In the midst of those technological innovations, the inhabitants of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, sailed along the Egyptian and North African coast until they reached the other shore, the westernmost, the furthest or Iberian as the Greeks called it. This event occurred between the 6th and 5th centuries BC, and is part of what is known as the protohistory of the Iberian Peninsula , a phase of the continuum history in which peoples have a script that we still do not understand today but whose existence has been narrated in other known classical languages that have made it reach us. In other words, we know about them through the texts of third parties who compiled their stories and left them written. But we also know them for their material legacy and thanks to the archaeological record with which their existence, their customs and the complexity of their societies are currently reconstructed.
The local populations of the Iberian area were distributed throughout the peninsular Levant, from the Gulf of Liguria to beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, although they also entered the peninsular Atlantic coast and North Africa. In these places, the towns began to receive the foreign Mediterranean minorities, especially the Phoenician merchants who traveled with their ships, showing a mastery of shipbuilding and navigation ahead of their time. In the ships they transported their products for trade but with the people they also traveled their knowledge, their ideas and their ways of life. The fruit of this contact between aborigines and overseas explorers gave way to a complex process of acculturation , of much greater significance than the simple commercial exchange.
The Phoenician ships
At the height of the 8th century BC. the Phoenicians had already developed money vessels for their commercial activities. Powered by sail and with very few crew members, they were an efficient and economical means of communication and transportation. As archaeologist Barry Cunliffe explains, these ships could carry between 90 and 450 tons of merchandise. They were relatively slow ships, reaching a cruising speed of about five knots, but that constant speed in a straight line allowed them to travel up to 120 nautical miles in one day of navigation, something impossible to achieve on land.
The construction technology of the Phoenician ships was linked to the art of sailing , and its crew, as quoted by the Greek geographer Strabo and also by the Old Testament writers, Isaiah and Ezekiel, were "the best navigators in the world". Apparently, they knew how to measure the height of the stars above the horizon and plot directions while maintaining latitude, so they could stay away from the coast, avoiding geographical accidents and sailing more safely. However, they were still unable to calculate longitude, something that was not possible until the 18th century, with the invention of the precision chronometer.
For Pliny, the Phoenicians would have learned from the Chaldeans to be guided by the stars and applied this nautical knowledge to navigate the high seas. They must also have shared seafaring experience with the Greeks, with whom they had close contacts from the 8th century BC. Greek sailors, as Homer explains, sailed at night guided by the position of the stars.
The arrival of the Phoenician ships to the eastern peninsula must have influenced the indigenous communities, and the cultural loans between one culture and the other must have occurred in an environment of mutual use of knowledge. Technology would also come into play in that exchange. At that time, as today, the ships were sophisticated machines, designed to sail the seas for weeks and months, a hostile environment very different from land.
The Phoenician shipwrecks that have been preserved, have been located and have been excavated, form the corpus of the material record through which it is possible to delve into the knowledge they had of shipbuilding techniques. But the number of wrecks available so far in the Mediterranean is very limited, as indicated by the Italian archaeologist Chiara Mauro. The limited material evidence available does not yet allow us to build a complete discourse on the naval technology of the moment. One of these rare underwater deposits was located a short distance from the Murcian coast of Mazarrón, just two meters deep and in an exceptional state of conservation. This allowed a complete excavation to be carried out between 1999 and 2001. Later, between 2008 and 2009, it was excavated again to document it exhaustively. And in 2019 and 2020, it was partially excavated again to carry out a diagnosis and propose new conservation measures.
El Mazarrón 2
The wreck called Mazarrón 2 It is located in a geographical area known as the Isla beach, in front of the town that gives its name to the site. The archaeological findings in this area are part of a chronology that goes from the end of the 8th century B.C. until the middle of the 6th century BC, according to studies carried out by Iván Negueruela.
The data obtained in the archaeological interventions carried out have been building an interesting discourse among specialists. Professor Juan Blánquez, from the Autonomous University of Madrid, during the celebration of the VII International Seminar on Phoenician-Punic Studies, has summarized the hypothesis according to which it could be a smaller ship, supporting a larger one, which could form part of a flotilla of auxiliary ships. Sailing in small flotillas has also been suggested by Chiara Mauro and María Aubet, an argument that would be supported by the discovery of two very close Phoenician ships off the coast of Ashkelon, in Israel, and the discovery of another similar ship along with Mazarrón 2 , the so-called Mazarrón 1, of which only part of the side remains, but which allows the detailed study of different aspects of its naval architecture.
