Exotic bric-a-brac is important in providing historians with an idea as to
how far connections extended, but they do not represent the ship’s basic
cargo, which consisted of raw materials. Next in importance to the copper,
tin, and terebinth resin were almost 200“inekku stones,”cobalt blue glass
ingots in the shape of discs 6 inches in diameter and 2.5 inches thick. The
ship also carried opercula, shelly plates attached to murex that were used in
making incense. Miscellaneous pieces of gold and silver were found, includ-
ing rings and bracelets; four gold pendants bearing Canaanite motifs, one
showing thefigure of a nude woman, probably a goddess, holding a gazelle
in each hand; a gold chalice; and a small gold scarab with the inscription
“Nefertiti,”wife of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaton. The gold and silver were
apparently carried as scrap to be melted down and reused.
The ship appears to have been traveling westward when it met its doom.
This suggests a counterclockwise maritime system that brought goods from
Egypt to Levantine cities such as Byblos and Ugarit, then across to Cyprus
and westward along the coast of Anatolia to Crete, the Aegean islands, and
the Greek mainland before turning southward to cross the open sea–not an
especially difficult leg of the voyage owing to favorable currents and winds–
to the African coast and back to Egypt. Some more adventurous ships may
have occasionally wandered west to Sardinia for metals and perhaps as far as
Spain. The huge variety of products on the Uluburun shipwreck seems to
indicate it had been tramping, that is, sailing from port to port taking on
whatever was available and selling whatever would turn a profit. Tramping
could be combined with directional trade; a ship could be traveling under
the aegis of a king, perhaps sending gifts to another king, and engage in
buying and selling on the side. Or the ship could have been in a long-
distance haul headed for a single destination that served as the distribution
point for a whole region. This would have required a very complex system of
local distribution since the large quantity of metals, resin, and inekku stones
would have been quite beyond the needs of any single city or even all but
the largest of states.
Some of this cargo is likely to have been on official consignment, in par-
ticular the copper, which may have been sent by the King of Alashiya
(Cyprus) to the Egyptian pharaoh. However, much of it, including the
valuable scrap, appears to represent private enterprise. The capital invest-
ment for such a load must have been huge for its day, making the loss cat-
astrophic. Over 1,000 items were recovered at Uluburun, an enormous
quantity compared to what is normally found in land sites. If this ship had
not sunk, most of the articles on board, particularly the perishables and raw
metals, would never have made it into the archaeological record.
How and when the peoples of the Aegean began to trade directly with the
Levant and Egypt remains unrecorded. They had been exchanging obsidian
and many undetectable goods among themselves for thousands of years. The
introduction of metals energized this trade, which in turn stimulated the
Into the Aegean and out of the Bronze Age 55