The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (17 page)

These letters were among dozens found in the ruins of the city, which the invaders pillaged and abandoned. Many city-states suffered a similar fate, yet despite the widespread destruction survivors of the turmoil managed to
maintain at least some maritime connections between the Levant and other shores of the eastern and central Mediterranean. In the first three centuries of the
Iron Age that followed, these were far less robust than they had been, but they formed the basis for the Phoenician and Greek overseas expansion in the ninth and eighth centuries
BCE
.

Inscriptions at Medinet Habu describing
Ramesses III’s repulse of the Sea People present the most complete pictorial record of a Bronze Age naval engagement. The earliest reference to such a sea battle is on a stele erected at
Tanis, in the Nile
delta, and refers to Ramesses II’s victory over a fleet of “
Shardana, rebellious of heart … and their battle-ships in the midst of the sea,” around 1280
BCE
. The Shardana are depicted subsequently as fighting both for and against the Egyptians, and they were among the “northern” allies of the
Libyans defeated by the Egyptians in 1218
BCE
. The next naval battle in the historical record is described in slightly more detail in a letter from the last Hittite king,
Suppiluliumas II, around 1210
BCE
. “
Against me the ships from Cyprus drew up in line three times for battle in the midst of the sea. I destroyed them, I seized the ships and in the midst of the sea I set them on fire.” Whoever these Cyprus-based sailors were, their momentum was little disturbed by this setback, and Suppiluliumas goes on to write that they later landed “in multitudes.” Shortly thereafter, the Hittite empire collapsed.

The record of
Ramesses III’s victory over the Sea People in around 1176
BCE
is more substantial, although where the battle took place is a mystery. The traditional view is that it was fought somewhere in or near the Nile delta, but the Egyptians may have intercepted the enemy somewhere on the coast of
Canaan, perhaps near Ashkelon. As for the enemy ships that survived the initial battle, “
Those who came upon the sea, the consuming flame faced them at the Nile mouths … they were dragged up, surrounded and cast down upon the shore, slaughtered in heaps from head to tail.” The Sea People may have had the advantage of iron weapons in land fighting, but in this battle their weapon of choice was the spear, while the Egyptians had long-range composite bows and grapnels for use at close range. This meant that the Egyptians could open fire on the enemy ships at a distance and so reduce their fighting effectiveness while remaining relatively unscathed. When the ships closed with one another, the Egyptians threw their grapnels into the enemy’s masts and rigging and then backed their vessels away to capsize the Sea People’s ships.

Taken together, the accounts of Suppiluliumas II and Ramesses III reveal a good deal about ship-to-ship fighting at the time. Three sorts of weapons are indicated: fire, in the accounts of Suppiluliumas and Ramesses; spears belonging to the Shardana; and bows, slings, and grapnels in the hands of the
Egyptians. A fire out of control is one of the most feared and deadly calamities that can befall a ship. If one has the wind at one’s back, it can be an effective means of terrifying the enemy and destroying ships, but fire is notoriously indiscriminate and despite scrupulous handling the smallest mistake or the slightest wind shift can turn it back on its user. For this reason, fire is best used at the longest possible range. There is no indication of how either the Hittites or the Egyptians employed fire, but it may have been delivered via flaming arrows. Until the end of the age of sail in the nineteenth century, most naval engagements were decided in boarding actions in which ships served as little more than floating battlefields. Before the development of the ship’s gun, bows and arrows and spears could be employed when the ships were still some distance apart, but sea fights generally involved closing the range between vessels so that they lay together hull-to-hull. The use of grapnels to capsize enemy ships as shown at Medinet Habu is rare. More commonly they were employed to lash ships together so that crew sweeping onto the enemy’s decks would not fall between the ships and be crushed or drowned.

Throughout the
New Kingdom, the Egyptians exploited their shiphandling ability and their dominance on the coastal sea-lanes to establish an effective naval force capable of providing logistical support for long-distance campaigns both at home and abroad. They also used their maritime forces for amphibious operations, as seen in the campaigns against the
Hyksos in
Avaris and the Mitanni along the
Euphrates. Against the Sea People they had the advantage of organization, hierarchical command, and military discipline. The enemy was probably little more than an improvised fleet cobbled together from disparate groups of raiders, well suited for attacking smaller ports and groups of merchantmen in piratical raids, but less capable of seizing larger objectives. Naval warfare between centralized states with comparable fleets, strategies, and tactics would not appear until the next millennium.

Although Ramesses III defeated the Sea People, Egypt’s influence over its Asian territories eroded over the course of the twelfth century
BCE
. This is nowhere better illustrated than in
“The Report of
Wenamun,” the long-suffering agent of the temple of
Amon at Thebes dispatched to purchase
cedar for “the great and noble riverine barge of
Amon-Re” in about 1050
BCE
. Wenamun’s account demonstrates both the loss of Egypt’s prestige and the importance of strong political and military power to safe trade. Sailing from the delta port of Tanis, Wenamun stopped at
Dor, where one of his crew absconded with half a kilogram of gold and more than two kilograms of silver. When the local ruler refused to compensate him, Wenamun sailed for Tyre, where he took about three kilograms of silver from a merchant ship that probably hailed from Dor, before continuing to Byblos. Prince
Tjekerbaal
ordered him repeatedly to leave, but Wenamun refused. A month later, the two entered into negotiations during which Tjekerbaal reminded Wenamun that when the pharaohs of old approached his ancestors for wood, they sent gifts and payment.

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.

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 con
sumers.

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 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.