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  • Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant *
  • John M. McManamon S.J. (bio)
Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant. By Shelley Wachsmann. College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1998. Pp. xii+417; illustrations, figures, notes/references, appendixes, bibliography, index. $80.

Extensively documented, lavishly illustrated, and judiciously argued, Shelley Wachsmann’s volume offers a compendium of present knowledge of seafaring in the Bronze Age and a point of departure for future research. In the first part of the book, Wachsmann visits each of the cultures that practiced the art of seafaring in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the second, he enlightens us on the technology that those peoples employed at sea. Throughout, he documents that, during the Bronze Age, the Mediterranean ceased to be a barrier and became rather an avenue to new freedom for seafaring peoples.

Egypt’s interest in the Mediterranean was rather circumscribed and centered on the need for timber. The Egyptians devoted more energy to trade across the Red Sea, building ships in pieces that were carried across the Eastern desert and assembled at the seashore. Egyptian seagoing ships, therefore, were sui generis: joined by inboard lashings and equipped with a hogging truss to stiffen the hull longitudinally. Wachsmann contends that the people of the Syro-Canaanite shore played a significant role in maritime trade already in the Bronze Age. Syro-Canaanite ships apparently had a wider beam to maximize cargo space, a high screen that ran the length of the vessel, and the first crow’s nests. From their island location, Cypriots may have played the role of middlemen in trade that moved from Egypt and the Syro-Canaanite coast westward to the Aegean.

In the Aegean, Wachsmann detects lines of continuity in ship form and function. Evidence suggests in the Early Bronze Age sea travel was accomplished in longships propelled by paddles. Wachsmann devotes much of his analysis of Minoan and Cycladic seafaring to an interpretation of the miniature frieze recently discovered on the island of Thera. He detects conscious archaizing in the ships portrayed there: the vessels have their sails lowered for paddling, carry horizontal stern devices, and are richly decorated. Wachsmann interprets the scene as a race or procession associated with a vegetation, fertility cult.

Wachsmann finds a remarkable consistency to the depiction of Mycenaean ships. They are distinguished especially by an open rowers’ gallery intersected by vertical stanchions and by an angular stem topped by a device shaped like a bird’s head. The representations of the ships of the Sea Peoples in the mortuary temple at Medinet Habu have those same characteristic features. That leads Wachsmann to argue that the Egyptian artist worked from a prototype that was identical to the portrayals on Late Helladic IIIB-C pottery, and that some of the marauders identified as Sea Peoples in the surviving artwork are probably fleeing Mycenaeans. [End Page 129]

In matters of technology, Wachsmann concludes that seafarers of the Bronze Age constructed their vessels in two different ways. The Egyptians used lashed ships, given their need to disassemble and reassemble them for Red Sea trade. The Syro-Canaanites probably introduced pegged mortise-and-tenon joinery. During most of the Bronze Age, sailing ships carried a boom-fitted rig, whose sail was spread by raising the yard to the masthead. The awkward manipulation of the boom precluded the use of shrouds, and Bronze Age shipbuilders substituted a system of lateral cables. Wachsmann postulates that the clumsy rig, lateral cables, and inboard-projecting keel together imply that seafarers of that era used the sail only when the wind was astern. With the innovation of the brailed rig around 1200 b.c., allowing one to furl the sail upward much like a venetian blind, seafarers widened their routes. Bronze Age ships apparently carried a number of stone anchors: twenty-four anchors were recovered from the Uluburun shipwreck, suggesting that the anchors were expendable and unreliable. The recovery of these anchors by archaeologists has demonstrated how difficult they are to maneuver in calm waters. How did Bronze Age seafarers handle them in the rough seas that would usually dictate their use?

Even this brief summary should demonstrate...

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