The Sea of Galilee Boat

Winner, Biblical Archaeology Society's Biennial Award for Best Popular Book in Biblical Archaeology "Wachsmann sets a high standard for archaeologists who want to bring their fieldwork to a general audience. His book is a pleasure to read; it is good science, and it is just plain fun." -Biblical Archaeology Review "Provides a rare, behind-the-scenes story of scholarly detective work on an important find from the New Testament period." -Archaeology Magazine "Wachsmann's engrossing account of [the boat's] excavation and restoration, enlivened by photographs and drawings, provides a wellpositioned window on the biblical past." -Publishers Weekly "The storyline style and the author's personal engagement with it in tum provide the reader with an informative and captivating experience with the boat itself. The book is an excellent model for archaeological reporting that bridges the gap between research and the lay reader." -The Biblical Archaeologist "The Sea of Galilee Boat takes readers with the author through each stage of his investigation and communicates the excitement felt as excavation and research progress ... . Wachsmann's pleasure in his work is evident and well conveyed by his personal reflections." -American Journal of Archaeology SHELLEY W ACHSMANN is the Meadows Professor of Biblical Archaeology in the nautical archaeology program at Texas A&M University. ｾ＠ ti,, Ed Rachal Foundation Nautical Archaeology Series Cover photo by S. Wachsmann. Courtesy of Yigal Allon Centre, Ginosar, Israel TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY PRESS College Station • www.tamu.edu/upress $23.00 I SBN-13: 978-1-60344-1 13-1 I SB N- 10: 1- 60344 - 113 - 1 I 11111 9 7 8160 3 441131 S2300 lllllllllill11 The following selected pages represent a sampler of materials from The Sea of Galilee Boat (3rd edition, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 2009). XIV Acknowledgments The crew. Front row (left to right): Gadi Horowitz, Danny Syon, Eti Shalem. Center row: Yisrael Vatkin, Oma Cohen, Aliza Paz, Karen Sullivan, J. Richard Steffy, Shelley Wachsmann, Hani Efroni, Zvika Malach, Edna Amos, Nitsa Kaplan. Back row: Yaron Ostrovski, Shalom Edri, Yossi Amitai, Gill Klop, Kurt Raveh, Moshe Lufan. Absent: Yohai Abes, Nurit Gofer, Yaron Gofer, Eliezer Janet, Moshe Lipnik, Yuval Lufan, Israel Lufan, David Ronen, Isaac Rotem, Yaakov Rotem, Ofir Sabag. out that first difficult night and stayed for the rest of the project, which greatly benefited from her skills and dedication. K. Raveh assisted considerably in the initial probe of the boat and during the excavation. Volunteers came in droves from all over Israel and from all walks of life. Each person contributed in his or her own way to the success of the project. I thank B. Azraf, L. Baron, A. Bolodo, M. Cohen, G. Efroni, M. Gallon, H. Ilan, Y. Ostrovski, and D. Pearl. Those who had artistic abilities were employed in recording in freehand drawings the boat and the related finds as they came out of the mud. Hani Efroni drew the boat's interior, while R. Malka sketched additional remnants of hulls found in the boat's vicinity. The excavation received much unsolicited coverage by representatives of the media, two of whom deserve special recognition: the late z. Ilan, archaeological correspondent for the Israel daily Davar, lost a "scoop" but gained my deep respect for his sense of responsibility; M. Ben Dor, cameraman for one of the large American networks, provided considerable help during the excavation. Prologue spua8a1 30 -eas l J<lld'l?q'J v The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal-it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. From The Innocents Abroad MARK TWAIN 1 s famous lakes go, the Sea of Galilee is relatively small. It is only 21 kilometers-13 miles-at its longest, from north to south, and 12 kilometers-7.5 miles-at its widest. Many millennia ago, a large body of water, which geologists call the Lisan Lake, covered the entire Jordan Valley. After it receded, the Jordan River system evolved, in which the Sea of Galilee formed the central component, between the Hula Swamp to its north and the Dead Sea to its south. In modern Hebrew, the lake is called by its ancient name, Kinneret, or Yam Kinneret (the Sea of Kinneret), keeping alive a tradition that goes back in time at least to the Late Bronze Age and possibly much earlier. Some say that the name Kinneret comes from the Hebrew word for a stringed instrument or lyre (kinor), for the shape of Kinneret when seen from above is somewhat similar to that of the musical instrument. Another tradition derives the name from the kinnara, a sweet and edible fruit produced by the Christ thorn tree (Ziziphus spina-christi), which grows in the vicinity. As I was to learn one day, Mendel does not accept either of these interpretations. He had kindly agreed to take a group of friends on a tour around the lake. One day in spring 1987, we were standing on the low summit of Tel Kinnarot, which is situated on a hilltop at the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was about a year after the boat had been discovered. The cool afternoon Mediterranean Sea breeze, blowing in from the west, flowed gently over us. "Throughout recorded history," Mendel said, "the lake was known by the name of the most significant city of the time along her shores. And since the lake saw a number of cities rise and fall, she received different names. The earliest name came from the site A 39 A Sea of Legends 43 45 A Sea of Legends Captured. water by a dozen of the locals and carried in procession to their village. Only thanks to his icy nerves and Hany's stalwart assistance-and, of course, baksheesh (bribe)-was MacGregor able to extricate himself from this predicament. For those who wished to see the Holy Land during the nineteenth century in a somewhat more civilized manner, tourism was booming. In June 1867 the good ship Quaker City sailed from New York on a pleasure-cruise-pilgrimage to Europe, the Holy Land, and Egypt. On her decks stood a young American writer of humor best known by his pen name, Mark Twain. Chapter 2 48 The fare was too high. descriptions he penned home were of what he saw; he was a totally objective and rational reporter. Or, at least, so he thought. The Sea of Galilee was a disappointment to Twain, coming in a poor second in any comparison with his beloved Lake Tahoe. And yet, there were times when something touched a chord even in that hardened cynic. One evening on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, as his party slumbered peacefully, Twain penned the following impressions:6 Night is the time to see Galilee . . . when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight. The old traditions of the place steal upon his memory and haunt his reveries, and then his fancy clothes all sights and sounds with the supernatural. