There are different ways of interpreting the thousands of Aegean Bronze Age objects, predominantly pottery, which have been recovered around the eastern and central Mediterranean (Cline 1994; Lambrou-Phillipson 1990; Leonard 1994; van Wijngaarden 2002). Looking at the same evidence, one person can find the wide contacts and varied contexts impressive and view the pottery as the tip of an iceberg of perishable items such as textiles and foodstuffs that must have moved along with the durable ceramics. A second person would emphasize the very small quantities that are attested from the perspective of time and space, perhaps even running a simple quantitative analysis to determine that the corpus amounts to 0.5 objects imported to the Aegean from the eastern Mediterranean per year over six centuries (Cherry 2009: 111—12), or using a more sophisticated approach, fewer than ten contacts per decade (Parkinson 2010: 16—25). As always, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, but it is difficult to know where in the absence of so much key evidence.
The Linear B tablets are of little help. They contain rare allusions to the palaces' external relations, but none explicitly mentions merchants or longdistance maritime exchange. Exchanges of some kind are implicit in the recording of certain exotic commodities like sesame and ivory, and slave women hailing from the coast of Asia Minor who may have arrived at Pylos as war booty (summarized by Cline 2007: 198—99). We also learn from the Pylian tablets that the palace built and manned ships in the service of the state (Palaima 1991). A few instances of regional interaction are recorded: a tablet at Mycenae mentions a transaction with Thebes (Cline 1994: 128—31; Killen 1985: 268; Chadwick 1994: 80—81), and another at Thebes documents exchanges with towns on Euboea (Aravantinos et al. 2001).
From one perspective, the implication that one might infer from the Linear B archives that interregional exchange was an insignificant sector of the Mycenaean economy does not square well with the emerging archaeological record from around the Mediterranean. Durable Mycenaean imports, chiefly fine pottery and bronze weapons and implements, continue to be found in modest amounts in the eastern and central Mediterranean; under these circumstances, it is puzzling that so few “Orientalia" and “Occidentalia" are turning up in Aegean contexts (Cline 2009: 167—68).
The apparent contradiction between the textual and archaeological evidence has engendered a divergence of opinion regarding the scale of Late Bronze Age trade in the Mediterranean, with opposing camps that may be labeled “minimalist" and “maximalist." (For an analysis of the roots of this debate in economic anthropology, see Tartaron 2001a.) Among the minimalists, Anthony Snodgrass is most prominent in denying a significant role for commercial trade in the Bronze Age economy, maintaining that a redistributive center would only send its ships abroad “ . . . when it needs resources from overseas, and this may be very infrequently" (Snodgrass 1991: 18). For the minimalists, the archaeological record is meager evidence (Manning and Hulin 2005), best explained in terms of infrequent, directional elite gift exchange that has nothing to do with money, markets, or private enterprise. Independent merchants have little place in this tightly regulated maritime economy (Chadwick 1994: 156—58).
The maximalist school tends to view Bronze Age trade as extensive, driven by market forces, and involving a substantial contribution from private merchants. Eric Cline (2009: 163—64) has recently restated his position on trade between the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean: (1) Trade was mainly directional to the major palace centers of the Aegean, with secondary redistribution from those centers; (2) Trade was predominantly commercial, with some gift exchanges occurring at the diplomatic level; (3) The primary traded goods were wines, perfumes, oils, and metals; (4) Crete was the main recipient of imported goods from the eastern Mediterranean in the seventeenth to fourteenth centuries (LH/LM I—IIIA);
(5) The Greek mainland was the main recipient of imported goods from the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth to mid-eleventh centuries (LH/LM IIIB— IIIC); (6) Crete interacted mainly with the East in LH/LM I—IIIA, and primarily with the West in LH/LM IIIB—IIIC; (7) The Greek mainland interacted with the West, and to a lesser extent, the East in LH/LM I—IIIA, and with the East in LH/LM IIIB—IIIC; (8) Egypt monopolized trade with the Aegean during LH/LM I—II, and shared the Aegean trade with Syro-Palestine, Cyprus, and Italy during LH/LM IIIA—IIIC. Cline (1994: 106, 2009: 164) has also reiterated his opinion that the scale of trade encompassing Egypt, the Near East, Italy, and the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age rivals that of today in economic complexity and political motivation. Sherrratt and Sherratt (1991: 376) concur that the Bronze Age economy was a market economy in the formal sense.
