In the West no shipwreck dates to the second half of the 7th, 8th or 9th centuries. The four 10th-century Saracen wrecks of Provence, France, and their local cargoes of large dolia, jugs, millstones and lamps are a far cry from the mass international amphora cargoes holding oil, wine and fish sauce of the Roman and Byzantine worlds. 

 

The missing link to this eternal mystery comes from the Holy Land. Logically, given its geostrategic location midway along the most important sea-lane of Late Antiquity, linking the wheat-abundant province of Egypt with the capital at Constantinople, Israel is rich in Byzantine and Early Islamic shipwrecks, of which 23 have been examined in varying detail. Almost exclusively, the six examples in Dor harbour, 13 kilometres north of Caesarea, are forcing marine archaeologists into a radical re-think of patterns of trade and economics between the late 5th and 9th centuries. 

Traditionally, the shift away from 35 metre-long Roman supertankers capable of transporting 7,000 amphoras and 400 tons of cargo to small craft of 12-20 metre standard length, with less than 1,000 transport jars, and a stark reduction in mortise and tenon edge-joint technology held in place with wooden treenail pegs, is interpreted as signs of a commercial revolution. 

During the Roman period, on average up to 20,000 square or rectangular mortise and tenons, set 10-12 centimetres apart between strake edges, were used to mould shell-first vessels. The emphasis lay exclusively on external structural integrity reliant on mortise and tenons. By the late 4th century this spacing had started to stretch out, and by the 5th century ships like the Ravenna wreck, Italy, no longer relied on wooden treenails to secure tenons in mortise slots. The shift towards a reliance on internal structural integrity based on frames and longitudinal stringers was slowly gaining favour. 

These smaller, more agile craft were less wasteful of wood and cheaper to build and maintain. Their smaller investment and risk to manage has been called a powerful factor of democracy, with the late Prof. Richard Steffy of Texas A & M University arguing that “economics and politics had changed so radically as to require a different ship-building philosophy. Shipowners were often independent businessmen with limited assets operating under what amounted to a free enterprise system.” 

As is now clear from the late 5th century Dor 2001/1 and Tantura A shipwrecks, and as far as archaeological visibility currently permits us to peer, Palestine lay at the very heart of this commercial revolution. It was setting a technological trend that the rest of the Mediterranean would catch up with some 150 years later, if wrecks at Yassi Ada, Turkey, and St. Gervais, France, are symptomatic of broader pan-Mediterranean socio-economic patterns. 

The wine trade seems to have been key to Palestine’s good fortunes. After all, what could be a more ideal unique selling point than peddling Christian or Jewish wine as grown on soils once roamed by the Twelve Tribes of Israel and later by Jesus and the Apostles? Some 900 Byzantine wine presses are distributed across Israel from the Golan to the Negev desert, with single vat capacities holding up to 59,000-litres of liquid. At Dor these can be linked directly to cargoes of LR4 (Gaza/Ashkelon) and LR5 Palestinian amphoras, which made their way across the Mediterranean as far West as Dalmatia and as far south down the Red Sea to Qana in the Yemen. 

In many ways charting the progression of the Palestinian wine trade is the easy part; documenting the chronology and rationale underlying its ‘fall’ is a far more thorny matter with sensitive political overtones. Did the arrival of Islam de-fuse classical forms of exchange, which stretched as far back as the 14th century BC Uluburun shipwreck with its mortise and tenoned hull? 

At first glance, the newly discovered late 7th to 9th century shipwrecks from Dor harbour foster room for optimism and an argument for some degree of classical continuity. They certainly fit into the pattern of the Caliphate’s efforts to continue minting Byzantine-style gold solidi coins and to de-silt the port of Clysma at the head of the Gulf of Suez in AD 642. Papyri preserved in the sands of the caravan town of Nessana in southern Israel also leave no doubt that the Byzantine-style tax regime was kept in place into the late 7th century, while three milestones celebrating the Caliph Abd al-Malik’s maintenance of the old Roman road system near Jerusalem, in the Judean Hills and in the Sea of Galilee, imply business as usual – or at least an attempt to posture as such. 

The image of early to mid-7th century dislocation in agricultural and industrial production revealed at primary supply nodes like the agricultural estate of Ramat Hanadiv and the ecclesiastical complex at Tel Tanninim seems graphic and convincing. But on the other hand, so does the historical record, which reflects a far more positive realpolitik. Naval shipyards were developed in greater Syria after Mu‘awiyah became caliph in AD 661 and once skilled Persian workmen were imported to Antioch, Tyre, Acre and other port cities. The naval invasion of Cyprus in 654 is said to have consisted of a Muslim fleet of 500 ships and 12,000 soldiers, and texts imply that the Battle of the Masts off the Lycian coast in 655 heralded the rise of Muslim victory at sea. 

The archaeology, however, does not agree. A navy is a key ingredient of imperial aspirations; the shipping of semi-luxury oils, wines and other exotic foreign wares is to all intents and purposes a luxury that reflects sophisticated medium-level culture that permeated all strata of society. Certainly along the coasts of Israel, the age of such domesticated, perhaps decadent bliss, was over. By the mid-7th century the harbours and warehouses of great ports like Caesarea had gone out of use. This winding down of operations coincided with the final shipment of Palestinian wine amphoras overseas. 

In the place of the open, boisterous world of the classical port, the fortified realm of the coastal ribât emerged. A ribât was not an open-plan port, but a closed and strongly defended fort. Technically translated as "places where horses tied up", each had four to eight projecting towers, which were circular at each corner and semi-circular in the centre of each side. Life inside the ribât was neatly summarised by Al-Muqadassî, who reported that “Along the seacoast of the capital [ie. Ramla] are watch-stations, from which the summons to arms is given. The warships and the galleys of the Greeks [Byzantines] come into these ports, bringing aboard them the captives taken from the Muslims; these they offer for ransom – three for the hundred dînars. And in each of these stations there are men who know the Greek tongue, for they have missions to the Greeks, and trade with them in provisions of all kinds… And the rîbats of this District where this ransoming of captives takes place are: Gaza, Mimas [Gaza Maiumas], Ascalon, Mahuz [port of Ashdod], Yubna, Yaffa and Arsuf.” 

The architecture of exchange now looked more medieval than classical, and if we take the ribât as symptomatic of the fate of maritime trade then the fragile economy became introverted, inward-looking, and self-sufficient. And this is precisely what we see in the Early Islamic wrecks at Dor. Even though the art of ship construction lived on, the cargoes are diminutive and the jars used to transport them unsuited for the bulk movement of foodstuffs. Where in its heyday the Palestinian bag-shaped amphora held 22 litres of wine, the Umayyad and Abbasid variants only stocked between 6 and 10 litres. 

The classical tradition of the seaborne amphora went ‘on hold’. It did not die, but became localised, and indeed would start to re-emerge from its slumber in the 9th century, as the Bozburun shipwreck reveals off Turkey. But between the second half of the 7th and early 9th century, long-distance maritime trade witnessed a near-total cessation. The Late Antique world of commerce and State shipment for the Welfare State was reliant on political stability and safe sea-lanes. With the loss of the Near East, that umbilical chord was rudely severed. 

S. Kingsley, Barbarian Seas. Late Rome to Islam (Encylopaedia of Underwater Archaeology, Periplus, London, 2004). 

S. Kingsley, ‘Saracen Seas, Early Islam and the Death of Rome’, Minerva 18.6 (2007), 44-46.