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit 54 Chapter 2 modem ear; however, a more recent medieval Arabic legend identifies the Kinneret as the final resting place of one of Judaism's most illustrious leaders: King Solomon. 12 Water, not surprisingly, is a scarce commodity in the Sinai. So when the children of Israel wandered through the desert for 40 years, they were constantly in need of water. When the multitude came to Moses and accused him of bringing them to their death by thirst, the Lord commanded Moses to smite the rock at Horeb, and water flowed from it. 13 Later in their journeys, the Israelites arrived at a place named Beer, which in Hebrew means "well." "That is the well of which the Lord said to Moses, 'Gather the people together, and I will given them water."' the Bible relates.14 Now, according to tradition, these biblical references refer to the same well at two different locations. This was said to have been one of God's last creations before he rested on the sixth day of Creation. Named after Miriam, the sister of Moses, the well was indeed a uniquely magical one, for it traveled with the children of Israel. During their wanderings, the well followed them up the mountains and down the valleys. When the Israelites needed water, Miriam's well was always there to refresh and sustain them. The leaders of the camp would gather around the well and sing its song: 15 Spring up, 0 well!-Sing to itthe well that the leaders sank, that the nobles of the people dug, with the scepter, with the staff. The well's water would then bubble up and rise in a pillar of water supplying each of the Twelve Tribes. Once they crossed the Jordan River and had conquered the land of Canaan, however, each tribe went its own way and settled in its own territory. Miriam's well, no longer needed, was abandoned and ignored. No doubt the well felt lonely and unappreci- A Sea of Legends 55 ated after all the attention it had received during the years of wandering. According to Jewish tradition, Miriam's well sank into the depths of the Kinneret, where it remains to this day. 16 Tradition also imparts to the well attributes of both physical healing and spiritual awakening. The tradition of Miriam's well was taken seriously by the Jewish mystics who studied Kabbalathe body of the philosophy of Jewish mysticism-in Safed, a Galilean city perched high up in the mountains overlooking the Kinneret. Rabbi Haim Vital, who was a leading Kabbalist, relates how, in his youth when he had come to study under the preeminent sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria (better known by his acronym, the Ari, or the Lion), the latter brought him to Tiberias. Taking him onto the lake in a boat, the Ari had his young apprentice drink from the Kinneret's waters and, when he had done so, explained that he would now be able to comprehend the mysteries of Kabbala-for he had sipped from the waters of Miriam's well. 17 Richard Pococke, an early British explorer who visited the Holy Land in the mid-eighteenth century, records a similar incident.18 A learned Jew, with whom I discoursed at Saphet [Safed], lamented that he could not have an opportunity, when he was at Tiberias, to go in a boat to see the well of Miriam in this lake, which, he said, according to their Talmudical writers, was fixed in this sea, after it had accompanied the children of Israel through the wilderness and that the water of it might be seen continually rising up. South of Tiberias are the hot springs which originally were known by the name Hammat. One legend explains that these springs are forever hot because, on the way to the earth's surface, the waters flow by the gates of hell. For this reason, in Aramaic the waters were called Moked de Teverya, "the Flame of Tiberias." 19 The arabs, however, call the hot springs Hammam Malikna Chapter 3 The Excavation from Hell The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry. You could not see a cloud, because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overheadThere were no birds to fly. The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand: They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: "If this was only cleared away," They said, "it would be grand!" "If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year, Do you suppose,''. the walrus said, "That they could get it clear?" "I doubt it," said the Carpenter, And shed a bitter tear. From Through the Looking Glass LEWIS CARROLL1 ("Forward! Move it! Move it!") With K those words, and with an electrical excitement in the air, a ragtag wagon train of kibbutz tractors pulling heavily laden carts adima! Lazuz! Lazuz!" moved south from Ginosar along the beach toward the boat. Rarely had an excavation begun under less propitious circumstances. The Department had not yet completed assembling the excavation equipment and materials. Oma was busy gathering conservation supplies in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; she would not arrive until the next morning. Other key staff members were still missing. Worse, the rising lake water continued to inch its way toward the site, threatening to inundate the boat within 48 hours, . and no sandbags were at hand. The kibbutz carts were piled high with barricades and barbed wire, hoes, picks and shovels, timber, plastic sheeting, PVC