Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

ather than a shipwreck. 165
Yet, like the Gelidonya and Uluburun examples, the Kibbutz
Hahotrim plowshare was probably taken aboard a vessel for an undetermined reason.
The existence of LBA agricultural equipment at three different underwater sites in
the eastern Mediterranean raises important questions about the value of the tools. Metal
sickles and plowshares perhaps were commodities traded throughout the eastern
Mediterranean and Aegean on account of their prestige or utility. Alternatively, they may
represent part of the tool assemblage kept on the ship. The objects on a Byzantine
seventh-century shipwreck at Yassi Ada (Turkey) included several kinds of agricultural
166
tools: one spade, one hoe, seven billhooks and two mattocks. These implements were
discovered with two axes, leading Katzev to conclude that “these tools would have been
used by a shore party landed to replenish the ship’s supply of fresh water, firewood, and
food as well as to collect timber for hull repairs and brush dunnage for cargo storage.” 167
It is uncertain whether the complete agricultural implements from the Bronze Age
shipwrecks served a similar purpose. The economic implication is that individuals on
those early ships acquired a type of wealth generally unavailable to most commoners:
agricultural tools.
Crete and the Greek mainland had highly productive agricultural systems, as
indicated by the textual evidence and analogies between the large Aegean palatial
magazines and Near Eastern centers.
168
Yet metal agricultural tools on Crete are not
common, judging by their total numbers and their low proportion within the region’s tool
165 Wachsmann 2009, 208-209.
166 Katzev 1982, 265.
167 Katzev 1982, 265.
168 Finley 1957, 134-136; Palmer 1998-1999, 223-225; Palmer (2001, 43) notes that the Near Eastern
analogies prevent comparisons between prehistoric and historical Greek agriculture: “Since the 1950s, the
approaches taken to study Late Bronze Age Greece, and the close parallels of the Linear B economic
records with Near Eastern palace records, rather than Homeric or Classical economy and society have
accentuated the differences between Mycenaean and Classical Greece.”
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