Sea-going trade expanded in the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600–1100 BCE). The catastrophes that led to the sinking of ships— including foul weather, perilous rock formations, and pirates—created deposits that preserve glimpses into the movement of people and cargoes. The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery includes a display of a merchant ship that frames objects that could have been carried on and used by those who sailed these ships.
A shipwreck preserves objects that sank at one moment in time. By contrast, the objects displayed in our ship at the Penn Museum span the Late Bronze Age. Objects from shipwrecks—the ships, the personal effects of sailors, and the ship cargoes—were in transit over long distances at the time of their sinking. Objects on land could also have traveled over long distances, but they are found in more localized use contexts, such as houses, workshops, administrative buildings, storage rooms, temples, and tombs. Creating the ship display for our exhibition brought out similarities and differences among the forms, functions, and values of objects found underwater and similar objects that come from sites on land in Jordan, Israel, Cyprus, Egypt, and Greece in collections of the Penn Museum.
Merchant Sailing Ships
Merchant sailing ships in the Late Bronze Age traversed the Mediterranean, connecting Egypt and the coast of Western Asia with Cyprus, Greece, and places further west. Merchant vessels could carry luxury gifts sent from one ruler to another or could carry goods for other forms of exchange.
The structure of the ship displayed in the Penn Museum draws especially on evidence from Syrian merchant sailing ships portrayed in the New Kingdom tomb of Kenamn at Thebes, Egypt, and a 15-meter-long (50 ft) ship that sank ca. 1335–1305 BCE o the southern coast of Turkey near Uluburun. Smaller ships thought to be of similar design sank ca. 1200 BCE o the coast of Point Iria in Greece and near Cape Gelidonya on the southern coast of Turkey.
Our ship display gives visitors a sense of the size and scale of a merchant ship, but does not recreate any particular ship, a specific cargo, or a crew’s origin or final destination. A full-sized ship would not fit in the gallery, hence the ship is a cut-away view of one end of a hull, unspecified as to whether it is the bow or the stern. An unfurled sail hangs above. The emphasis is on the cargo hold, thus details of the deck, railings, and rigging have been omitted.
Discovering the Contents of Merchant Ships
George F. Bass was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania when he directed the pioneering excavation of the Cape Gelidonya ship in 1960, the first to employ techniques of land excavation at an underwater site and the first excavated by archaeologists also trained as divers. Underwater excavations of merchant ships have documented ship parts, cargoes of finished products and raw and/or recyclable materials, and personal belongings of the crew. The Penn Museum’s collections from sites in the Eastern Mediterranean region do not include objects found during the excavation of a ship or parts of a ship vessel.
Objects in our display that compare with the personal belongings of Late Bronze Age merchant ship sailors come mainly from two inland sites in Israel: Beth Shean, the site that is at the core of the Eastern Mediterranean Gallery (see Hubbard, page 74), and Beth Shemesh. Each of these cities had a population of Canaanites who lived under Egyptian rule in the Late Bronze Age.
Objects in our ship that compare with the cargoes of Late Bronze Age ships are from many sites that formed parts of the Eastern Mediterranean long-distance trade network. In addition to Beth Shean and Beth Shemesh, the objects are from the coastal towns of Gournia on Crete, Greece, and Kourion-Bamboula, Cyprus. There is also one object each from Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and the Baq’ah Valley in Jordan.
Crews and Their Belongings
People from many regions sailed on merchant ships. A drawing in the gallery includes two men from a hypothetical crew. Weight sets suggest that there were three or four merchants on board the Uluburun ship who served as crew and captain.
Merchants carried weights for measuring out quantities of precious metals. Next to the ship display is a case about merchants that includes hematite weights. One weight (29-107-627) at 27.72 g is the equivalent of three shekels, a widely used standard of weight between 9.3 and 9.4 g.