irrigation hose, and anything else in Kibbutz Ginosar that might prove useful until the official supplies arrived. After passing Nahal Tsalmon, a creek that empties into the Kinneret immediately to the south of the kibbutz, the caravan had to skirt a patch of impassable mud by driving-oddly enoughinto the Kinneret's waters where the seabed was firmer. Together with the equipment and supplies came a steady flow of volunteer workers from Ginosar. Kibbutz Ginosar had "adopted" the boat. It had been found by Moshele and Yuvi, sons and members of the kibbutz, and that clearly made taking care of the boat their responsibility. The kibbutz opened its heart and soul to the excavation. Members of Ginosar gave their time and their skills. They helped in a variety of manners, from excavating, to preparing food, to filling sandbags, to supplying volunteer experts in the field. If there was a problem 61 Chapter 3 66 The first frame is revealed. 70 Chapter 3 I thanked her for safekeeping the boat for 2,000 years, but now we would take responsibility for it. I assured her that we would treat her boat, this one that had sailed the sea of eternity, with the greatest of loving care. As I was deep in these musings, heavy motors sounded behind me. Orti had kept his promise. Men from the Kinneret Authority, led by "Shlomkeh" Bahalal, immediately began working on a dike. Within a short time, the boat was surrounded by a rapidly growing barrier of sandbags and earthworks. Later in the afternoon, the sharkia subsided. To this day, I stand personally convinced that the Kinneret gave us her permission to excavate that boat. Indeed, from that point on, her waters no longer threatened us, and ultimately, the rising water level turned into a blessing, for it was later vital to saving the boat. As work progressed and the level of the Kinneret continued to rise, the dike was repeatedly strengthened by the men of the Kinneret Authority, who stood on round-the-clock vigil. Even at night we sometimes would see heavy machinery driving in the lake, as the barrier was raised again and again. The rainy weather during those first few days of the excavation created a muddy morass that complicated the use of the heavy mechanical equipment, which repeatedly got mired in the mud. Someone quipped that this was neither a land nor an underwater excavation, but an amphibious one. · Another challenge soon developed. Because the pit we were digging was beneath the water table, water was continually seeping in. Again, the Kinneret Authority saved us by bringing pumps that kept the groundwater at bay. Often we were cold, wet, and muddy. The mud and the dampness were such that I chose to wear my neoprene diving pants for the first two days of the excavation. That was an experiencerather like wearing a tight-fitting thick plastic bag. That first night of work was intensive, and we had made a sizable dent in the overburden in the hull. Oma arrived the next morning. "The first thing I remember about the excavation," she once 74 Chapter 3 "Be realistic, Shelley. You've been seeing too many rainbows," she told me on parting. Human dynamics are fascinating in high-pressure situations. By the second day of the excavation, a certain weird euphoria had taken hold of the group. We were fighting an uphill battle against all odds. Whether or not we would succeed was open to question-in a big way. And yet, strangely, it was this particular situation that drew the folks from Migdal back to the excavation. This time, they came not to argue and lay claims to the boat, but to help. It soon became apparen,t that a large pit had to be carved around the boat so that we could gain better access to the hull. We first tried to do this with a scraper attached to a kibbutz tractor but found that it could not give the desired results. We needed some special tool: a mechanical backhoe with a small shovel that could dig a deep and narrow passageway. The kibbutz did not own one, and it would take time for the Department to rent one-far more time than we could afford. "I have one," said a gruff voice behind me. I turned to face a mountain of a man, his face hidden behind a huge beard. "I beg your pardon. What did you say?" I asked. Clearing his throat, the man repeated, "I said, I have one. I have a backhoe." Shmuel Karasanti, a farmer from Migdal, had been within earshot as we were discussing the problem. "I'll bring it this afternoon. Only please ... if you could supply the fuel?" "Sure," I said with a smile. "And thank you." Shmuel just shrugged his shoulders in response and walked away without saying another word. A few hours later, a bright yellow mechanical backhoe arrived at the site. And Shmuel was in the driver's seat. Under our supervision, he began to enlarge and deepen the pit around the boat, beginning opposite the starboard bow. Excavating archaeologically with a backhoe has distinct similarities to waltzing with a hippo: There is a significant danger of 78 Chapter 3 Why is this man smiling? only too well aware of how difficult it must have been to acquire some of the materials on such short notice. Everything I had asked for was there. The same van that brought the equipment also carried Michael Feist and Yisrael Vatkin, the Department's surveyors. Yisrael, a recent immigrant to Israel with a thick Russian accent, stayed with us to plot the boat's exact position. He continued working into the night, using a portable lamp to light his surveyor's table. The second night of excavation, I finally called a halt to work. The Kinneret Authority's dike was safely holding back the rising waters, so the immediate threat was contained, and some of us had been on the go since six the previous morning. Were we to continue at this rate, we would begin to start making stupid mistakes, mistakes that we could not afford. The Excavation from Hell 85 this, it was clear that we were losing the battle. We were slowing the evaporation of the water from the wood cells, but we were not stopping it. The boat had to get back underwater. Fast. As the day continued, the sun beat down relentlessly under an azure sky. There