting from his carelessness.
^c
One can trace the evolution of commercial law and the rights and responsibilities of ships’ officers and crew from this point forward, but few
navigation rules had the force of law before the advent of steam navigation in the nineteenth century.

Sumero-
Akkadian culture spread fairly evenly across
Mesopotamia but political unification was difficult to achieve and harder to maintain, and even Hammurabi’s success was short-lived. Babylon’s imperial demise began in the reign of his son and successor, when the southern Sumerian cities began to reassert their independence. The political situation continued to deteriorate for a century (coinciding with the period of
Hyksos rule in Egypt) and in 1595
BCE
an invasion by the
Hittites of central Anatolia overwhelmed the Babylonians. The north was absorbed into the Mitanni kingdom, which originated in
Iran, while southern Mesopotamia fell to the obscure
Sealand Dynasty. There was a simultaneous decline in the cohesion of the Indus civilization and the disruptions at both ends of the route led to a thousand-year hiatus in long-distance sea trade between Pakistan and India and the Persian Gulf.

As if to announce the reorientation of Mesopotamian trade toward the Mediterranean, the last surviving text to mention “Dilmun copper,” from 1745
BCE
, is also the first to mention Cypriot copper: “
12 minas [360 kilograms] of refined copper of Alashiya [Cyprus] and of Dilmun.” Throughout antiquity, the island of Cyprus was a major producer of copper (its modern name comes from the Greek word for copper), which is one of the two primary elements, with tin, of bronze, the most durable alloy available in the ancient Near East, where the
Bronze Age lasted roughly from 3000 to 1000
BCE
. Most Cypriot copper probably entered the Levant through the
ports of
Byblos or
Ugarit, from where merchants carried it overland to the Euphrates and downstream to Mesopotamia.

One of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the foremost Levantine port of the early Bronze Age, Byblos lies about forty kilometers north of Beirut. It has yielded more Egyptian stone work, including statuary, reliefs, and other pieces than anywhere else in the Near East. The disproportionate number of letters from Byblos found in the Egyptian diplomatic archive at Amarna sheds considerable light on the close and enduring ties between Egypt and this maritime gateway to the Near East, especially in the 1300s
BCE
. Yet archaeological evidence shows that by then Byblite mariners had been trading to Egypt for two thousand years. Byblos’s prosperity long depended on that of Egypt, and when Mesopotamian or Egyptian pioneers developed an overland route through
Canaan, the port may have been abandoned briefly. Thanks to the abundant forests in its hinterland, and Egypt’s need for wood, Byblos
reemerged as an important trading center in the early third millennium
BCE
, and it was likely the port through which the first recorded shipment of cedar passed en route to Egypt during the reign of
Sneferu in the 2600s
BCE
. Five centuries later the port was hard hit by the end of Egypt’s
Old Kingdom, but it recovered in the second millennium. It was later a major importer of Egyptian
papyrus, and the Greeks took the name of the port of Byblos for “papyrus,” “book,” and, ultimately, the
Bible.

An oared ship and fish—perhaps intended as a figurehead—on a roiling sea decorate this Early Minoan (2700–2300
BCE
) terra-cotta “pan” buried in a tomb on the Cycladic island of Syros. Though highly stylized, the elongated prow anticipates the more realistically rendered bows seen in the
Thera murals 1,500 years later. Photograph by Hermann Wagner, D-DAI-ATH-NM #3701. Courtesy of the Deutsche Archäologische Institut, Athens.

In about 1600
BCE
, Byblos started trading to the west, especially to Cyprus and Crete, the largest Mediterranean islands east of
Sicily. The cultural and material exchanges between the Levant and Crete helped shape the
Minoan culture that flourished from the late third millennium through the fifteenth century
BCE
and left its imprint on the
Mycenaeans of mainland Greece. Named for the mythical King Minos, the civilization of ancient Crete has enjoyed good press since the fifth century
BCE
, when both
Herodotus and Thucydides depicted Minos as a conqueror of the southern Aegean. Thucydides notes that “
Minos, according to tradition, was the first person to organize a navy. He controlled the greater part of what is now called the Hellenic [Aegean] Sea; he ruled over the
Cyclades [Islands]…. And it is reasonable to suppose that he did his best to put down piracy in order to secure his own revenues.”

This theory of a Minoan thalassocracy—literally, “empire of the sea”—has proved remarkably resilient, especially considering that Minos is a mythical rather than an historical character, that the period of the
Minoans’ greatest influence ended more than a thousand years before Herodotus and Thucydides, and that the traditions these historians preserve are oral rather than written. There is no doubt that
Cretans were sailing to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean as early as the third millennium
BCE
. But images of a Cretan colonization of the Aegean and as high seas enforcer owe much to Thucydides’ interpretation, which reflects his fellow Athenians’ concerns about suppressing piracy and other threats to their trade by building the most powerful fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. The reception of his ideas today follows from modern notions of sea power and
maritime hegemony as articulated by such strategists as Alfred Thayer Mahan, who promoted the development of fleets in the mold of the ubiquitous and omnipotent Royal Navy at the end of the nineteenth century, when the
British Empire was at its height. Archaeology has shown Thucydides’ claim of a Cretan colonization of the Cyclades to be overstated at best. The prevailing view is that
Neolithic migrants moving west from Anatolia settled the islands and the
Peloponnese, to which they introduced new farming techniques and crops, including olives and wine. While contact between Crete and the Cyclades is easy to see, there is little evidence of direct Minoan rule in the archipelago.