Uncorking the Past Read online

  PEOPLES OF THE PREHISTORIC SEA

  From space, the Mediterranean Sea sits like a shimmering jewel or an alluring woman between Africa and Europe. Some 25 million years ago, this body of water—an ancient remnant of the Tethys Sea—began to form. The basin deepened, waters from ocean and river surged in and out, and gradually it became the planet’s largest “inland” sea.

  To our earliest ancestors, traveling northward via the Great Rift Valley through Ethiopia or along the Nile River through the Sudan and Egypt, the Mediterranean Sea presented a formidable barrier to progress. Arriving at the Nile delta, they would have surveyed a seemingly endless body of water, with no land in sight. It is more than five hundred kilometers from here to Cyprus or southern Turkey. Without a boat, this might well appear the end of the line. Even migrating birds are intimidated, spending days on shore to build up their caloric reserves before venturing out over the Mediterranean.

  The longest north-south crossing of the Mediterranean is about 1,600 kilometers. That compares with only 14 kilometers at the Strait of Gibraltar, the sea’s sole natural connection to the world’s oceans—still a difficult proposition for a good swimmer. Island hopping is another possibility, especially from Tunisia to Sicily to the toe of Italy. Movement from east to west across the Mediterranean, about 3,900 kilometers, was even more of a challenge. Island hopping and short transits by land or sea along the shore might have been used as strategies by our early ancestors, once they had learned how to make boats.

  Before this momentous innovation occurred, however, early hominids and humans had another option. They could bypass the Mediterranean altogether by walking across the Sinai Peninsula, the land bridge between Africa and Asia. This route, later called the Ways of Horus by the Egyptians and the Via Maris by the Romans, takes about fifteen days from the modern Egyptian border to Gaza. For those who blazed the trail it must have seemed an eternity, as they did not know where to find oases to replenish their water supplies. The journey was more predictable once donkeys had been domesticated and settlements were established along the route.

  Once they surmounted the Sinai hurdle, the travelers were greeted by a verdant land along the coast and in the inland Jordan Valley. There they might well have stopped and begun exploiting fig and other fruits, cereals, and honey as early as 9500 B.C. The fermented beverages made from these resources were probably presented as offerings to the plaster images of the ancestors and gods at the sites of Jericho and ‘Ain Ghazal as early as the seventh millennium B.C.

  Early hominids and humans would also have been drawn to the Mediterranean coast north of Mount Carmel, an area that today is shared by northern Israel, Lebanon, and southern Syria. The past half million years have seen a succession of cooler, rainy periods in this region (corresponding to the major advances of glaciers across northern and central Europe), followed by warmer episodes in which elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus roamed the land. Wild grapevines probably already festooned dense forests, and other fruits and nuts were there for the taking.

  Although the recent civil war in Lebanon and subsequent troubles have slowed archaeological investigation, prehistorians had discovered by the early twentieth century that the two chains of mountains (the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon), running parallel to the coast and extending south to Mount Carmel and the nearly 3,000-meter-high Mount Hermon, were riddled with deep caves. Tabun on Mount Carmel in Israel, ‘Adlun in southern Lebanon, Ksar Akil farther up the coast, and Yabrud, looking out onto the Great Syrian Desert from the eastern slopes of the Anti-Lebanon, have come to define an unbroken sequence of Palaeolithic periods and cultures. These and other caves were used by our ancestors for millennia to protect themselves from the elements and marauding animals, to bury their dead, and presumably to celebrate and worship with fermented beverages. Unfortunately, although intricate series of lithic tools and weapons, microlayer on microlayer, have been found, what has been preserved of organic remains gives us only tantalizing hints of what the people ate and drank. A boar’s jawbone found in the crook of a male skeleton’s arm in one of the Mount Carmel caves suggests that they had a penchant for pork.

  The intensity of human settlement is obvious from the depths of the cave deposits, up to twenty meters in places, and from the extensive scatter of hand axes and other lithic tools on the high terraces all along the Mediterranean, where the sea transgressed during drier and warmer spells and then retreated during glacial times. For example, at Ras Beirut, today the chic coastal promontory of the modern capital, the lithics are concentrated on a terrace forty-five meters above the current level of the Mediterranean. Here humans were encamped right along the shore and must have wondered what lay across the sea.