Merchants also carried seals, small objects worn as amulets and used to make impressions in clay as a kind of signature. A north Syrian cylinder seal, made of faience ca. 1600–1400 BCE, in the ship display has a carved design that includes a pair of lions and two men worshipping a sacred tree, emphasizing divine protection for the wearer.
Seals could be strung like beads. Beads similar to a round faience bead in our display (49-12-279) have been found all around the Eastern Mediterranean and were carried also as cargo on ships.
Sailors also wore amulets with symbols of their gods, similar to two gold pendants in our ship. One with an incised eight-ray star disk represents the star of Ishtar (Venus) (29-105-93). A crescent-shaped pendant may represent the moon god. Venus and the moon would have been important to sailors in navigation.
Crews would have used ceramic vessels for meals and terracotta oil lamps for light on board ship. Traces of burning are still visible on the pinched nozzle of a bowl-shaped lamp in the ship display.
Museum Object Number(s): 61-14-709 / 29-104-106 / 29-102-350
Shipping Containers
Much of a ship’s cargo, like fruit, wine, oil, and likely also textiles was shipped in containers. As on land, rarely are vessels found with their contents intact. A typical Late Bronze Age olive oil shipping container has two stirrup-shaped handles. Stirrup jars originated in Mycenaean Greece. Potters elsewhere copied the design, creating vessels like the one from Beth Shean in the ship display (32-15-146).
Museum Object Number(s): 54-41-99
Stirrup jars were shipped all around the Eastern Mediterranean, often being reused, sometimes for a di erent commodity. A squat stirrup jar in the ship display was made in Greece, but was found in the Baq’ah Valley, Jordan (81-14-641). A larger, coarser example with an octopus design was made on Crete, but it was found at Kourion-Bamboula, Cyprus. On one handle is an undeciphered Cypro-Minoan mark, perhaps added by a Cypriot merchant.
Enormous Cypriot storage vessels called pithoi served as shipping containers. They compare in shape and size with large ones from land sites, where pithoi stood on floors or were placed in pits cut into the floors. Due to their size, none of the many whole pithoi found at Kourion-Bamboula were exported to Philadelphia.
Goods were also shipped in Canaanite jars. The only complete Canaanite jar in the Penn collections (29-103168), reconstructed from many fragments, was not stable enough to be put on permanent display. A crew member in a drawing that accompanies the ship display carries one of these vessels. Its pointed base could be stuck into soft ground to stabilize it on land and these vessels were stacked inside cargo holds, often with the pointed base of one resting on the flat shoulder of another vessel below.
For an idea of the size and shape of these shipping containers, the gallery instead features a transport amphora (54-41-41) from ca. 600–500 BCE in a display about Phoenicians placed next to the ship and a pithos from Roman-period Kourion (see Smith, page 49).
Cargoes of Raw Materials and Recyclables
A drawing in the gallery shows a deck that covers a ship’s cargo hold, but the deck likely would not have covered the cargo hold entirely. Cargo was stacked tightly. George Bass described the stacking of raw copper ingots from Cyprus and scrap metal in the form of broken bronze plowshares in his Cape Gelidonya field notebook. In his publication he cited an example from Beth Shemesh (61-14-2570) as a close parallel for some plowshares from his excavations.
Museum Object Number(s): 49-12-299
Bronze vessels like one from Kourion-Bamboula in our display were carried as finished products or scrap metal, but their thin bodies do not survive well underwater, often leaving only the thickened rims behind.
Raw metals like copper were shipped in much larger quantities in standardized shapes of similar weight called ingots. Finding a whole ingot on land is rare in the Eastern Mediterranean. Copper “oxhide”-shaped ingots with four protruding handle-like corners are porous rather than solid, making it possible to divide them with a blow of a hammer. The ship display includes one of four fragments of ingots found at Gournia, Crete (MS4563B). Scientific analysis showed that the ingot fragments from Gournia were made of copper mined in Cyprus.
The ship display also includes a fragment of a blue glass ingot (E845.24). It retains part of the flat surface of the ingot made in a disc-shaped, slightly conical mold.
