Uluburun Shipwreck: A Late Bronze Age Cargo off Turkey

The Uluburun shipwreck is the wreck of a merchant ship that sank off the southern coast of Turkey around 1305 BC. Discovered in 1982 and excavated between 1984 and 1994, it carried tonnes of copper and tin together with glass, ivory, resin, gold and objects made in many different lands. It is the single richest source for understanding how goods moved across the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age.

Discovery

In 1982 a young sponge diver from the town of Kaş, Mehmet Çakır, reported seeing metal “biscuits with ears” on the seabed near the Uluburun headland. Archaeologists had been showing local divers drawings of Bronze Age copper ingots, and they recognised the description at once.

The Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA), based in Texas and Bodrum, began excavation in 1984 under the direction of George F. Bass, a pioneer of underwater archaeology. Cemal Pulak soon took over as excavation director. Over eleven seasons the team made more than 22,000 dives to the wreck, which lies on a steep slope at depths of roughly 44 to 61 metres. At such depths each diver could work only two short sessions a day.

Excavating at depth

Working at 44 to 61 metres posed serious problems. Divers breathing compressed air risk nitrogen narcosis, a dulling of judgement, and decompression sickness if they rise too quickly. The team limited each dive to about 20 minutes on the bottom and used a decompression chamber kept at the site.

Every object was mapped in place before being lifted, so that its exact position on the slope could be recorded. Heavy ingots were raised with lifting balloons, while fragile items such as glass and jewellery were brought up by hand in padded containers. Conservation of the finds, especially the corroded metal and waterlogged wood, took many more years after diving ended.

The ship

Only a small part of the hull survived, but enough to show how it was built. The ship was about 15 metres long, made of cedar planks joined edge to edge with mortise-and-tenon joints, the shell-first method used throughout the ancient Mediterranean. It carried 24 stone anchors, a sign of how much its crew depended on anchoring along rocky coasts.

The date of the sinking comes from tree-ring analysis of wood on board and from the cargo. Firewood points to a date around 1305 BC. A gold scarab inscribed with the name of Nefertiti, queen of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, shows the ship sank no earlier than the mid-14th century BC.

The cargo

The ship’s main cargo was metal. Divers raised 354 copper ingots in the four-handled oxhide shape, along with many smaller bun-shaped and pillow-shaped ingots, totalling about 10 tonnes of copper. The term oxhide comes from the ingots’ resemblance to a stretched animal skin; the projecting corners probably made the heavy slabs, each weighing roughly 20 to 30 kilograms, easier to carry and stack. Chemical analysis shows most of the copper came from Cyprus. About 1 tonne of tin, in ingots and fragments, was also aboard. Mixed at the standard ratio of about ten parts copper to one part tin, this was enough to make some 11 tonnes of bronze, sufficient to equip a sizeable army.

The origin of the tin, which is rare in the Mediterranean, has long been debated. Recent analyses suggest that part of it came from Central Asia and part from Anatolia, showing how far raw materials travelled.

The ship also carried about 175 glass ingots, mostly coloured deep cobalt blue, the oldest intact glass ingots known. Around 150 Canaanite jars held about a tonne of terebinth resin, used for incense or perfume, while others contained glass beads, olives and other goods.

Luxury goods from many lands

Beside the bulk cargo lay a remarkable range of precious and exotic items:

• logs of African blackwood (ebony) from Egypt or further south;
• a section of elephant tusk and hippopotamus teeth for ivory carving;
• ostrich eggshells and tortoise shells;
• Baltic amber beads, from northern Europe;
• Cypriot pottery packed inside large storage jars, and Mycenaean pottery;
• gold and silver jewellery, including a Canaanite gold chalice and pendants;
• bronze swords, spearheads, arrowheads and tools of several different styles.

Also found was a small wooden writing board, two leaves of boxwood joined by an ivory hinge. It was once coated with wax for writing and is among the earliest known examples of a hinged tablet, a forerunner of the book.

Sets of balance-pan weights of different standards suggest that merchants aboard traded goods by weight. Objects of Canaanite, Cypriot, Egyptian, Mycenaean and Mesopotamian origin were found, along with items from northern Europe and the Balkans, and personal items suggest that people of several nationalities were on board.

Where was it going?

Nobody knows the ship’s exact route or owner. The most widely accepted view is that it sailed west from a port on the Levantine coast, perhaps Ugarit, or from Cyprus, heading for the Aegean, where Mycenaean palaces imported copper, tin and luxury goods. The Uluburun headland lies on the coastal route toward Rhodes and Crete.

Some scholars think the scale and richness of the cargo point to a royal consignment, a gift exchange between rulers of the kind described in the Amarna letters, rather than ordinary private trade. Others see it as the work of merchants operating on their own account. It may have combined both.

Comparisons and legacy

The Uluburun excavation built on earlier work by George Bass at Cape Gelidonya, also on the southern Turkish coast, where in 1960 he excavated a smaller ship that sank around 1200 BC with a cargo of copper ingots and scrap bronze. That project is often described as the first excavation of an ancient shipwreck carried out entirely on the seabed by archaeologists. Bass argued from the Gelidonya finds that Levantine and Cypriot traders, not only Mycenaean Greeks, ran much of the Bronze Age sea trade, and the Uluburun cargo strongly supported that view.

The oxhide ingots from Uluburun also helped explain finds elsewhere. Ingots of the same shape appear in Egyptian tomb paintings, in hoards from Sardinia and Crete, and in palace stores. The wreck shows them in transit, packed in rows in a ship’s hold, exactly as the paintings suggested.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 1305 BC: The ship sinks off Uluburun, according to tree-ring dating.
• 1982: Sponge diver Mehmet Çakır reports copper ingots on the seabed.
• 1984: The Institute of Nautical Archaeology begins excavation under George Bass.
• 1985 onwards: Cemal Pulak directs the excavation.
• 1994: The final excavation season ends after 11 seasons.
• Following years: Finds are conserved and displayed at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.

Why it matters

The Uluburun shipwreck is a snapshot of a single voyage in the interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age. It shows that copper from Cyprus, tin from Asia, glass from Egypt or Mesopotamia, African ebony and Baltic amber could all travel in one hull. Within about a century, the networks that filled this ship would break down in the Late Bronze Age collapse, making the wreck an even more vivid record of what was lost.