"19 Uluburun shipwreck, Suppiluliuma, Middle Assyria, Ugarit, LBA collapse, Sea Peoples"

More than 3,000 years ago, a ship left the island of Cyprus, 20 tons of cargo and royal gifts. It was probably heading for Greece. The wooden boat was 49 feet long and sturdily built. But off the coast, at a place now known as Ulubarun in Turkey, the crew faced a crisis and the ship sank. It stayed there, untouched, on the seafloor until it was discovered by underwater archaeologists in 1982. Over the next decade, the archaeologists were able to recover many objects from the wreck and to begin to piece together a surprisingly vivid picture of ancient Near Eastern trade. When the ship was first recovered, there was a lot of discussion about which country it might have come from. Was it from Canaan or Greece or Cyprus? The crew's possessions consisted of objects from all over the place. Including an Egyptian gold scarab, Mycenaean pots from Greece and sets of Canaanite weights. And the ship's hold was packed with 10 tons of copper from Cyprus in the form of 354 ingots. Each ingot weighed about 50 pounds. There was no obvious single source for the goods on board. The director of the excavation concluded that the crew was probably mostly from Syria and Canaan. Four of the passengers appeared to be merchants who'd brought along sets of balance weights so that they could weigh gold and silver payments or bulk goods that they might be buying. Someone, presumably the captain of the ship, had a Canaanite sword. The crew would have used the simple bowls, knives and Canaanite oil lamps that were found. They fished with fish hooks and net sinkers. And they seemed to have had a simple life on board. To pass the time, they kept a set of knuckle bones. The knuckle bones might have worked much like dice in modern games. The boat wasn't just a trading vessel though. Two other men on board appeared to have been ambassadors. And some of the goods in the hold might have been luxury gifts for their king in Greece. Perhaps received from the king of Alashia in what is now Cyprus. This was during the Mycenaean period in Greece, hundreds of years before the classical era. It was the time that provided the setting for the later legends of the Iliad and the Odyssey. We know from contemporaneous records that the king of Alashia sent vast amounts of copper to the pharaoh in Egypt in exchange for luxury goods. So he probably had similar relationships with other lands, possibly including Mycenaean Greece. Each of the shipwrecked diplomats had a five-piece set of Mycenaean pouring and drinking vessels. Each one also had a necklace, a Mycenaean sword, and a seal to stamp his goods. Between them, they owned five razors to shave with. They were elite, important men. Their swords demonstrate that. And they didn't have weights and measures, so they weren't merchants. The cargo also included one ton of tin. Which is just the right amount to make 11 tons of bronze when combined with the 10 tons of copper that were also aboard the ship. Bronze was essential to the economy of this period. It was used to make all kinds of tools, weapons, and statues. Regions that didn't have access to copper and tin had no choice but to import it. There were also almost 800 pounds of glass ingots from Egypt in the Near East, along with 24 stone anchors and 150 Canaanite jars, half of which were filled with 1,000 pounds of terebinth resin. Terebinth was used as incense and as part of the mix for making perfumed oil. There were other goods as well, ebony logs and ivory tusks from Africa, and three ostrich eggshells, along with spices and olives. So the ship must have picked up some goods in Canaan, things like the terebinth, the tin, the glass ingots, and then it moved on to Cyprus. There, perhaps, the Mycenaean ambassadors joined the crew after having visited the Alishean court, and the boat was loaded with the copper. The vessel was probably on its way to Greece when it sank. We don't know if the crew, the merchants, and the envoys survived. No skeletons were found, and the boat was only 60 yards from shore, so perhaps they did. One great thing about the Uluburun shipwreck is that it's like a time capsule, frozen just the way it was before sinking. We know from letters between kings of this time that vast amounts of gold, copper, and other luxury goods were regularly sent from one court to another, and the shipwreck shows how some of these goods were transported. The Akkadian language of Mesopotamia was the lingua franca of the age, and letters written in Akkadian passed regularly between the courts of the Near Eastern kings. Only a tiny fraction of what was written has survived, and just a couple of shipwrecks have been found. But they hint at a time of just unprecedented international cooperation. The Uluburun shipwreck provides a clue that the Mycenaean Greeks were part of this diplomatic world. We can guess this because of the people on the boat and the gifts they appear to have