Cargoes of Finished Products
The Eastern Mediterranean Gallery has many finely crafted luxury objects that might have been carried on merchant ships. For conservation reasons, the small ivory cosmetic box lid in the ship display (4912-245) will alternate with another, similar example to preserve their delicate material. Removing one to return to storage and replacing it with the other also symbolically allows the ship in the gallery to unload and load cargo periodically. Their circular shapes measuring 5.6 and 5.8 cm in diameter show how they were made from slices of hippopotamus tusks. Ivory was also shipped in the form of tusks, but on land it is rare to find a whole one.
Cypriot table wares come from many sites around the Eastern Mediterranean. They could be carried as ship ballast to add weight after other more intrinsically valuable cargoes were unloaded. On land, as at Kourion-Bamboula, Cyprus, Cypriot white-slipped and hard-fired bowls (49-12-248) and jugs (49-12-316) with ring-shaped bases served as colorful and often shiny table wares.
Outside Cyprus, similar vessels might have been valued as exotica or antiques, as suggested by two vessels in the ship display. A hard-fired Cypriot jug with a ring-shaped base found at Beth Shemesh and a Cypriot jug with a shaved surface and pointed base found at Beth Shean (29-102764) were likely manufactured a century or more before their final use.
Consumers
People used the objects that we have selected for the ship display in their daily lives—at home, at work, and in worship—before losing, breaking, or deliberately burying them.
Residents of Kourion-Bamboula would have consumed the contents of the Cretan stirrup jar. They also placed vessels—the white-slipped bowl, bowl and jug with ring-shaped bases, and the bronze bowl—in tombs as parts of funerary dining equipment. Family members there also offered the ivory cosmetic box lids and the faience bead as gifts for the dead.
Museum Object Number(s): 61-14-979 / 61-14-980
A glass-worker likely discarded the glass ingot fragment in a workshop at Tell el-Amarna. The Gournia excavation notes make no mention of copper ingots. Possibly they were thought to be slag, the waste material from metalworking. The only mention of slag appears in notes for “House of the Sword Maker”, termed House Aa and published as House Ea. There slag was found in a storage space among pithos vessels, which compares with the find locations of several other copper ingots and their fragments on Crete. Recent excavations at Gournia have discovered evidence for bronze-working in the same part of the ancient town. Most likely a bronzesmith stored these ingot chunks, which could be melted down and made into tools, weapons, or other objects.
People at Beth Shean lit their house with the Canaanite lamp. Mercantile activity required the use of the hematite weight—among others—in a forerunner of the commander’s house. Also from Beth Shean are the small Cypriot jug with a pointed base, the Syrian faience cylinder seal, and the pendant amulet with the star of Ishtar. They were found in a temple (see Hubbard, page 58), placed there as dedications or used as temple equipment.
Someone at Beth Shemesh buried the crescent-shaped amulet as part of a hoard of gold and precious stones buried in a house. Elihu Grant, director of the Haverford College excavations at Beth Shemesh, described this find as a “thief’s loot.” We now understand this hoard— contained in a ceramic jug—to be one of many similar burials of precious materials from the end of the Late Bronze Age. The crescent likely was no longer valued as an amulet, but as one of many bits of precious metal and stone stored in the pot as a kind of currency. The owner likely had every intention of retrieving it rather than leaving it buried for millennia.
The objects that fill the Penn Museum ship provide views into the dynamics of merchant shipping and the consumers of the objects carried on board ships. The condition of these objects at the time of discovery and their find contexts reveal overlaps and divergences in the function and value of similar objects during transit and these objects at their final destinations.
Notes from the Field
Delving into the Penn Museum Archives revealed clues to the interpretation of many of the artifacts in the Ship display.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Cemal Pulak for sharing his thoughts about reconstructions of the Uluburun ship and Moritz Jansen for comments about studies of the copper ingots found at Gournia.