3,300 Year Old Titanic of the Med gives invaluable clues to Mideast's past

About 3,300 years ago a large ship left the northern Mediterranean Sea region carrying a treasure of copper, tin, glass, gold, silver and other materials to an unknown destination.

In 1983 the ship was accidentally discovered by a 13-year-old diving for sponges near the Turkish fishing town of Kas. The copper ingots led the youth to go to the curator of the local museum.

The shipwreck was dug up by an excavation expedition of underwater archaeologists, first under the leadership of Professor George Bass and later under Professor Cemal Pulak, both from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. Excavating and documenting the 10,000 items found on the ship was a 10-year project. The late Bronze Age shipwreck, known as the Uluburun Shipwreck, is seen as one of the most important underwater discoveries of the second half of the 20th century.

“This ship is an immense source of information about that period, there’s nothing to equal the extent of those findings,” says archaeologist Professor Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University. Goren is about to publish a series of studies dealing with a selection of findings on ancient shipwrecks from the second and first millennium BC, a project he has been working on for eight years.

Goren’s essays focus on new findings from five shipwrecks dating to the same era, with the Uluburun Shipwreck as the jewel in the crown.

The amount of essays written about that shipwreck could fill an entire room. It’s an endless source of various studies, including one focusing on the jaw of a mouse found on the ship, says Goren.

Shipwrecks tend to enthrall people, they capture and preserve one traumatic moment experienced by a group of people at sea and encapsulates their entire life. Some of them, like the Titanic, have become box office hits. Most will remain the domain of archaeologists, museums and aficionados.

In archaeology shipwrecks are especially interesting. They’re like time capsules from the past that have frozen time. In some cases they preserve everything that was in them, especially when they sink fast and in deep water, that’s when they’re preserved in good condition. The slower a ship sinks and the shallower the water, the more exposed it is to currents, animals and plants that attack the findings, he says.

Unlike ships that sink in the modern era, finding ancient ships is an archaeological asset, enabling scientists a glimpse of trade routes, political and diplomatic relations, various seafaring techniques and even the sailors’ way of life thousands of years ago.

In the Uluburun Shipwreck case, the questions that interested us were, who did the ship belong to? Where did it come from and where was it headed? We’re dealing with a ship from the late Bronze Age, when the Ramses dynasty ruled in Egypt, says Goren.

The ships Goren is studying were discovered in the Mediterranean region, mainly along the Turkish border. Without an engine or navigation instruments, their captains had to sail with the currents, navigating by the stars and landmarks on the shore. This forced them to maintain eye contact with the shore. “Since the Turkish shore is rocky and indented, numerous ships were shipwrecked as they sailed along it,” he says.