was not a cloud in sight. "Well, at least you won't be seeing any rainbows today," Oma said. "Thank goodness for that." A few minutes later, a hose, connected to one of the pumps used to keep the groundwater from inundating the site, sprung a leak. Almost immediately, men from the Kinneret Authority were taking care of the problem. I walked over and watched as it released a fine mist into the surrounding air. And in the mist was a miniature rainbow. "Orna," I called, "Come over here. You have to see something." "What?" she asked expectantly as she came over, wiping the mud from her hands on her pant legs. I just pointed to the minirainbow in the mist. "That doesn't count," she said. Zvika Malach is another moshavnik from Migdal who joined the excavation. A gentle giant with a long-flowing beard, he later told me that he had never had an interest in archaeology before, but that, after visiting the site on that first day of excavation, he found himself drawn back to it again and again. He would get up before dawn each morning to tend his orchards and then show up at the excavation around noon and work until we stopped for the day. Zvika, who was always willing to do any task asked of him, soon became a welcome member of the team. That day, in the late afternoon, Zvika and I were supervising Shmuel's work with his mechanical backhoe. We had followed a clockwise pattern around the boat, as we deepened and enlarged the pit. Now, having nearly completed this task, we were enlarging the northeast comer. 86 Chapter 3 Until then, the densely packed clay being brought up by the shovel had been virtually sterile. But in this comer of the pit, just off the boat's port bow, we began to find bits and pieces of ancient wood-loose fragments with old breaks-bearing the scars and markings of mortise-and-tenon joints. The excavation ground to a crawl as Zvika and I began to examine each of the shovel loads of sediment. Shmuel would scoop up a shallow shovel load and then dump it in front of us in the pit. We then quickly sorted through the mud and removed the wooden fragments, placing them in a plastic milk crate. Once we had sifted through the dirt, Shmuel would delicately scoop up the same shovel load of sediment and carefully deposit it outside the pit, where others would spread it out and go over it with a metal detector to ensure that we had not missed any coins, nails, or other metal fastenings. Zvika became so preoccupied with this process that he seemed totally oblivious of the backhoe shovel, which often swung perilously close to his head. One of my main concerns at that point was ensuring that he did not accidentally get knocked into the next world as the shovel whirred, bucked, and shook above him. As we worked, groundwater began to well up and cover the lowest parts of the deepening trench. Therefore, before each scoop of the shovel, we would explore in the water with our hands to make sure the shovel was not destroying anything. At one point, Zvika, with his hands immersed in the muddy water and the shovel swinging inches from his head, told me excitedly, "I can feel planking, and it is attached to something!" I signaled to Shmuel to back off with the shovel and had one of the small pumps brought over. As the groundwater receded, we watched in anticipation as not one, but two coherent hull fragments came into view. This area would definitely have to be enlarged by hand. I could not take the chance of the mechanical shovel's damaging the wood. I had Shmuel remove the backhoe. "Are these only fragments of hulls, or perhaps the uppermost strakes of complete hulls, like the one we were excavating, only The Excavation from Hell 95 Moshele and Gill prepare the hanging platform. The newly acquired structure was also able to support various garden sprinklers, "borrowed" from the kibbutz landscaper' s shop, which were used in a further attempt to keep the boat's exposed timbers wet. At one point, I stood on the sidelines, taking a breather and drinking a cup of scalding coffee. At all hours of each day, and some of each night, the boat was surrounded by people hurrying about on every side, attending to her every need. Most of the time I was one of them. Now, for a change, I was looking "from the outside in." What made this involvement so infectious, I wondered? I was an archaeologist. This was my job, my vocation, and my passion. But everyone else seemed to be showing just as much enthusiasm and care. It was as if anyone who came near fell in love with the 100 Chapter 3 "the ship of fools." More than once during the excavation I had cause to reflect that perhaps we all were indeed in a "Ship of Fools." Then again, perhaps we had been blessed with the "wisdom to be foolish." Either way, Ronny's cartoon hit the spot. After the excavation, I wrote to a veteran cartoonist for MAD Magazine, Dave Berg. I had never met Dave, but in 1973, following the cease-fire that ended the Yorn Kippur War, my army unit had found itself deployed in the city of Suez after the fighting . While stationed there, I had read one of Dave's books, enjoying its humor and warmth. I had written to him then, introducing myself, and had asked him to draw a cartoon of our experiences for me. I told him that I was in a paratrooper unit, situated ay-sham ("somewhere") in Egypt, and that we had spent most of our time filling sandbags. A few weeks later at mail call, I had received a letter from Dave. In it he had enclosed a cartoon depicting Israeli paratroopers jumping out of a plane. In place of a parachute, however, each soldier is floating down on a sandbag. On the ground are a shovel, a pile of sandbags, and a sign with "101" written on it (the kilometer marker indicating the distance from Cairo to which Israeli forces had advanced before stopping). That cartoon was a very special gift for a "grunt" far from home, and it remains one of my prize possessions. I now asked Dave to draw a cartoon of the boat. This time, Dave sent me a cartoon in which I am standing, fishing pole in hand, with the hook caught on a horse-shaped stern ornament of a boat rising from the water with "B.C.E." (for "Before the Common Era") emblazoned on its bow. "Hey, Shelley, what did you catch?" asks a bearded figure from behind a copse of shrubs. "Nothing much," I respond. "Just an old boat." Almost always there was at least one, and often more, film crew from TV networks around the world capturing our every move. It was a bit like living in a fish bowl. One of the people · firo m Hell The Excavation 103 104 Chapter 3 filming us was a newfound friend of mine who, quite unintentionally, had taught me something of great value. Moshe Ben Dor was, at the time, a cameraman for a major American television network. He was also a veteran scuba diver and had decided to combine his two loves. He, together with a partner, had purchased a broadcast-quality camera and underwater housing. Shortly before the boat surfaced, he had contacted me and asked if we had anything of interest to film underwater, so that he could try out his camera on something other than fish. The Department didn't have a project going at that time, primarily because I had called a halt to diving because of our dilapidated equipment. But although the idea never got off the ground-or in the water, for that matter-we did become friends, and during my visits to Jerusalem, I would occasionally look him up. Several times I accompanied Moshe in his work. It was in this manner that I got an inside glimpse of how a major television network operates. I saw how streamlined and electronic the art of news gathering had become and was impressed-perhaps shocked is a more accurate word-by how easily and quickly things could be done. Information was sought, located, filmed, and transferred back to the United States all in the same day. This was a different world from the one I had grown used to. It was truly a revelation to me. Growing up in a government bureaucracy for most of my adult life, I had never realized that needs could be expedited in such a timely manner, outside the military. I had assumed that things had to take time to be accomplished. It was simply a fact of life. Like death and taxes. This was a particularly valuable lesson for me. Along with other experiences that I was having at this time, it made me realize that, within the realms of physical reality, anything is possible, unless you believe it to be otherwise. That is, if you really believe that you can soar like the eagles and jump off a cliff to demonstrate, reality, in the form of gravity, will kick in, and you will end up splattered on the canyon floor, food for the crows. Nor does it mean that if you really believe that you will be the president of the United States-or of Papua New The Excavation from Hell 105 Guinea, for that matter-you will become the president. Someone else may hold that belief even more strongly than you. What it does mean, however, is that reality, for each of us, follows our individual belief system. If someone believes that something is impossible, it will be. Period. Even if there is a solution to that particular problem, he will be blind to it. If he is convinced that there is no solution, then even if one is revealed, he will not see it, for he is no longer looking for it. Thus the solution will be invisible to him. Rather like the story of the Bedouin and the giraffe . . . There is a story told of a Bedouin guide from southern Sinai who worked, during the years after the Six-Day War when Israel held the Sinai, for the Israel Nature Protection Society. Although illiterate, Mahmud, as we shall call him, was highly intelligent and a keen observer of life. As a gift for his excellent service, he was given a free, allexpenses-paid trip to Jerusalem. Now, Mahmud had never been out of southern Sinai. He was familiar with jeeps and trucks, knew what an airplane looked like, and had seen buildings as high as two or three stories at his home in Santa Katarina. But that was about the extent of his familiarity with the modern world. Upon arriving in Jerusalem, Mahmud was taken on a tour of the city by several of the Israelis who had enjoyed his kind hospitality in Sinai. But where do you take someone who has never seen a modern city with all its amenities? After deliberating on how best to enhance his stay, his Israeli friends took him first to a department store and showed him the escalators. Moving stairs! These clearly made a tremendous impression on Mahmud. His hosts then took him to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. Mahmud studied each of the animals with interest. Some, like the longhorned ibexes, were familiar to him, for they were his neighbors in Sinai. Other animals he had never seen before. He visited the elephant, and then the hippopotamus and the 106 Chapter 3 tiger. But at the giraffe's cage, he stood transfixed. He gawked in awe at the giraffes, as they majestically strode around their enclosure in long-necked silence, eyeing him from time to time. It was growing dark before his hosts managed to pry him away from the giraffes and out of the zoo. "What did you think of the animals?" one of them asked as they walked out the gates of the zoo. "Oh, the elephant was most amazing," he said. Mahmud went on to remark on the hippo, the zebra, and the monkeys. But he didn't say a word about the giraffes. Finally, unable to hold his curiosity in any longer, one of the Israelis asked, "But what about the giraffes?" "Oh," said Mahmud, looking into his eyes with absolute assurance, "an animal like that doesn't exist." Upon reflection, then, I had recently come to the conclusion that the proper attitude to be taken when addressing any given problem is to see it not as a wall stopping you from moving forward, but as only one side of a coin. The flip side is the solution. Perhaps the French philosopher-mathematician Descartes said it best. When faced with a perplexing problem, he would first imagine that he had already solved it. And then he would sit down and figure out how he had done it. People live within belief systems. Those sharing like beliefs feel comfortable with each other. When someone within a group shifts his or her beliefs, others in the group feel