been bringing. We don't yet have any letters from Mycenaean kings to the great kings of the other lands, but letters might well have existed and just not been found yet. The ship and its passengers were probably taking a circular route around the eastern Mediterranean. After unloading the goods and letting off the ambassadors in Greece, the vessel would have gone on to Crete, then across the Mediterranean to Egypt, and back along the coast eastwards to Canaan. Ships on this route probably also stopped at the city of Ugarit on the north Syrian coast. This was one of the great international ports of the late Bronze Age. That's the period from around 1600 to 1200 BCE. Ugarit was in the orbit of Egyptian power, but it wasn't a vassal of Egypt. Its people didn't pay tribute. Documents found there are written in almost all the languages of the region. Akkadian, Egyptian, Purian, Hittite, Cipro-Minoan, and Ugaritic. So people who lived and worked there came from all over the place. Ugarit was rich from trade, and from the manufacture and export of a vivid purple dye made from a shell called murex. The dye was so valuable that purple became the color of royalty for centuries afterward. Ugarit's royal family lived in a palace famous for being one of the most spectacular buildings in the region. The city prospered not only because of its strategic coastal location, but also because the era was peaceful and people could travel easily. So Ugarit had a diverse population and a thriving economy based on international trade, and little interest in maintaining a military. This whole international system of trade and diplomacy between independent states worked smoothly for centuries. If you wanted glass, you got it from Canaan or Egypt. If you wanted silver, you got it from Anatolia. Copper came from Cyprus, which was ancient Alashia. Horses came from Mitanni in Syria. The best textiles came from Babylonia in what is now Iraq. Olive oil and perfume came from Greece. Ivory and ebony from Africa. Incense from Arabia. And gold from Egypt. Ships were probably built and manned in many different lands, and their cargos and crews were international. Merchants, envoys, craftsmen, and guards traveled across the entire region regularly, both on the water and across land in caravans. Ideas and artistic styles spread as well, so that you can find a wall painting in Nuzi, way over in northeastern Mesopotamia. It was influenced by the artistic style that developed on the island of Crete, more than 1,500 miles to the west. Of course, the general economy was still based on agriculture. Each land seems to have produced enough food for its own people, supported by irrigation to water the fields and river valleys, or by rainfall. Even high officials typically owned farmland. They would hire laborers to work the land, while also taking a personal interest in it. Now, one of the first things to go wrong with the international system didn't end up destroying it, but it was a shock. In Anatolia, during the 14th century BCE, a Hittite prince named Superliliuma swore allegiance to his brother, the king. But then he had his brother killed so that he could take the throne. This was a heinous crime, not just the murder, but also the fact that Superliliuma had broken an oath to the gods. And this would come back to haunt him later. Superliliuma was a contemporary of King Tushrata of Mitanni and of the pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt, as well as of a king named Burnaburiyash I in Babylonia. At first, Superliliuma seemed to fit into the brotherhood of kings just fine. For instance, he had his ambassadors negotiate a marriage with Babylon, and he married King Burnaburiyash's daughter. But soon, it was clear that he had no love for King Tushrata or for Mitanni. Superliliuma launched a military campaign that devastated some of Mitanni's cities, though he was unable to capture the capital. The whole campaign upended a lot of the assumptions that populations in small cities and vassal kingdoms had had about their safety. The leaders of the port city of Ugarit decided to side with him rather than to risk invasion. Tushrata of Mitanni died soon after this, killed by one of his sons. A relative then claimed the throne, while another of Tushrata's sons fled to Superliliuma for help. The Hittite king agreed and gave him troops to help him seize the throne. But this Mitannian prince was no longer independent after his victory. His land was now subject to Hatti, the land of the Hittites. Cementing the new relationship between Hatti and Mitanni, the prince of Mitanni married Superliliuma's daughter. But this wasn't a marriage between equals like many of the other diplomatic marriages. Mitanni was no longer a major power. Instead, the western half of Mitanni now belonged to Hatti, and the eastern half declared its independence as the kingdom of Assyria. Then things began to settle down a little. The new king of Assyria made an alliance with the king