The Eastern Greeks in the Sixth Century B.C. (cont.)

While excavations at Egyptian Naucratis and Syrian Al Mina reveal evidence of East Greek artifacts in international circulation, the shipwreck at Pabuç Burnu provides a glimpse at the smaller-scale local trade conducted by sailors or merchants involved in a more limited venture—a modest-sized merchant vessel unlikely to have sailed beyond the immediate area between Rhodes and Miletus. The wreck, which carried an assortment of coarseware cups, bowls, and pitchers, along with about 250 amphoras that probably carried wine or olive oil, offers clues to the systems by which trade and transport were conducted, the development of standardization in amphora capacities, and perhaps the social status of the individuals involved in seafaring ventures. The artifacts help us to model production and distribution mechanisms including those designed for tribute, bulk shipment, and localized trade.

Along with the economic developments suggested by the cargo, the hull of the vessel itself reveals advances in the technology of ship construction during the sixth century. Construction features visible on six fragmentary planks recovered from the ship's hull reveal that it was laced together. Such lacing of planks appears in Homer's Odyssey where the hero builds a boat for his journey away from the island of Calypso (5.244-8):

He felled twenty trees in all, and shaped them with his bronze axe,
and smoothed them expertly, and trued them straight to a chalkline.
Meanwhile Calypso, the shining goddess, brought him an auger
and he bored through them all and fit them to each other
with dowels, and then with cords he lashed his boat together.

It may be cords and rotting hull planks such as these that king Agamemnon laments in the second book of the Iliad (2.135) as he describes the damage wrought to the ships by nine long years of disuse at Troy. Before the eastern Greek tyrants such as Polycrates of Samos may have adopted sturdier building techniques (or mortise-and-tenon joinery) in the late sixth century B.C. for their multi-level triremes, they appear to have laced their vessels together.

Simple laced vessels like the shipwreck at Pabuç Burnu may resemble the boats that the sophist Critias, in a fragmentary poem about the exports of East Greece and other regions, attributes to the inhabitants of Caria, the region south of Halicarnassus. Poetically, he explains (fr. 2.6-11), "Miletus and Chios, Oenopian's city by the sea, are famed for the beauty of their beds...Phoenicians invented letters as a means of preserving discourse. Thebes was the first to construct the carriage for a chariot, and the Carians, stewards of the sea, made cargo vessels." The inhabitants of coastal Asia Minor from northern Aetolia to southern Caria occupy a critical stopping point for the transmission of goods and knowledge between the eastern and western worlds of the Archaic period. With its cargo of wine and olive oil in amphoras, coarseware pottery, and its wooden hull remains, the Pabuç Burnu shipwreck offers a window into the economic and technological practices of the East Greek world before the Persian conquests of 546 and the unified resistance that led to the Ionian revolt a half-century later.