restless, uneasy, and often even angry at the individual who is seeing the world from a different perspective. From the point of view of the group, the individual is not being realistic. What they mean, of course, is that he or she is not seeing reality in the same manner as the group. Indeed, for that individual, reality has now taken on a new and quite different meaning. Thus my newfound philosophy was probably behind the differences Oma and I were having. It drove her to distraction that Chapter 4 Galilean Seafaring in the Gospels And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. A windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, "Lord, save us! We are perishing!" Matthew 8:22-25 have to confess, I was unprepared for the intense public interest generated by the boat. To some, the immediate connection between an ancient boat found in the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is selfevident. My only prior contact with the Gospels had been while taking an undergraduate course in Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The possibility that the boat might date to the general historical period covered in the Gospels, as well as the ''boat of Jesus" appellation given it by the media, quickly prompted me to learn more. I was surprised to discover that not a single written word has come down to us from Jesus himself. Our knowledge of Jesus, his actions, and his words derives almost entirely from the accounts of others as recorded in the Gospels of the New Testament. The word gospel derives from the Old English word godspel, which means "good tale" or "good tidings." After Jesus's death, there must have existed compilations of stories which were kept by the early Judea-Christian believers. We know that in antiquity there were many gospels recording the life and works and experiences of Jesus.1 Most of these were considered heretical and were actively suppressed by the emergent church. 2 Only four gospels were accepted and canonized by church authorities. These are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three follow a similar narrative and therefore are called the Synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of John takes a different viewpoint. The Gospels are not biographical in the modern sense of the term: Entire periods of Jesus's life are missing from them. Imagine the life of Jesus as described in the Gospels as a play in five acts. Act I deals with the details of his birth and the flight to, and return from, Egypt. Act II, which encompasses his early childhood years, I 111 Chapter 4 120 bor's main element was a promenade that extended over 800 meters (0.5 mile) of shorefront property. Along its length were positioned piers which jutted out into the lake. These would have protected boats from the southerly wind. Three of the piers were shaped like triangles pointing into the lake from the promenade. Apparently during the time of Jesus's ministry, a customs office was located somewhere along this shore. Here new arrivals paid their tolls to Herod Antipas's tax collectors. These officials were reviled by the Jewish inhabitants, who saw them as collaborators in an excessively harsh and corrupt political system. From among these tax collectors came one of the Apostles.15 "When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' And in the morning, 'It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.' You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times." (Matthew 16:2-3) Jesus' s knowledge of weather lore is another subtle indication of his familiarity with the seafaring life. The warning in Jesus's forecast is of a storm, which is the specific fear of the sailor, not the farmer. Sailors have rendered this into rhyme: Red sky in the morning, Sailors take warning. Red sky at night, Sailors delight. There is meteorological wisdom in the rhyme, for in the northern horse latitudes weather flow is generally westerly. A red sunset indicates that the incoming weather is dust-laden and therefore dry, not stormy. And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. (Mark 4:36-37) Chapter 5 "Yep, It's an Old Boat" The fortunate man, in my opinion, is he to whom the gods have granted the power either to do something which is worth recording or to write what is worth reading, and most fortunate of all is the man who can do both. From a letter to Tacitus PLINY THE Y OUNGER1 here was no question in my mind, when forming the expedition's team, that Dick Steffy should study the boat while we were excavating it. I would have settled for one of his studentsor "Steffy clones," as we sometimes called them-but I was truly delighted that Dick himself was able to accept Avi's official invitation. I had first met Dick during a visit he made to Israel in the early 1980s. I was immediately taken by his quiet and goodnatured ways. These mask a reservoir of knowledge and an understanding of ancient ship architecture that runs deep and wide and is second to none. Soon after my first encounter with Dick, he was back in Israel. This time he had come to work on a truly outstanding discovery. The late Yehoshua Ramon, while diving near the ancient harbor of Athlit, had discovered a huge bronze waterline ram, the size of a picnic table, probably dating to the early second century BC. Although ancient history, in the form of sea battles (like the one depicted dramatically but inaccurately in the movie Ben Hur), was often written by such rams, the one found at Athlit is the only ram known to date to have come down to us from antiquity. Yehoshua had found the ram still attached to timbers of the ship to which it had belonged; these held a gold mine of knowledge for learning about ancient ship construction. That is, they held that potential if someone could make sense of the wooden jigsaw puzzle. Dr. Elisha Linder of Haifa University, who had taken over research on the Athlit ram, asked Dick to study its timbers. It was while he was studying the ram that I got to know Dick better. I would find Dick toiling away quietly, trying to make sense T 125 "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 