Uncorking the Past Page 22
Small clay sealings, scattered around the jars, confirmed the foreign origin of the wine. Their backs had been impressed with jar rims and strings, which meant that the clay, when wet, had been applied over a string that tied down a cover, probably of leather, over the mouth of the vessel. When the strings and covers disintegrated, the sealings fell to the ground. The upper surface of the sealings displayed finely cut cylinder-seal impressions of distinctively non-Egyptian types, which combined free-flowing designs of animals (including antelope, fish, birds, and snakes) with geometric patterns. A thorough search of the archaeological literature revealed no exact matches for the cylinder-seal designs, but the closest parallels pointed again to the northern Jordan Valley and the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. Like the hieroglyphs on the bone and ivory labels marking other goods in the tomb, the clay sealings were likely labels for the seven hundred jars: if we could decipher them, they might even tell us the location of the wineries.
Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), another tool of modern molecular archaeology, enabled us to chemically “fingerprint” and trace the wine jars in Scorpion I’s tomb to their source. Small amounts of pottery from the jars, on the order of a tenth of a gram, are subjected to a high-energy neutron flux inside a nuclear reactor. This excites individual chemical elements, especially the rare-earth elements which are highly characteristic of specific clay beds around the world, to become radioactive. As each element decays back to its ground state, it emits characteristic gamma rays, allowing the elements to be measured down to parts per million. Extremely powerful statistical methods are then applied to match these results to data from ancient samples and modern clays.
Eleven wine jars, representing all the major pottery fabrics in the Scorpion I corpus, were tested at the University of Missouri Research Reactor in Columbia. Although three of the jars showed no chemical matches with any clay sample or well-defined local group of ancient pottery in our data bank, the other eight were made from clays local to the Gaza area, the Jordan Valley, the southern hill country of the West Bank, and the Transjordanian Plateau to the east. There were no other matches to the more than 5,800 samples in our data bank, and, significantly, Egyptian clays and pottery were not among the possible matches. Surprisingly, several of the Scorpion I jars matched clay beds at the “rose-red city” of Petra in Jordan, renowned for the architecture carved from its red sandstone; it was later a capital of the Nabataeans and a principal caravan stop on the Arabian camel route, one segment of the Silk Road.
The aridity of southern Jordan today would seem to preclude any grape growing or winemaking there. A different picture, however, has begun to emerge from recent surveys and excavations. Early Neolithic sites in the Petra region, such as Beidha and Basta, were some of the largest, most innovative settlements in the Near East. Although grapeseeds are yet to be recovered from these sites, hundreds of winepresses dating from later times attest to a vibrant industry. Recently a temple to Dionysos was uncovered at the Beidha “High Place” by Patricia Bikai of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman (ACOR). The wine god and his coterie of associated deities (including Pan, Ampelos, and Isis) were stunningly depicted on the capitals of a central courtyard, whose surrounding benches in the style of a Roman triclinium might well have been used to celebrate the delights of the beverage. When I was in Jordan in 2006, Patricia and I looked over the pottery in the ACOR storeroom, and our laboratory has since analyzed several jars from the temple. Predictably, they once held resinated wine.
Could any of the wine in Scorpion I’s tomb have come from the Petra region, or do the INAA matches simply reflect the chemical similarity of clay deposits in various parts of the southern Transjordanian plateau? The recent discovery of a fourth-millennium B.C. town at Tall Hujayrat al-Ghuzlan on the Gulf of Aqaba, only about one hundred kilometers south of Petra and with clear evidence of Egyptian contacts, suggests that the wine could conceivably have come from this region. From the top of the Gulf of Aqaba across the Red Sea would have been a straight shot by boat to trade routes crossing the Egyptian eastern desert to Thebes and Abydos (for example, via the 150-kilometer traverse of the Wadi Hammamat).
Transshipment of the Scorpion I wine from a Mediterranean port, however, is more plausible. Locations like Byblos, which had access to the necessary raw materials for building ships, were likely integrated into an economic exchange system with inland regions and towns farther south along the coast much earlier than the southern Transjordanian plateau was connected with the Gulf of Aqaba. In either case, the main problem would have been to get the wine from the hill country and the Jordan Valley to the coast without ruining it. Jars were probably strapped to the sides of donkeys, as depicted by figurines of the period, and could have been wetted with water to provide evaporative cooling for the wine under the hot Levantine sun. The nearest ports to the winemaking areas identified by our INAA study were Ashkelon, which has now been shown to have been occupied in the late fourth millennium B.C., and Gaza, still poorly known because it is covered by a modern city.
