Beyond Babylon: Copper, Ivory and the Gift Economy of the Bronze Age

In the summer of 1982 a Turkish sponge diver working off the coast near Kaş came up with a report of what he called “metal biscuits with ears” on the seabed. The find reached archaeologists of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, who were running annual surveys of the coast. The objects were copper ingots in the four-handled form archaeologists call “oxhide”, and they belonged to a ship that sank off the cape of Uluburun around 1320 B.C., give or take fifteen years. Over eleven seasons between 1984 and 1994, divers made more than 22,000 dives to recover what the ship had carried.

That cargo became one of the anchors of a large exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. ran from November 18, 2008 to March 15, 2009 in the museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall. According to an announcement issued by Türkiye’s consulate in New York, it gathered roughly 350 objects drawn from royal palaces, temples and tombs, together with finds from the wreck, to show how traded raw materials, letters and diplomatic gifts produced a shared visual culture across the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.

A ship as a record

The Uluburun wreck is useful to art history because it froze a single moment of exchange. Most objects in a museum case arrive alone, separated from the route that brought them. Here the whole consignment survived together, from bulk metal to finished luxuries.

Cemal Pulak, who directed much of the research on the site with George Bass, set out the numbers in an essay on the wreck and Late Bronze Age trade. The ship lay between 42 and 61 meters down, a depth that protected it from salvage but limited each diver to two dives a day of twenty minutes on the bottom. Excavators logged 6,613 hours underwater and raised nearly 17 tons of material, most of it scattered over about 250 square meters of steep, rocky slope.

The main freight was copper: about 10 tons of it, cast as 354 slab ingots averaging around 24 kilograms each, plus 121 bun-shaped ingots. Lead-isotope analysis traced the copper to Cyprus. Nearly a ton of tin was recovered as well, though Pulak notes that some of it had decayed into a soft, nonmetallic form during its centuries in the sea, so the original quantity was probably larger. Combined at the usual ratio of ten parts copper to one of tin, the metal on board would have made about 11 tons of bronze. The tin itself had come a long way. Pulak points to texts suggesting a source east of Mesopotamia, probably in Central Asia, with shipment through the Levantine coast.

Raw materials for workshops

Much of what survives in Bronze Age treasuries began as raw stock of the kind found on this ship. Around 175 glass ingots, shaped like truncated cones and weighing some 350 kilograms in total, were on board, most of them cobalt blue or turquoise, with at least two purple and one amber. Chemical analysis links the cobalt blue glass to core-formed vessels from Amarna in Egypt and to Mycenaean relief beads, which suggests one broad region of manufacture supplying workshops on both sides of the sea.

The ship also carried about 18 logs of African blackwood, the material Egyptians called hbny, from which the English word ebony descends. The logs had been trimmed to the dark heartwood and cut to lengths of about one meter. Pulak observes that ebony was a favourite furniture wood of the Egyptian elite, as the furniture from the tomb of Tutankhamun shows, and that sending it unfinished implies a buyer with the means to run a workshop, most likely a palace.

Ivory travelled the same way. The hold held a section of elephant tusk and 14 hippopotamus teeth, and three ostrich eggshells, one intact, which were destined to become ornate vessels once a craftsman added spouts, handles and bases. Well over half of the roughly 150 Canaanite jars contained terebinth resin, about half a ton of it, the second largest consignment after the metal. Pulak links this resin to the Egyptian term sntr and to incense and scented oils; a jar labelled sntr appears in a storeroom painted in the tomb of Rekhmire at Thebes.

Gifts between kings

The finished goods are smaller in bulk but more revealing about taste. The excavators recovered gold and silver jewelry, mostly Canaanite with some Egyptian pieces, as well as a gold chalice of about 236 grams. Among the jewelry was a small gold scarab inscribed with the name of Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Several silver bangles and gold pieces had been cut with a chisel, a sign that even fine jewelry served as bullion when a deal required it.

Pulak reads the ship against the Amarna Letters, the correspondence between the Egyptian pharaoh and other royal courts. Trade at the palace level, he argues, often took the form of gift exchange: a ship loaded in one port for a named recipient, carrying goods of great value over long distances. Luxury gifts in that system frequently served as dowries or tribute. Ivory cosmetic boxes, tin vessels and perhaps dyed textiles on the Uluburun ship look like gifts of exactly this kind, and the tin vessels found on board, among them a pilgrim flask, a plate and a double-handled cup, are each unique, which Pulak takes as a sign of prestige goods rather than stock.

This is the mechanism the Met’s exhibition was built to explain. When a pharaoh’s gold, a Cypriot ingot and a Canaanite jar ride in the same hold, motifs and techniques travel with them. Pulak makes the point directly for gold: Near Eastern jewelry reaching the Aegean, intact or as scrap, supplied local goldsmiths with metal and with models of foreign style at the same time.

Who was on board

The wreck also gives faces, of a sort, to the traders. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology records that the hull was built of Lebanese cedar with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints and a proto-keel rather than a true keel, and that the cargo included musical instruments: lutes with soundboxes made of tortoise shell. Personal possessions, weapons, seals and balance weights point to a Syro-Canaanite crew. Pulak’s study of the weights suggests three or four merchants were aboard, and other personal effects indicate two Mycenaeans of elite status.

Stone anchors cut from beachrock found near the Carmel coast, and galley pottery made from clay from just north of it, lead Pulak to propose a home port in that area, with Tell Abu Hawam as a likely candidate. From there the ship seems to have sailed north along the Levant, then west along the Anatolian coast. Its destination, on his reading, was the Greek mainland, and most plausibly the palace at Mycenae, supplied through its port at Tiryns.

The book that stays

The exhibition closed in March 2009, but its catalogue remains the fuller argument. Edited by Joan Aruz, Kim Benzel and Jean M. Evans and published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Yale University Press, it runs to xxiv and 524 pages with 460 illustrations, and was reviewed in Antiquity by Heather D. Baker in March 2010.

What the Uluburun cargo adds to that argument is scale. Pulak notes that, leaving the two excavated wrecks aside, the known corpus of Cypriot pottery from the Late Bronze Age Aegean amounts to only 68 vessels. This one ship carried about 155. Had it arrived, the archaeological picture of the period would look quite different, and that gap is a fair warning about how much of the second millennium’s traffic in art and materials never reached the ground where excavators dig.