  The earliest use of watercraft in the Mediterranean likely dates back to at least 12,000 B.C., when a people known to archaeologists as the Natufians, after the site northwest of Jerusalem where they were first identified, took central stage along the Mediterranean littoral and its mountainous backdrop. (We do know that early humans must have used some kind of primitive boat, probably made by tying logs and reeds together into rafts, to cross from Southeast Asia to Australia around forty thousand years ago.) Rather than relying on hunting the prolific coastal wildlife (fallow deer, bear, and wild oxen) or gathering wild cereals, fruits, and nuts, the Natufians increasingly turned to managed resources that assured a more sedentary existence—grains that could be cultivated and processed and animals that could be herded. They were also beginning to explore the riches of the sea, as revealed by multibarbed harpoons and fishhooks. Their red ocher–colored burials, whose skulls were adorned with hundreds of dentalia and other shell species, testify to their close spiritual kinship to the sea, which reached its fullest expression in the Neolithic period, when the eyes of modeled and plastered skulls were accentuated by cowries and bivalves (see chapter 3).

  The only way that the Natufians could have so effectively exploited the riches of the Mediterranean was by boat. Their ability to fashion both incredibly realistic and abstract works of art, often highly erotic, from bone, antler, wood, and stone implies that they had the expertise to make larger constructions, such as the remarkable cluster of circular huts, with storage basins and fireplaces, at Einan, north of the Sea of Galilee. Besides attesting to a sedentary way of life in advance of the Neolithic period, the excavation of this site revealed what has been described as the earliest megalithic burial structure in the world: a pit five meters in diameter was plastered on its interior, the burials positioned within it, and the top of the pit sealed off with stone slabs. A skull on top of the slabs, close to a fireplace, provided a macabre detail: cut marks on the attached vertebrae suggested that the person had been beheaded. More slabs were piled up over this skull and fireplace and a seven-meter circle of stones was built around the pit.

  If the Natufians were capable of such monumental feats in stone and plaster, then it seems possible that they also experimented with boat construction. The wooden implements and objets d’art from Natufian excavations, sparse though they may be, attest to their sensitivity and skill in shaping this highly malleable material. They also had a good supply of it right at their doorstep. The mountains of Lebanon were once carpeted with Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani), standing forty-five meters tall, together with pines, firs, junipers, oaks and terebinth trees.

  We know that the Natufians had sophisticated toothed saws, knives, and other flint tools for cutting and shaping wood. They had discovered the advantages of tree resin as an adhesive and sealant, as can be seen from the abundant use of resin to hold microliths to sickle shafts for cutting grain. They would have had to work out other complex details of boat manufacture, such as bending, joining, and waterproofing long wooden planks. But it could well be only a matter of time until a boat is recovered from a Natufian coastal site. The succeeding Neolithic period shows a similarly close kinship to the sea, especially at the site of Byblos (see below), where pottery was decorated by impressing the edge of a shell into the moist clay,
and cowries were imported from as far away as the Red Sea.

  SAILING SEA AND SKY

  The first definitive evidence for shipping comes from Egypt in the third millennium B.C. David O’Connor, who taught me Egyptology during my graduate days at Penn, was amazed to discover fourteen “boat graves” in the desert near the religious capital of Abydos, which lies along the Nile about 650 kilometers south of where the river empties into the Mediterranean. The boats were part of extensive funerary complexes, surrounded by walls eleven meters high, that belonged to some of the first pharaohs of Egypt of late Dynasty 1 (ca. 2800 B.C.). Although weighing as much as a ton, the twenty-five-meter-long craft had been dragged into place and encased in mudbrick boat-shaped pits, which were covered with gleaming white plaster.

  The Abydos boats had been carefully constructed by fitting together variously sized planks, probably made from tamarisk, and tightening them together by running rope through opposing lines of holes. Their hulls were slightly curved, and they had a very shallow draft of sixty centimeters—adequate for navigating the Nile but not enough to weather the violent Mediterranean. The outsides of the ships had been plastered and painted an intense yellow.