Travel by boat from Ashkelon or Gaza to the eastern Pelusiac branch of the Nile River would have been the most expeditious and safest way to convey the wine to Egypt. An overland route across the Sinai was also in use at this time, but continued transport by donkeys would have added insult to injury for both wine and animal. On current evidence, the Levantine merchants also controlled the offloading of the wine in Nile delta port areas, such as Minshat Abu Omar on the Pelusiac branch.
Our INAA study bore out the inference of a shipping connection between the southern Levant and Egypt. When we tested one of the distinctive clay sealings of foreign origin in the vicinity of the wine jars, we found it was made of Nile alluvial clay. In other words, when the wine arrived in a Nile delta port, the jar covers must have been replaced, resealed with local clay, and then stamped with the seal of the Levantine merchants. The jars’ arduous journey by land and sea meant that any residual fermentation of the wines had already taken place, with the gases escaping through the porous caps. After the jars were brought ashore in Egypt, they could be prepared for their remaining journey upriver to Abydos under Egyptian auspices; some of these eventually found their way into Scorpion I’s tomb.
The beverage of a pharaoh deserved only the best treatment, since, according to the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, “[the king] shall make his meal from figs and wine which are in the garden of the god.” The supply of a wine laced with figs assured the dead king of a fully sanctified meal for the afterlife.
This tomb exhibits another intriguing parallel to the later boat graves. The wine jars are piled in layers inside three rooms of Scorpion I’s tomb, much as amphoras were loaded into the hull of a Byblos ship (see below). In 1997, a U.S. Navy submarine detected a pair of Phoenician shipwrecks sixty-one kilometers offshore from Ashkelon and Gaza, lying two kilometers apart at a depth of four hundred meters. Two years later, Robert Ballard, who famously explored the sunken Titanic, deployed a remotely operated vehicle to plot their positions and the cargo debris scattered on the sea floor. It turned out that these ships, dating to the late eighth century B.C., were stuffed from bottom to top with wine amphoras.
The two ships, nicknamed Tanit (the principal Phoenician goddess and tutelary deity of the seas) and Elissa (the Tyrian princess who, legend claims, founded the important Phoenician colony of Carthage in present-day Tunisia), were sailing westward on a course that could have carried them to Egypt or Carthage. A sudden storm, as sometimes sweeps down from the Sinai Peninsula, probably took them by surprise and plunged them to their watery graves. The ships sank into muddy sediments, and over time their upper wooden sides were exposed and eaten away by wood borers to expose two layers of superimposed amphoras in their hulls. In the hold of the Tanit, 385 vessels were visible; inside the Elissa, 396 amphoras could be seen. The site has thus far only been imaged and not excavated; many more layers of amphoras might lie unseen below.
The spread of the amphoras on the
sea floor marked out the approximate dimensions of each ship, and their size was estimated to have been about 14 meters from stem to stern, with a beam width of 5 to 6 meters. These dimensions were in accord with later classical-period wrecks, such as that of the Kyrenia, which went aground off the coast of Cyprus around 300 B.C. Boats of this size weighed about 25 tons when fully loaded. Since an amphora full of wine weighs about 25 kilograms, just the visible amphoras of the Tanit and Elissa weighed at least 9 tons each. This amounts to about 15,000 liters of wine. But Phoenician ships sometimes carried much more, as recorded in an Egyptian customs docket of 475 B.C. in which one large ship carried 1,460 full amphoras (40 tons), in addition to 4 tons of cedar wood, copper and empty amphoras.
Our laboratory’s analysis of the pine-resin lining inside one of the Phoenician amphoras found traces of tartaric acid and its salt, derived from grape wine, absorbed into the lining, so we know that at least one amphora aboard the Tanit and Elissa contained wine. Of the additional twenty-two amphoras recovered from the wrecks, all had a pine-resin lining, suggesting that most if not all the amphoras contained wine, just as they did in the ship that docked in Egypt in 475 B.C.
