The Uluburun shipwreck
A merchant ship sinks off Turkey with ten tonnes of copper and cargo from a dozen countries.
- When
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
A vessel that went down around 1320 BCE off the Turkish coast carried ten tonnes of Cypriot copper ingots, a tonne of tin, Canaanite jars of terebinth resin, ebony from Africa, ivory, ostrich eggshells, Baltic amber, Egyptian gold, Mycenaean pottery and the oldest known writing tablet with a wax surface. It is the single best evidence for how thoroughly interconnected the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was — and therefore how much there was to lose.