of Babylon and, as usual, negotiated a diplomatic marriage. Assyria replaced Mitanni as a great power in the brotherhood of kings. As it happens, a really unusual diplomatic marriage almost happened at around this same time. A queen of Egypt wrote to Superliliuma, stating that her husband had died and she had no sons to succeed him. She'd heard that Superliliuma had many sons. Would he please send one of them to become her husband? We can't be sure of the Egyptian queen's name, but she was probably the widow of Tutankhamen or Akhenaten. And this request was totally unprecedented. She would have viewed anyone outside the royal family as a servant. And that was something of a problem, because, as she explained, she didn't want to marry a servant. Although there were probably plenty of high officials anxious to marry her and become pharaoh, she decided to take matters into her own hands and use the thousand-year-old institution of diplomatic marriage to find herself a husband. This man was going to be someone who was her equal, a royal prince, not a commoner. The Hittites were allies, and she must have decided that a Hittite prince would do. Superliliuma was completely dumbfounded. He was so shocked that he sent an envoy to Egypt to check. Was this for real? Did the Egyptian queen really want to marry a Hittite prince? Would his son really become pharaoh? The Hittite envoy returned several months later with a curt reply from the queen. Of course she was telling the truth. Any Hittite prince that Superliliuma sent would become king of Egypt. Fair enough. Superliliuma chose his son Zananza and presumably organized bridal gifts and the wedding party, and they sent them off to Egypt. On the way, though, the worst happened. Zananza was murdered. Now relations between Egypt and Hatti collapsed. Superliliuma sent troops into a part of Canaan that Egypt controlled. Earlier in his reign, he'd sworn by the gods to abide by a peace treaty with Egypt. So here was Superliliuma breaking another oath. In taking prisoners of war and riches from Canaan, Superliliuma got something else as well, something no one wanted. The POWs he captured were infected with plague. The illness spread terribly through Hatti, eventually killing the king himself. To ancient eyes, the reason for this was obvious. Superliliuma had broken his oaths to the gods. Of course the gods would kill him. This is what Superliliuma's son wrote in a prayer to the gods in hopes of making the plague go away. He pleaded with them to spare the rest of the people. Too many had died. And eventually the plague did end. Through all of this, tensions stayed high between Egypt and Hatti until their armies met in battle in 1274 BCE. This was at Kadesh, located on the border between their empires in the western part of Syria. The Egyptian king was now Ramses II, who went on to rule for more than 60 years. In Ramses' account of the battle, he claimed that at one point he fought and was defeating the Hittite army single-handed. The Egyptians were completely victorious. But the Hittites also claimed to have won. Of course, it's impossible for both sides to have conquered one another. We do know that the Hittites kept control of the city of Kadesh. But mostly it was a stalemate. Neither side was going to gain the upper hand. After a while, in 1258 BCE, the two sides agreed to an alliance. And they cemented it, as always, with a peace treaty and a diplomatic marriage. Ramses II married a Hittite princess. From that time on, Egypt and Hatti had a peaceful relationship, right up until both empires came to an end about a century later. The reason the Late Bronze Age ended has been discussed a great deal, because it was so dramatic. Once things started going wrong, it was like a domino effect. The Late Bronze Age, from around 1600 to 1200 BCE, had been so stable and prosperous. The empires of Hatti and Egypt, the Kassite kingdom of Babylonia, they'd lasted much longer than most previous kingdoms. But soon, it was all gone. The Hittite empire completely collapsed by 1185 BCE, and the citadel of the capital city burned down. A few years later, in 1155 BCE, the Babylonian kingdom was invaded by the Elamites of modern-day Iran. The kingdom of Assyria, which had expanded when Mitanni was conquered, shrank back to an area around the capital city of Ashur. Egypt's long, stable New Kingdom period came to an end as well, by 1070 BCE, after more than 400 years. Besides the big kingdoms, the smaller kingdoms of the Mediterranean also suffered. Actually, they seemed to have suffered even more. Several Mycenaean cities of Greece were destroyed, and after the cities along the coast of Syria and Canaan gained independence from Hatti and Egypt, many of them were destroyed as well. What happened? There aren't many clues in the texts. In most places, it seems that documents just stopped being written around this time, with no indication as to why this was the case. But in the Syrian trade port of