The amphoras on the two ships have a distinctive sausage or torpedo shape. A careful study of the style and pottery ware by Lawrence Stager of Harvard University and his students, who accompanied Ballard on his 1999 exploration, showed that the amphoras had most likely been manufactured at a Phoenician city-state along the Lebanese coast. They also retrieved other artifacts from the shipwrecks that clearly pointed to the cultural identity of its sailors. For example, a beautifully red-slipped and highly burnished jug with a flaring mushroomlike lip, in imitation of gold and silver prototypes, was the distinctive calling card of the Phoenicians; it abounds in the Lebanese homeland and at Phoenician colonies and port sites throughout the Mediterranean. Part of the Phoenician “wine set,” the decanter was used to serve wine with an ostentatious flourish.
The distinctly Phoenician character of the ships and their crews also emerged from a study of objects found in the sterns of the boats, where their galley or kitchen was located. Here, six cooking pots from the Tanit and Elissa, probably used to prepare scrumptious fish stews, were familiar eastern Mediterranean types. Prayers to the gods of the sea were also made near the rear of the boat, as seen on fourteenth-century B.C. Egyptian tomb paintings of Canaanite ships. A single adorant is usually shown pouring a liquid offering—most likely wine—from a small vial held in one hand, while incense wafts up from a burner held in the other. An incense burner resembling those in the paintings and of known Phoenician style was recovered from the Elissa’s stern. The main deities that the Phoenician sailors would have invoked on their dangerous voyages were the mother goddess Tanit, who was associated with the moon and navigation, and her consort, Reshef or Baal, who controlled the wind and weather.
THE FINE WINES OF CANAAN AND PHOENICIA
The thirty thousand or more liters of wine lost when the Tanit and Elissa sank represent just a trickle of the huge quantity of wine exported from Phoenician ports such as Tyre, Sidon, Berytus (modern Beirut), and Byblos during the first millennium B.C. Most ships would have arrived safely at their destinations, having loaded and offloaded an impressive array of goods en route. When the biblical prophet Ezekiel excoriated Tyre in the sixth century B.C. and predicted its doom (Ezekiel 27), he compared the prosperous city-state with a huge seagoing vessel fashioned from the best woods—juniper and cedar from the mountains of Lebanon, oak from Transjordan, and cypress from Cyprus. The metaphorical ship is described as loaded with incense, gold, and camels from Arabia; wheat and olive oil from Israel; tin and silver from Tarshish; horses and slaves from Anatolia, and more—a seemingly endless list of merchandise from the far-flung corners of the known world.
Figure 18. Wall painting from the tomb of Kenamun, the mayor of Thebes during the fourteenth century B.C., depicting a Canaanite ship arriving in port. The captain of the ship holds aloft an incense burner and a cup of wine, which has probably been taken from the amphora in front of him. Illustration adapted by K. Vagliardo for L. E. Stager, “Phoenician Shipwrecks and the Ship Tyre (Ezekiel 27),” in Terra Marique: Studies in Art History and Marine Archaeology in Honor of Anna Marguerite McCann, ed. J. Pollini (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005), 238–54, fig. 18.12; after N. de G. Davies and R. O. Faulkner, 1947, “A Syrian Trading Venture to Egypt,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 33: pl. 8.
In 1984, George Bass of Texas A&M’s Institute of Nautical Archaeology electrified the archaeological world when he announced the discovery of what is still the earliest excavated shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and it has all the international panache of Ezekiel’s boat. Found by a sponge diver in 45-meter-deep water along Turkey’s desolate southern coast near Uluburun, the ship turned out to be a Canaanite merchantman. It was about the same size as the Tanit and the Elissa, made entirely of cedar of Lebanon, and built with mortise-and-tenon joints between the planks and the keel (just like the earlier Khufu ship). It was probably headed to Egypt during the fourteenth century B.C., following the counterclockwise currents of the eastern Mediterranean around Cyprus, when a sudden storm drove it against the rocks.