129 lated a course of study in ship reconstruction to teach to his students, thus actually creating the new discipline of ancient ship reconstruction. Dick created a ship reconstruction laboratory, shortened to the ship lab, and in it he taught his students how to record ships and with them built research models to understand better the shipwrecks excavated by INA. As word of Dick's ability spread, he was invited to advise on projects around the world-in Turkey, Israel, Greece, England, Canada, and the United States. In the early 1980s an invitation was extended to Dick to study a particularly intriguing find in Italy, one that dated to the first century AD. Vespasian was the tenth emperor of the Roman Empire, which he ruled for ten years. During that time he brought order to the chaos of the civil war which had brought him to the throne. History would view him as one of the more capable emperors to have ruled Rome. Seutonius tells us that Vespasian had a wry sense of humor and that even after he became emperor he never put on airs. He retained this sense of humor even on his deathbed. Mocking the Roman practice of deifying their emperors after death, he was heard to exclaim near the end, "Dear me! I must be turning into a god ." Shortly thereafter, Vespasian, muttering that a Roman emperor should die standing on his feet, rose to his and promptly did so on June 24, AD 79. Titus, Vespasian' s son, ruled after him. Titus's short reign was remarkable for the series of natural disasters that occurred during his watch. These included a fire that destroyed much of Rome and one of the most severe plagues in Roman history. For us, living in the twentieth century, however, the most memorable disaster under Titus occurred almost immediately after he took office. Located on the Italian Campanian Coast near Naples, Mount Vesuvius erupted slightly after noon on August 24. Within 20 hours, the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum had ceased to exist, having been obliterated under meters of volcanic debris.2 Chapter 5 130 ｺ ｾ＠ 'Q) Q. E 0 a... • V) \lJ Vl Q) "' "' Q CJ 0.. <1J z ii z"' «-.. 0 < >, "' c:i ........ E ::i c: Q) ｾ＠ Vl "' ..c: f- 0 >, CJ Ct) E ..::.:. If) N 0 "Yep, It' s an Old Boat" 131 Archaeologists love a good natural catastrophe. There are few situations in which the past is so suddenly frozen in time, waiting to be revealed. And in the category of ancient natural catastrophes, Pompeii and Herculaneum are hard to beat. As a boy, I visited Pompeii when the passenger ship on which my parents and I were sailing to Israel docked for a day at Naples. I remember marveling at the antiquity-and the remarkable preservation-of the city's buildings, wall paintings, and monuments. But it was the plaster casts that really held my attention. In 1771 the discovery in Pompeii of the skeleton of a young girl whose breasts had left their impression in the volcanic ash caused an overnight sensation. Then, in 1864, Giuseppe Fiorelli, the head excavator of Pompeii at that time, realized that the mysterious "hollows" his crews had encountered during digging had been formed by the decomposition of the bodies of the dead buried under the ashen debris. He had his workers inject a type of hard-setting liquid plaster into the cavities, thus capturing the imprint the bodies had left in the hard-packed volcanic ash. Soon after the eruption had subsided, parties of searchers dug down into Pompeii. Whether they did so as thieves in search of loot or as rescue parties in search of survivors we do not know. Some of these searchers left evocative inscriptions. "Sodom and Gomorrah," wrote one who was, presumably, a Jew or early Christian, while another left the chilling observation, "There were fifty of them, still lying where they had been." 3 Nothing had prepared me for viewing those plaster casts. They were my first visual encounter with death. Individuals lay, as they had fallen, in every possible pose. Here a woman lay on her stomach, vainly trying to cover her face. There a man crouched, his back pushed up against a wall. In one glass case, a dog lay on its back, as it had died. Despite the many centuries that separated its lifetime from my own, its contorted final agony was still readily apparent to my 12-year-old eyes. I stood transfixed by that dog. I remember thinking, "This is what hell must look like." My parents finally had to drag me away to keep up with the tour. At the time of the Vesuvius eruption, Pliny the Elder, a close friend of the recently deceased Vespasian, was in charge of the "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 133 adventures, he retired to sleep, snoring loudly as ash and pumice rained down. So that Pliny would not be caught in the room as the volcanic debris piled up, he was awakened and, together with Pomponianus and his household, escaped the buildings that, because of the accompanying earth tremors, had started to shake and shimmy as if their walls had been constructed of jello. Making their way down to the coast with pillows tied to their heads to protect them from the ungodly rain of ash and pumice, they reached the shore only to find that the sea was too wild to attempt an escape. Pliny, who was prone to a sore throat, lay down on a sheet and asked repeatedly for cold water to drink. When the approaching flames and the stink of noxious fumes forced the group to move on, they roused him. Supported by two servants, he stood up for a moment but then suddenly collapsed. The others left him behind and retreated. Two days later his body was discovered "intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death."5 Herculaneum is somewhat less well known than her larger sister-city. While Pompeii lies somewhat inland, on the southern slopes of Vesuvius, Herculaneum is situated to the west and fronts the sea, on the Bay of Naples. And as it now turns out, it was to the sea that many of the inhabitants of Herculaneum turned in their attempt to escape the mountain's wrath. As opposed to the hundreds of bodies-or their impressions-found at Pompeii, until fairly recently only a few dozen