  The combined effect of seeing a huge armada moored in the desert, shining white and yellow under the intense Egyptian sun, must have been electrifying. These “solar barges” provided a fitting send-off for the king to traverse the heavens with the sun god, Ra; like the sacrificed attendants, animals, food and drink, and other essentials placed in the tomb, they had been buried in anticipation of the pharaoh’s every need in the afterlife.

  For the next thousand years, Egyptian pharaohs and even high officials were customarily buried with a boat or an entire fleet. The most spectacular example is the ship, one of five, that was buried around 2500 B.C. beside the Great Pyramid of the pharaoh Khufu at Giza. It is 43.6 meters long, nearly twice the size of the Abydos boats and nine meters longer than the Golden Hind, with which Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in the sixteenth century. Khufu’s ship for the afterlife was constructed mostly from cedar using the so-called shell-first technique, in which individual hull planks are joined to one another and to the keel by interlocking mortise-and-tenon joints. Although the draft was still shallow, the ship had an impressively high bow and stern, probably intended less for open-water sailing than for ostentatious political and religious displays.

  The use of cedar in building Khufu’s magnificent funerary barge suggests where we should seek evidence for the earliest shipbuilding. Lebanon was renowned for its cedar forests in the ancient world, and no coastal site was more closely associated with the tree than Byblos, forty kilometers north of Beirut. One of Lebanon’s most intensively excavated sites, Byblos provides a detailed sequence of occupation from the early Neolithic period through the end of the Bronze Age. The French scholar Ernst Renan, who wrote the highly controversial book La vie de Jésus, initiated exploration here in 1860. More scientific excavations, first under Pierre Montet and then Maurice Dunand, spanned the period from 1925 to 1975.

  Byblos, whose name probably meant “mountain city” in Egyptian (Kpn) and Phoenician (Gebal), was particularly attractive to aspiring sailors for its protected harbor and proximity to the cedar-covered mountains. We learn from third-millennium B.C. Egyptian texts that gangs of woodcutters felled the trees in “God’s Land” with copper axes and then transported the logs, most likely by barge, to Byblos. There the cedar timber was used to make the renowned “Byblos ships” (Egyptian kbnwt) that made it possible to ferry huge shipments of the wood to Egypt. In one of the earliest accounts, the Palermo Stone Annals of the Old Kingdom, Snefru (the first king of Dynasty 4) claims to have brought forty shiploads of cedar and other conifers to Egypt and built forty-four boats, some of which were one hundred cubits (fifty-five meters) long. The planks intended for the somewhat smaller Khufu ship were numbered for ease of assembly in Egypt.

  Regrettably, Byblos has never yielded direct archaeological evidence of shipbuilding. Even the pillars of its temples and palaces, presumably made of cedar, long ago disintegrated in the moist coastal climate, leaving only large stone bases. We can be sure, however, that the Egyptians were there in force in the third millennium B.C. The principal goddess of the city-state, Baalat-Gebal, is represented on a cylinder seal, attired in a long, Egyptian-style tunic and a headdress consisting of a solar disk set between cow’s horns, which designates her as the equivalent of the Egyptian goddess of foreign lands, Hathor. Numerous fragments of stone vases also bear the cartouches of Old Kingdom pharaohs who claimed to have journeyed to Byblos for cedar and other woods.

  The ancient world’s insatiable demand for cedar of Lebanon nearly extirpated the tree. Today it grows only in a restricted area in the upper Qadisha Valley, above Tripoli, and in several small pockets in the mountains. Egypt did not have trees tall enough for seagoing vessels or monumental architecture. According to biblical tradition, Solomon was obliged to import the wood as well as carpenters from Lebanon to build the first temple in Jerusalem.

  To secure its hold on cedar and other valuable commodities, Egypt asserted its supremacy over Byblos and Lebanon, as reflected in the stories of its gods. For example, one version of the Osiris resurrection myth recounts how the god of Abydos was murdered by his brother, Seth, and his body laid in a coffin which floated across the open sea to Byblos. It landed near a cedar tree, which grew up around it. When a king of Byblos chopped the tree down to make a pillar for his palace, Osiris’s sister and wife, Isis, intervened to return him unharmed to Egypt. Osiris’s resurrection was also symbolized by the grapevine, another Levantine plant, that provided Egypt with one of its most significant fermented beverages. Symbolism became reality at the time of the annual flooding of the land by the Nile in late summer, when the land’s fertility was renewed and wine flowed in abundance at the Wagy festival in honor of Osiris (“the Lord of wine through / during the inundation”).