Ugarit, archaeologists found some letters that seemed to have been written right before the city was destroyed by invaders. In one letter, the king of Ugarit, Ammurapi, wrote urgently to the king of another city. He said that there were ships of the enemy visible at sea, and he needed help. It's not immediately clear who these enemies were, and his ally didn't send reinforcements. Instead, the neighboring king wrote back, telling him to surround your town with ramparts, have your troops and chariots enter there, and await the enemy with great determination. This was absolutely no help. Ugarit had never possessed much in the way of a military force, and the troops it did command were away, helping the king of Hatti. Now, those enemy ships arrived in the port, and did enormous damage to the rich, unprotected Ugarit. Still, the embattled king, Ammurapi, survived, and was still in Ugarit when a letter arrived from the island of Cyprus, from the king of Al-Ashir, who was asking him for help. Al-Ashir was also being attacked. Ammurapi wrote back that he couldn't be of any assistance at all. He explained that, The enemy's ships came here. My cities were burned. Thus the country is abandoned to itself. The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted great damage upon us. These unidentified enemies seem to have continued south along the coast, destroying and looting as they went. Their destination seems to have been Egypt, the richest of all Mediterranean lands. Unfortunately for us, the Egyptian king recorded the invaders' attack and his response. This was Ramses III, who later claimed to have achieved a glorious victory over the intruders. He covered the walls of his mortuary temple with relief sculptures and descriptions of the events. And here's how he tells the story. The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once, the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Karkamish, Arzawa and Al-Ashir on, being cut off at one time. Their confederation was the Peleset, Chekher, Shekelesh, Denyan and Weshesh, lands united. So, the enemy invaders were from islands. They've come to be known as the Sea Peoples. Relief sculptures in Egypt show some of the invaders arriving in boats. And the scenes of battle have plenty of details. The defending Egyptian boats are all manned and orderly, whereas the foreign boats are distinctly non-Egyptian in shape and are all in disarray, with some of the enemy fighters falling into the sea. The enemies wear distinctive headdresses and kilts. They seem to have been observed and drawn from memory. It does seem as though people were on the move by boat, that Ramses III wasn't making this up. Some of the Sea Peoples are even shown arriving by land, in wagons, with women, children and household possessions. They look as though they were coming to stay. It all looks pretty convincing. The Egyptian army and navy were able to repulse the foreigners, and some of them settled just to the north of Egypt, on the coast of Canaan. The group known as the Peleset show up in the Bible as the Philistines, and they gave their name to that area of the Levant, Palestine. Where did the Sea Peoples come from? Many archaeologists agree their origin was indeed across the sea. In fact, the architecture and pottery that began to be used at this time in Philistine sites are very much like Mycenaean architecture and pottery. Some of the Sea Peoples were probably Mycenaean Greeks. Others were probably from Cyprus and southern Anatolia. In fact, this might be the context of the Trojan War, which is believed to have happened right around this time in the 12th century BCE. According to Homer, this was a period when Greeks were fighting in northwestern Anatolia. The Sea Peoples would also have been on the move at this time, attacking coastal cities in the region. The memory of those campaigns might well have been the seed behind the whole epic tale of the Greeks fighting the Trojans. So why were the Sea Peoples on the move? There are a lot of possibilities. Perhaps there was a drought in their homelands, and they were refugees fleeing starvation. There is some evidence for a drought, not just in Greece, but across the northern Mediterranean. Hatti seems to have imported grain from Ugarit and from Egypt around 1200, and the king wrote about a famine when he requested the grain. Previously, they had been able to grow enough food in an area that depended on rainfall to water crops. A few years of drought, therefore, could be devastating. People from the whole region would have suffered, and many could have fled, looking for somewhere to live where food was more plentiful. Another possibility is that a series of earthquakes caused huge fires. There's evidence for earthquake damage and burned buildings at several sites in the region. Again, this would have been devastating to local inhabitants. People might have had to move in order to survive, becoming refugees. Still, scholars think that neither drought