Homer and the Phoenicians
Scientists have discovered all sorts of wonderful things, engineers have constructed all sorts of wonderful things, archaeologists have uncovered all sorts of wonderful things, doctors have ... but I think you get the idea. Modern technology enables us to do things that would leave our ancestors open-mouthed with astonishment. The only members of our modern world who appear to have accomplished nothing of any worth are literary critics.
Of course these shadowy scholars claim such coups as revealing a few forgeries ranging from the Donation of Constantine to the Hitler Diaries, but apart from that, nothing. Why, they can't even tell us who wrote the plays of Shakespeare? Was it really Bacon after all? Who can tell?
What makes it worse is that the further back you go in time the more dogmatic and the more radical become the pronouncements of these "experts". Moses couldn't have existed, they claim, for reasons ranging from the supposed non-existence of writing back then to the non-appearance of the biro until the twentieth century. As for Homer - we pause while the literary critic regains his composure after a long and hacking laugh.
Homer, you see, wasn't really Homer, but someone else of the same name, who lived long after the ancient Greeks thought that Homer lived and who filled his work with the most shocking anachronisms. Why, the chap was so ignorant that he even spoke of the Phoenicians travelling around the Mediterranean back when Hector was a boy and Troy stood in grandeur above the sea!
In another article on this site I speak of the fallacy of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence. It is true that until recently there was no evidence for widespread Phoenician trade in the days when Greeks and Trojans fought, but that is not evidence that there was no such trade. After all, Homer spoke of it and although the literary critics might cavil, Homer is evidence!
Recently, however, underwater archaeologists have been investigating two shipwrecks off the coast of Turkey. Known, from their find sites, as the Gelidonya and the Uluburun wrecks, these ancient ships have added considerably to our understanding of ancient trade routes.
The Gelidonya wreck is the younger, for its pottery and C-14 dating of its wood places it around 1200 BC. It apparently struck a pinnacle of rock beneath the surface just to the north of the Gelidonya islands and as it sank some of its cargo cascaded out through the hole in the bottom, leaving a trail of wreckage pointing to the final resting place of the ship.
The cargo and what little remains of the ship point to a Phoenician origin and the archaeologists who excavated it in the 1960s had no hesitation in calling it a Phoenician wreck.
Interestingly the hull contained considerable quantities of brushwood as packing to protect the fragile pottery vessels in the cargo against damage from pounding through the sea. Homer mentions that Odysseus placed brushwood in his newly built ship, but doesn't explain why he did so. To Homer, of course, an explanation would have been to state the obvious; to the literary critics the mystery was yet more evidence that Homer didn't know what he was talking about and never existed anyway.
The Uluburun wreck dates to around 1300 BC, or although dendrochronology places some of the ship's timbers to nearly 90 years older, firewood found in the wreck is dated by the same technique to 1312 BC and was probably loaded aboard for the ship's last voyage.
You can read the entire cargo manifest of the Uluburun ship in the Wikipedia article on the subject. The wide range of goods carried show just how far-reaching were the trade networks of the Late Bronze Age.
The construction of both boats points to an origin in Cyprus or Phoenicia while the cargo being carried strongly suggests that it came from the Lebanon and Syria - areas for which the Phoenicians were ideally placed to be middlemen. In fact, the only known mold for casting the type of copper ingots found in the ships was discovered in a palace at Ras-ibn-Hani, the port of Ugarit, the greatest of Late Bronze Age Syrian port cities.
It would appear that Homer's references to the Phoenicians are not at all anachronistic, particularly as contemporary Egyptian texts and pictures all show that trade - especially trade in copper - was carried in Syrian, which is to say Phoenician, ships.
So far no human remains have been found for us to analyse so the possibility remains that in fact the boats were Phoenician vessels manned by Greek crews, which sank while on a trading voyage to Syria, but it is at least clear that trade with Phoenicia was indeed carried on in Homer's day - the original Homer, that is, rather than the mythical character invented by the literary critics.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
