Traditionally, the economic potential of the Dead Sea as a natural resource and medium for maritime communication has received little interest. With its corrosive sulphuric properties, what was called Lake Asphaltitis in antiquity is almost exclusively thought to have been too hostile for shipping. Despite this negative tide of opinion, regional studies are now demonstrating that the Dead Sea enjoyed a profitable specialised economy from before the Hellenistic period. 

Salt, dates, date wine and honey were a staple form of production and trade, while bitumen and balsam production were highly skillful entrepreneurial ventures. Certainly, the harvesting of bitumen from the Dead Sea would have demanded vibrant coastal communities to be experts in shipbuilding and sailing. Writing c. 60-30 BC, Diodorus Siculus described Lake Asphaltitis (the Dead Sea) as: 

 

“casts up back clods of bitumen in many parts of it; these swim at the top of the water, and resemble both in shape and bigness headless bulls; and when the labourers that belong to the lake come to it, and catch hold of it as it hangs together, they draw it into their ships; but when the ship is full, it is not easy to cut off the rest, for it is so tenacious as to make the ship hang upon its clods till they set it loose with the menstrual blood of women, and with urine, to which alone it yields. This bitumen is not only useful for the caulking of ships, but for the cure of men’s bodies: accordingly it is mixed in a great many medicines. The length of this lake is 580 furlongs, where it is extended as far as Zoar, in Arabia; and its breadth is 150”.

Economic interests, and not primarily sectarian Jewish revolutionaries, are what brought Rome to the Dead Sea during the First Jewish Revolt (AD 66-70). As Pliny the Elder confirmed after Judaea was subdued, “The balsam tree is now a subject of Rome and pays tribute together with the race to which it belongs… the immense value of even the cheapest part of the harvest, the wooden lopping fetched only five years after the ravages of war of the destruction of the Temple, 800,000 sesterces” (Natural History 12.118). 

If the Madaba Map mosaic is reliable, then date plantations ringed the city of Zoara at the south-east tip of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan. Two ships on the Dead Sea, equipped with masts and dual-rudders, also seem to be transporting salt and perhaps commodities within amphoras. Other vegetation present on the map at the royal Herodian estate of Archelaus in Jericho and Sapsas may represent the balsam bush. 

Seafaring on the lake may also be inferred from a boat depicted on the mosaic from the mid-6th century AD Monastery of St. Lot and Procopius on Mount Nebo, as well as local grape cultivation and pressing for wine (though scenes of fishermen on the floor suggest some level of idealised source material). 

Fieldwork on the western, Israeli shores of the Dead Sea has emphatically confirmed the existence of rich agricultural, industrial and maritime traditions. Qumran and Ein Feshkha contain vats suitable for date wine or balsam production, while a balsam workshop has been excavated in the Roman village of Ein Gedi. Notably, the double-rimmed jars used for its storage have been provisionally sourced to Callirrhoe on the eastern shore, implying extensive trade links across the lake. A Roman date processing plant has also been excavated at Ein Boqeq at the south-western tip of the Dead Sea. 

 

Complementing this secondary data for shipping, surveys along the shores of Ein Gedi have allegedly identified its harbour, as well as recovering a one-armed Hellenistic wooden anchor covered with date-palm rope and a second two-armed wooden Roman anchor, 1.8 metres long. Rope preserved with two stone anchors has been radiocarbon dated to the 2nd century BC. Weighing 111 and 120 kilograms, these substantial anchors are as heavy as any found in the coastal Mediterranean ports of Israel and are indicative of merchant vessel traffic (bearing in mind that anchors had to be far heavier to deal with severe buoyancy issues in the Dead Sea). A second assemblage of stone anchors, alongside thousands of Hasmonaean dynasty bronze coins dating to the 2nd century BC, has been found at Ein Feshkha. Further north, a ship’s slipway and cargo of several thousand early 1st century BC coins of Alexander Jannaeus have been surveyed at Khirbet Mazin. 

Substantial evidence thus exists for flourishing commerce along the western shore of the Dead Sea. But other than a controversial harbour site at Callirrhoe, no comparable material or sites have been identified in Jordan. The primary objective of the Safi Coastal Survey, conducted by Wreck Watch in association with Dr. Konstantinos Politis, Director of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies, was to examine the area for comparable commercial and maritime materials: 

Alongside the archaeological fieldwork, desk-based research examined the geomorphology and contours of the southern Dead Sea in the Roman and Byzantine periods using maps, aerial photographs and satellite imagery; access routes to the shore (roads and slipways); the maritime climate, including wave and wind regime; early modern ethnographic evidence for seafaring from the 18th to early 20th centuries; iconographic evidence for Dead Sea ship construction methods. 

 

P.C. Hammond, ‘The Nabataean Bitumen Industry at the Dead Sea’, Biblical Archaeologist 22.1 (1959), 40-48. 

Y. Hirschfeld, Qumran in Context: Reassessing the Archaeological Evidence (Hendrickson, 2004). 

Y. Hirschfeld, ‘A Hasmonaean Coin Cargo in the Dead Sea’, Minerva 17.5 (2006), 47-8. 

S. Kingsley. ‘Battle for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sixty Years of Controversy’, Minerva 18.1 (2007). 

J. Patrich, ‘Agricultural Development in Antiquity: Improvements in Cultivation and Production of Balsam’. In K. Galor, J.-P. Humbert and J. Zangenberg (eds.), Qumran. The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates (Leiden, 2006), 241-48.