To judge from the astonishing wealth of its cargo, this Byblos ship was likely under royal commission: it contained African blackwood (“ebony”) and hippopotamus tusks, ten tons of Cypriot copper ingots in ox-hide and bun shapes, elaborate gold and glass drinking vessels, Canaanite gold pendants, masses of molluscan opercula (the animal’s hard footplate, which seals the opening of its shell), a half ton of terebinth tree resin, a double-paneled, hinged “book” for inscribed beeswax tablets (our word book derives from Byblos)—the list goes on and on. Canaanite oil lamps and a large set of Levantine animal-shaped stone weights marked its crew, officers, and traders as hailing from a city-state on the Eastern Mediterranean coast.
All that seemed to be missing from the Uluburun wreck was wine. There were about 150 amphoras in the wreck’s hull, and some of those were as much as a third full of nodules and chunks of terebinth resin. Others were filled with glass beads and olives. That still left seventy or more empty amphoras, which might originally have carried fine Canaanite wine for the pharaoh or to assuage the thirst of the sailors.
In his prophetic tirade against Tyre, Ezekiel reported that delectable wines from Helbon, near Damascus, and from Izalla on the southeastern Anatolia coast, transported overland in huge jars (pithoi) to Damascus, were among the goods transshipped by the Tyrian merchants. Helbon wine, renowned among the Assyrians, came from the small village of Halbun, situated high in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains west of the Damascus oasis. More than five hundred years later, the Roman writer Strabo claimed that its wine was served to the kings of Persia.
The wines of the Phoenicians and of their Bronze Age ancestors, the Canaanites, garner the highest praise in the ancient world. (I am using Canaan here in its original, more restrictive sense, as applying solely to the northern Levantine coast; later its meaning expanded to denote more southerly regions of modern Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.) For example, we read in the so-called Rephaim or Rapi’uma texts excavated in the fourteenth- to thirteenth-century B.C. palace of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, near Latakia) in Syria, on the northern periphery of Canaan, that “daylong they pour the wine . . . must-wine, fit for rulers. Wine, sweet and abundant, select wine . . . the choice wine of Lebanon, must nurtured by El [the head of the pantheon].” Later Greek writers, such as Theocritus and Archestratus of Syracuse, single out Bybline wine as “fine and fragrant,” the equal of the best Greek wine from Lesbos. Its aroma appears to have been its strong suit, if we are to believe the biblical prophet Hosea, who lauds its scent (14:7).
Where and when did the tradition of making fine Canaanite and Phoenician wines begin? These questions await detailed scientific investigation, but I estimate a sixth-millennium B.C. date for the domesticated Eurasian grapevine’s transplantation to the northern Levant and the start of its winemaking industry. Leva
ntine wine later grew into a major economic force. Anatolia, which had contacts with Neolithic Byblos, had already embarked on the same trajectory by 7000 B.C., if not earlier, which led to its all-encompassing wine culture. Gaza, the Jordan Valley, and the southern Levantine hill country had been planted with the domesticated vine by ca. 3500 B.C., to judge from grapeseeds, wood, and even whole dried grapes (raisins) recovered from Jericho and other sites throughout the region. Indeed, the industry had matured to such a degree by the time of Scorpion I (ca. 3150 B.C.) that it supplied all 4,500 liters of his wine for the afterlife. Dating the beginning of the industry in the northern Levant to the sixth millennium B.C. allows enough time for the process to have become established and transferred southward from eastern Turkey to the southern Levant over three to four thousand years.
If the Canaanites and Phoenicians had planted the vine only near their harbor towns, their vineyards would have been confined to a narrow strip of land between sea and mountain. Fortunately, a large, fertile valley between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountains—the Beqaa—beckoned inland. Today, the best Lebanese wines come from the Beqaa, even in the midst of sectarian violence and Israeli incursions. It is also where the Romans, around A.D. 150, built temples at Baalbek—the grandest complex of religious structures in the entire empire, dedicated to Bacchus (the wine god), Venus (the goddess of love and fertility), and Jupiter (the king of the gods) who was identified with the Phoenician storm god Baal. Quite appropriately, the Bacchus temple was erected under the aegis of Antoninus Pius, who hailed from the Phoenician (Punic) colony of Carthage in north Africa. The temple astounds the visitor with its well-preserved Corinthian columns, nineteen meters tall, and its richly adorned decoration of entwined grape motifs and reliefs that recount the birth and life of Bacchus. The valley was likely the country’s principal wine-producing center in antiquity.