On the other hand, the speech that began by proposing a Clearly Phoenician origin has been nuanced with the possibility that it was a locally built ship. To these two hypotheses is added a new proposal that suggests the possibility that it is a regional variant of a locally built ship inspired by Phoenician treasure ships . In other words, it could be a ship built in the eastern peninsular, around the 6th century BC, probably by Iberians who would have learned the technique of the Phoenicians, observing their ships and sharing knowledge with them, in the context of that koine Phoenician-Iberian to which numerous authors have referred.
Currently, the archaeologist Carlos de Juan, basing himself on the investigations of Patrice Pomey, published in 2012, maintains that it is necessary to reinterpret the constructive features of the Mazarrón 2 ship, those that were reported after their discovery, in the sense of evidence pointing to a type of construction adapted to a local geographic environment.
The dimensions of the boat are 8.15 meters long by 2.25 meters wide and 0.9 meters deep. She is a ship without a deck whose structure does not seem to have the conditions to make a great trip. According to these data, the Phoenician origin could be ruled out, which would have required a voyage of some 2,300 nautical miles. In addition, it could be a ship framed in a constructive family differentiated from other clearly Phoenician wrecks, such as Bajo de la Campana, about 20 meters long, which transported, among other merchandise, a set of African elephant tusks.
The details of the carpentry of the Mazarrón 2 ship seem to confirm that it was built using customary knowledge of Phoenician tradition but with unique contributions from local shipwright carpenters. Observing the way of joining the wood for the assembly of the hull strakes, Dr. De Juan assumes that it is a technique that would have come "clearly from the hand of the Phoenicians". This evidence has also been confirmed in other Mediterranean Phoenician wrecks, located in Turkey, such as the Uluburum or the Cape Gelidonia. At the same time, the shape of the cockpit joint, which is the base that holds the mast, supposes a unicum for archaeology , a particularity that would reinforce the idea of the contributions of local carpenters to solve structural issues with their own knowledge. Other details, such as the layout of the frames, erroneously classified at first as made from fig branches (currently known to be juniper), have led experts to conclude that the architecture of this ship shows us, in the words of Carlos de Juan “two worlds that are coming together”, the Iberian Mediterranean Levant and the Phoenician East. In this field of technological exchange, the presence of technical solutions of Greek and even Egyptian origin can also be sensed, such as the use of a specific type of rudder.
Specialists in ancient naval architecture usually refer to these smaller vessels as boats instead of ships, due to the dimensions of their length and beam, but above all because of the depth , that is, the total height, which, as indicated above, measures less than one meter. All this information supports the idea that it could be a boat destined to carry out short, coastal navigations, designed to enter roadsteads or rivers, in order to make a watering hole or seek natural protection against storms. But it does not seem to be a structurally adequate design for crossing the high seas, nor does it seem to have sufficient protection to resist waves. Therefore, the small dimensions of the Mazarrón 2 wreck lead us to think that it would have dedicated itself to covering short routes, carrying out cabotage navigation , with daytime trips and overnight stops, surely traveling along the peninsular Mediterranean coast. This navigation of landfalls would also be endorsed by the type and origin of the merchandise it was transporting, which remained on board after the shipwreck, was recovered in the first excavation campaign, and is exhibited in the National Museum of Underwater Archeology (ARQUA) in Cartagena. . The Mazarrón 2 transported 2,800 kilos of merchandise, an important weight but well below the 90 tons of the great Phoenician ships cited by Barry Cunliffe, or the 20 tons of the Ulu Burum cited by Juan Antonio Martín. The transported product was molten litharge lead in the form of cakes, a waste ore during silver extraction that was probably used for new cupellation processes that allowed more silver to be extracted. The origin of the mineral, according to the lead isotope tests carried out after the excavation, is in the Mazarrón or Cartagena mines, an area known and exploited for its metal resources. This information suggests that the ship, when she sank, was not at her destination but at her point of origin, loaded and ready to begin the voyage.
In addition to the ore ingots, some elements were recovered for the subsistence of the crew, such as a granite hand mill and an esparto basket with a wooden handle. She was also carrying a Trayamar 1 type amphora, a container reused to transport water to supply sailors. The amphora is a valuable dating element whose typology is associated with a period of use between 610 and 570 BC, according to Juan Ramón Torres. This container corresponds to specimens found in deposits in Malaga, the place to which its production is associated, and which could give an idea of the commercial route that the ship carried out.
The conclusions that the specialists are reaching, based on the new data and the reinterpretation of the existing ones, is that the Mazarrón 2 wreck is a document that supports the hypothesis that it could be a ship built in the eastern part of the peninsula, in a shipyard near the area of the shipwreck, using a combined technique of local knowledge and others of Phoenician influence. This fact would be validating the existence of an Iberian construction tradition in the Archaic Period, from the 7th century to the beginning of the 6th century BC.
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