  WINE FROM ACROSS THE SEAS

  The truth about how wine first came to Abydos, as revealed by biomolecular archaeological investigation, has little to do with ancient myth. The story begins with archaeologists from the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo, who were excavating a magnificent “funerary house” in the desert, not far from the later boat graves. This tomb belonged to king Scorpion I of Dynasty 0, around 3150 B.C., and it was fully equipped for the afterlife. Three rooms in the structure were literal wine cellars, stacked high with some seven hundred jars of wine, amounting to about 4,500 liters. The other chambers were crammed with beer jars, bread molds, stone vessels, and cedar boxes full of clothing. The king himself lay in all his splendor on a wooden shrine in the largest room of the structure, with an ivory scepter at his side.

  In case the king might have trouble finding what he needed in the afterlife, his undertakers had the foresight to attach incised bone and ivory labels by string to the jars and boxes and to write inked inscriptions on the sides of vessels. In these labels, the earliest hieroglyphic writing from Egypt, it is stunning to see how carefully the figures of plants and animals (including jackals, scorpions, birds, and bulls) are delineated. The labels probably denoted the Egyptian estates where the food and other goods were produced.

  As we might have surmised from the very early date, the wine in the tomb did not come from Egypt. The wild grape did not grow in the arid climate of Egypt, and it took some time for the earliest rulers of the country, who were just beginning to consolidate their power, to begin tapping into the resources of the world around them and to develop a taste for wine. Eventually, the kings saw the wisdom of transplanting the domesticated vine to the rich alluvial soil of the Nile River delta. During Dynasties 1 and 2 (ca. 3000–2700 B.C.) they established a royal winemaking industry that assured a steady supply of the beverage. Scorpion I lived a century or two in advance of this development, but he set the stage for what was to come.

  Our chemical analyses showed that the wine in Scorpion I’s tomb was resinated with pine and p
ossibly terebinth tree resins. Numerous grape-seeds in some of the jars confirmed these results, and although some might interpret this debris as evidence for slovenly winemaking, the finding of whole preserved raisins and carefully sliced figs in some of the jars points to deliberate decision making by the winemaker. Fresh fruits enhanced the wine’s sweetness and taste and ensured sufficient yeast to start and sustain the fermentation. If that were not enough to entice the would-be drinker, our most recent analyses revealed other likely additives to the wine, including savory (Satureja spp.), balm (Melissa), senna (Cassia), coriander (Coriandrum), germander (Teucrium), mint (Mentha), sage (Salvia), or thyme (Thymus/Thymbra).

  Figure 17. Imported wine in Early Dynastic Egypt. (a, above) Jars containing resinated wine from Chamber 10 of Scorpion I’s tomb (denoted U-j) at Abydos, ca. 3150 B.C. The room is one of three that were filled with layer upon layer of wine jars—about seven hundred altogether—that had been imported from the Jordan Valley and environs. A single whole, sliced fig had been suspended into some of the jars. Photograph courtesy of German Archaeological Institute, Cairo. (b, left) “Tiger-striped” wine jar (U-j10/33, catalogue no. 18, height 40.8 cm), imported from the Levant and deposited in Scorpion I’s tomb. Drawing courtesy of German Archaeological Institute, Cairo.

  The style of the jars themselves and their labels supplied further clues about where the wine had been made, on the reasonable assumption that the pottery and the wine originated from the same general area. Their decorations of smeared red and white slips, narrow painted bands, or dramatic, swirling tigerlike stripes set them apart from anything made in Egypt. Only one time period and area fit the bill: the first phase of the Early Bronze Age, at sites in the vicinity of Gaza on the southern Levantine coast, in the inland Jezreel and Jordan Valleys, and in the hill country of Transjordan, as far south as the Dead Sea.