nor earthquakes were sufficient to be responsible for the amount of upheaval that marked the end of the great Bronze Age civilizations. Another possible explanation is that the extreme gap between the rich and poor of the time might have resulted in the poor rising up. It's certainly true that the elites in the late Bronze Age lived in great luxury and depended on the poor to provide much of their wealth. The palaces, for example, had something of a monopoly on bronze. Weavers worked for the palaces to make beautiful textiles and were paid in food rations. While the textiles were used as luxury gifts for which the king might receive gold or silver in return. Some people do seem to have resisted the amount of work they were called upon to perform for the palaces and temples. In Canaan, there was a group of outlaws known as the Habiru who seemed to have abandoned urban life. And in peace treaties of the time, one of the main concerns was always with the extradition of fugitives who left one land and tried to live in another. This wouldn't have been a major negotiating point if it hadn't been an ongoing problem. A significant number of people must have fled their cities and their debts and the demands the state put on them to try to live somewhere else. The destruction of palaces and citadels at some sites might have been the work of unhappy local subjects rather than invaders. There's no confirmation of this, but it would help explain why some cities were destroyed while others had no destruction at all, and why in some cities only the citadel was destroyed while private houses were untouched. Once the seeds of rebellion were sown or an armed migration of refugees was unleashed, it seems that other things began to break down. It's not that the Sea Peoples showed up everywhere, but instead that similar types of destruction spread across the region. For example, there's no sign that the Sea Peoples made it to Hatti. Even though the palaces of the Hittite capital were destroyed, the capital city was far inland, hundreds of miles from the root of the Sea Peoples. So the attackers on the Hittite capital might have come from closer to home, the neighboring Ghazga people perhaps. Or this destruction might also have been a result of social unrest among the Hittite population. The Sea Peoples didn't directly cause the reversals in Assyria and Babylonia either. What seems likely is that a whole lot of things got out of balance. Whatever the first trigger was, whether drought, rebellion, earthquakes, or all three, the system began to disintegrate. Things became quite dangerous in some regions. Some people took to the roads in wagons or to the sea in boats to pursue life elsewhere. Raiders looted and burned buildings. People couldn't travel safely to trade or deliver messages or luxury gifts anymore. Great kings lost contact with one another and had no source for the expensive foreign goods they wanted. Ships like the one found at Uluburun no longer could peacefully tie up at ports around the Mediterranean and expect a civil welcome. All around the Mediterranean coast, small states now replaced the big empires. In Greece, for example, people were much poorer than before, with simple grave goods replacing elaborate ones. Overseas trade seems to have stopped. The Mycenaeans had used a writing system that modern scholars call Linear B, but that too was forgotten. All over the place, there were fewer big cities and many more people living in the countryside. And it wasn't a peaceful time. Battles took place regularly between the various small kingdoms. This period, from about 1155 to 972 BCE, is often referred to as a dark age because not much documentation survives to help us understand what was going on. Tablets inscribed with cuneiform texts are rarely found at the archaeological sites from this era. This might be because people were writing on papyrus, which typically doesn't survive for hundreds or thousands of years. But you do get the sense of a very different era from the one that came before. In spite of all the gaps in our knowledge about this era, there is one giant source of information for history in the Levant during this time, and that's the Hebrew Bible. This era was when the Kingdom of Israel formed. It was the time of Israel's battles against the Philistines and the Canaanites and of its first kings. The Bible describes Solomon's relationships with the neighboring land of Tyre and with other kingdoms, like distant Sheba. The leaders exchanged luxury goods, and Solomon married the daughters of neighboring kings. It does look from the Bible as though some aspects of the old diplomatic system were still working. But the long era of peace and international cooperation between major kingdoms, that had come to an end. Once the system started to break down, it was impossible to save it. The old empires were divided up into smaller, squabbling kingdoms. If these kingdoms kept many records, they don't seem to have survived.