The evidence of shipwrecks points unmistakably to a large, but archaeologically invisible, trade in raw materials and organic substances that do not normally survive in the archaeological record (Bass 1997). The Bronze Age shipwrecks excavated by George Bass and Cemal Pulak on Turkey's southern coast at Cape Gelidonya and Uluburun (see below for details) provide a glimpse of the breadth and cosmopolitan origin of material being transported around the Mediterranean (Bass 1991, 2005b; Pulak 1997, 1998, 2005). The main cargo of the Uluburun wreck comprised 10 tons of copper ingots, 1 ton of tin ingots, 175 glass ingots, a ton of terebinth resin stored in 130 of 145 Canaanite jars, and large amounts of varied Cypriot pottery. Also included were rare and exotic materials such as ebony logs, raw hippopotamus and elephant ivory, finished ivory objects, ostrich eggshells, seals, an Egyptian scarab bearing the name of Nefertiti, and vessels of faience, gold, and tin. A few swords and utilitarian objects such as knives, razors, chisels, oil lamps, and fishing equipment belonged to the crew. Numerous sets of pan-balance weights in the Near Eastern standard attest to the presence of a Semitic (not Aegean) merchant or merchants among the crew. to careful recovery methods and subsequent analyses, specialists were able to identify a range of organic remains including grains, nuts, spices, olives, figs, and pomegranates, as well as various branches and rushes used as dunnage in packing the main cargo (Knapp 1991; Haldane 1993). A dozen cultural groups — Canaanite, Egyptian, Cypriot, Mycenaean, Assyrian, Babylonian, Kassite, Nubian, Baltic, Balkan, eastern Near East, and possibly Sicilian — are represented in the raw and finished materials (Pulak 1997: 256). With the exception of the pottery, most of the material from the Uluburun wreck would rarely survive in a terrestrial archaeological context: the organic material would have long since disappeared, and most ingots would have been melted down or otherwise rendered unrecognizable in antiquity. The remains preserved on the Uluburun wreck permit us to imagine the range of goods conveyed around the eastern Mediterranean at the time of the Mycenaean palaces.
The excavator suggests that the Uluburun ship originated in a Syro-Canaanite port, and was bound westward toward the Aegean with a probable final destination at one of the Mycenaean palaces, “ an official dispatch of an enormously rich and valuable cargo of raw materials and manufactured goods largely intended for a specific destination" (Pulak 1998: 220). As such, it is perhaps not a “microcosm" of international trade in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, as has been claimed (Cline 1994: 100; criticized by Burns 2010: 15), but it could be used to buttress Snodgrass' vision of rare, directional gift exchange. Further support might be drawn from Pulak's (1998: 218) interpretation of some of the personal effects as belonging to two Mycenaean Greeks on board, whom he construes as emissaries accompanying the rich cargo to its final destination in the Aegean (see also Bachhuber 2003: 134—46).
The Gelidonya shipwreck represents a different, less elite form of maritime traffic, however. It contained mainly metal ingots along with scrap metal and metalworking tools, and is interpreted by the excavator as a private Levantine merchant vessel with a metal tinker on board, engaged in tramping from port to port (cabotage) in search of opportunities to buy, sell, fabricate, and repair metals (Bass 1991: 75). A third LBA shipwreck, which went down at Point Iria in the Argolic Gulf, is highly ambiguous because the small cargo consists only of a mix of Cypriot, Cretan, and Greek mainland pottery (Phelps et al. 1999). The ship may have originated in any of those places, and it may have been plying local networks rather than long-distance routes (see discussion of shipwrecks below). It is also crucial to consider that textual and archaeological evidence from the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean demonstrates the conflation of private (entrepreneurial) and state-sponsored (palatial) merchant activity (Bachhuber 2006: 355; Knapp 1993; Manning and Hulin 2005: 273; Wiener 1987: 264). Even if the primary function of the Uluburun ship was to implement directional trade from one royal court to another, the diversity of the cargo and the presence of many balance weight sets suggest merchants conducting trade for profit at ports of call at Ugarit and on Cyprus.
A compromise between the minimalist and maximalist positions presents itself in the realization of multipurpose voyages and mixed cargoes, and when the volume of trade is distinguished from its significance. Sherratt and Sherratt (1991: 354) suggest that although the quantities of goods transported over long distances were small relative to total production, their importance should not be underestimated, for they represent the efforts of a minority to acquire goods possessing tremendous social significance. A good case can be made that imported goods arriving in the Aegean from the eastern Mediterranean were imbued with a kind of symbolic power derived from the distances traveled and their mysterious cultural origins (Broodbank 1993; Helms 1988; Knapp 1997). To those who possessed them and controlled their distribution, they imparted esoteric knowledge and prestige, which could be manipulated to legitimize and maintain real social and political power. Bryan Burns (2010) rightly emphasizes that the true significance of imported goods lies not in their source or any meaning they held in their originating culture, but rather in how they were assimilated into indigenous frameworks of meaning in the destination contexts, and hoarded, displayed, or dispatched to enhance status and influence social action. The seemingly narrow distribution of imports in the Aegean may be the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of elites to control quantities as well as content, because exotic objects lose their power when they are widely distributed.
As might be expected, the cumulative evidence favors neither of the extreme ends of the minimalist/maximalist spectrum. With recent research highlighting limits on the control that palaces could exert geographically and over specific sectors of the economy, it is implausible that all long-distance maritime activity was state sponsored or that there was no scope for merchants to pursue private profit. Nevertheless, the concentration of exotic imported goods at palatial centers on Crete and the mainland is a powerful indicator that elites at these centers actively sought to monopolize access to certain valued products. They were successful at doing so because they uniquely possessed sufficient capital and political authority to acquire and transport high-value commodities over long distances (Bennet 2008: 191). Their interest lay mainly in precious metals and other exotic materials that conferred both symbolic prestige (jewelry, vessels in precious metals, ivory plaques and inlays, etc.) and practical advantage (weapons, superior tools). Perhaps nonpalatial merchants dealt mainly in subsistence goods and utilitarian pottery and tools, and circulated in regional and local rather than international, cross-cultural networks. The Gelidonya and Point Iria wrecks might be seen in this light.
World History
