Did a daring semiliterate sailor wreck a ship off the Israeli coast 2,400 years ago?

For millennia, as ships navigated along the Eastern Mediterranean coastline carrying their valuable cargo, expert sailors probably knew that the area off the coast of northern Israel presented unique challenges, reefs, and small islands that they needed to steer clear of.

A rare, recently deciphered Phoenician inscription on a type of two-handled jug has offered a glimpse into a sea voyage and shipwreck some 2,400 years ago. The inscription was found on an amphora sherd unearthed about eight years ago in the waters near Tel Achziv, possibly scribbled on the pottery by a resourceful sailor. It was published for the first time last week in the journal CARMEL: Studies in Archaeological Sciences and Conservation.

“Tel Achziv is located just south of the border of modern-day Lebanon and was a significant port within the boundaries of Phoenicia during the Iron Age,” Prof. Assaf Yasur-Landau of the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies and the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa told The Times of Israel over a phone call.

Yasur-Landau co-authored the academic paper with several other scholars, including Jacob Sharvit of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who discovered the amphora parts underwater, and Prof. Christopher A. Rollston of George Washington University.

The Iron Age covers the period between 1200 and 586 BCE, when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and razed the First Temple.

Yasur-Landau noted that the ancient city of Achziv was also destroyed during the military campaign led by Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar but was later rebuilt.

“The city is mentioned in a fourth-century Greek source, the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax, a geographic tractate that recounts a sea voyage across the Mediterranean and describes Achziv as a settlement by a river between Tyre and Akko,” said Yasur-Landau. “The river likely refers to the Nahal Kziv that flows into the sea nearby.”

That part of the Israeli coast features a reef and small islands about 1 to 1.5 kilometers (.62 to .93 miles) from the shore, making the area especially susceptible to shipwrecks.

“We can imagine how sailors might not have spotted the obstacles in the darkness or during a storm and crashed into them,” Yasur-Landau said.

The pottery was discovered in two different spots around the islands.

“We are talking about amphoras with an elongated and pointed body that were especially good for maritime shipment because they were easily stored,” Yasur-Landau said. “On one of them, we noticed a two-line inscription incised in the clay.”

According to the researcher, deciphering the inscription proved to be incredibly challenging.

“Only part of it is preserved,” Yasur-Landau said. “We needed special equipment to photograph it with adequate lighting, which the Israel Museum provided, and we contacted Prof. Rollston, one of the world experts in paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician.”

Rollston could identify enough letters of the inscription to understand that part reads “of the Sydonian[s].”

Sidon was another important Phoenician coastal city.

“Similar inscriptions mentioning the city of Sidon have been discovered in the past, but this is the first time that an inscription like this is found underwater,” Yasur-Landau said.

The pottery sherds also underwent petrographic tests, which analyzed the mineralogical and chemical characteristics of the clay to identify where it originated. The amphoras’ clay came from an area between Tyre and Sidon.

“The petrographic results are consistent with the inscription,” Yasur-Landau said. “They also show us that while we do not know whether the amphoras belonged to the same cargo, they did present a connection as they were formed from clay from the same area.”

According to the researcher, it was not uncommon to write on amphoras to mark what they contained, who the owner was, or where they were being shipped. However, the writings were often inscribed with ink and did not survive.

The inscription found near Tel Achziv was incised on the amphora using a sharp iron tool.

Based on the poor handwriting, Rollston determined that it was not the work of a professional scribe but of a semiliterate person. Many merchants had basic literacy skills in the second half of the first millennium BCE.

“Many inscriptions were produced by highly trained scribes, and with these sorts of inscriptions, the morphology of the letters is quite consistent, the stance of the letters follows standard norms of the period, and the spacing between letters is fairly precise and standard,” Rollston told The Times of Israel via email.

“With this inscription, the caliber of the inscription reflects more that of a semiliterate person, someone who had not had years of rigorous scribal training,” he added. “In certain respects, this makes this inscription even more interesting, as it does not hail from the upper echelons of elite society. It may very well be that an enterprising sailor etched it himself.”

According to Yasur-Landau, the amphora carrying the inscription presented another unique characteristic.

“We were able to identify some resin inside,” Yasur-Landau said. “Organic materials normally do not survive for over two millennia, but in this case, the resin was preserved by the sand that covered the artifact.”

“Resin was employed to make amphoras waterproof,” he added. “We can infer that the vessel was likely used to transport wine.”

While we will never know the identity of the semiliterate sailor who decided to leave his mark on a wine jug, his chicken-scratch writing lives on and might provide researchers with further insights.

According to Rollston, it is possible that, as technology advances, scholars will be able to decipher the rest of the inscription.

“The technologies for imaging inscriptions are always progressing, and inscriptions that were not decipherable in the past can now be deciphered with a fair amount of certitude,” Rollston said. “We hope that the rest of this inscription may someday soon yield its secrets as well.”

Meanwhile, Yasur-Landau noted how the discovery highlights the importance of maritime archaeology.

“Only a small percentage of researchers work in underwater archeology,” he noted. “This artifact shows the huge potential of finds from the sea to illuminate historical and economic phenomena in Israel.”