skeletons had been found at Herculaneum. It had long been thought, therefore, that most of the Herculaneum's inhabitants had succeeded in escaping. Not so. Recent excavations at the seawall of Herculaneum revealed a series of chambers. Originally these were probably for storing fishing boats, but for the past 19 centuries they had been storing dozens of skeletons belonging to inhabitants of Herculaneum who had gone down to the sea seeking safety and had met with death instead. These individuals had been felled, suddenly, by hurricaneforce avalanches of glowing superhot gases and volcanic debris as they tried to escape. "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 135 "The fact that it was found inverted meant that much of the upper parts of the hull-which are rarely found on Mediterranean shipwrecks-were preserved, although in an extremely fragile state," Dick said. He was truly excited about studying that boat. She was a beautiful vessel with a graceful sweep to her. Much painstaking labor had gone into preparing the timbers. Because of the manner in which she had landed, Dick could study only the hull's exterior. Even so, it was clear that the boat was long, narrow, and lightly built. She had an overall length of about 9 meters (29.5 feet), a maximum beam of 2.4 meters (7.9 feet), and an amidships depth of 85 centimeters (2.8 feet). On the hull's exterior Dick discerned an irregular series of bronze nails and treenails; pronounced trunnels, these are roughly cylindrical pieces of hardwood which can be driven through joining timbers to connect them. This pattern suggested to Dick that the boat's frames were attached in alternating floor and half-frames, a framing pattern common during the classical period. Dick thought that some worked timbers found near the boat might indicate that boat- or shipbuilding activity had been going on somewhere along that beach. It was difficult for him to determine how old the boat had been when it was incinerated by the inferno. "There were no visible wood-eating marine toredo worm holes," Dick said, "so the boat was probably either new or had been kept out of the water when not in use." "When I first saw the Herculaneum boat," Dick said, "I remember thinking, what a marvelous craftsman must have built it, because there aren't any scarfs [joints] in the planks. The planking chosen for the boat was excellent. Each strake was constructed from a single plank. So I thought, 'Gee, this fellow is great at selecting wood.' " "What a marvelous find," Dick had thought when he first read a notice in his Texas newspaper concerning the discovery of 136 Chapter 5 an ancient boat on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The vessel in Israel had piqued Dick' s curiosity, particularly because of his recent study of the Herculaneum boat. This made him a soft touch when a few days later he received the telephone call from Avi and me inviting him to study our boat. "The Herculaneum boat was a beautifully crafted little vessel from the center of the Roman Empire, and here was a wonderful opportunity to see what was happening at the same time in the Roman provinces-in the boondocks," Dick told me later. Dick's plane landed at Ben Gurion airport in the late afternoon of Wednesday, February 19: the fourth day of the excavation. As the plane taxied up to the apron, he was amused to hear his name being called over the speaker system. The United States Embassy in Israel had rolled out the red carpet for him and had arranged for a limousine to meet him on the tarmac. "It was a very nice way to arrive in Israel," Dick remembers. "We just walked through customs and waved at everybody." The limousine whisked him off to the embassy, and then Karen drove him to Ginosar, filling him in on the way on the latest developments at the excavation. When they pulled in at Ginosar, we said our hellos over cups of coffee at the kibbutz guest house. Then, forgetting his jet lag, Dick changed into a pair of rubber boots and we drove out to the site, the jeep bumping and sliding over the water-worn stones. Prior to Dick's arrival, I had explained to the staff and volunteers what it is that a ship reconstructor does. He not only studies the structure of a ship but interprets clues that can provide an entire picture of its birth, its life, and its demise. I had described Dick in glowing terms. He would see where the workers had sharpened their tools and whether their tools were worn or new. "Dick reads wood the way you or I would read a newspaper," I had explained to them. The evening was dark and moist. Dick descended into the excavation pit alone and, in the warm, glowing light of the gas fishermen's lamps, began to walk slowly around the hull, stopping to examine it. The planks on the hanging platform had been "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 137 removed to give him an open view of the parts of the boat that had been cleared of the mud. Every few steps, he would bend over, supporting himself by putting his hands on his knees, to examine this or that detail of the boat. As opposed to the Herculaneum boat, where Dick could view only the exterior of the hull, on our boat he could see only the hull's interior. Everyone there stood watching and wondering. What was he seeing in the timbers? What would the wood reveal to him? A palpable air of expectancy hung over the site. All eyes followed Dick as he made his rounds. Finally satisfied, he finished, wiped some mud from his hands, and walked back to us. There was absolute silence. "Well, what do you think?" I asked. "Yep," he said, "it's an old boat." Years later, I asked Dick for his impressions that first evening at Ginosar. "You had a lot of lights on it, I remember," he told me. "Didn't take but a few seconds to recognize it as a Roman period boat. I had some thoughts, but I don't like to say things unless I can prove them. "Any boat or ship impresses me. First of all, it was ancient technology. This quaint little boat sitting there on the shores of the Sea of Galilee: It was very impressive. I remember thinking that this boat was maybe the age of the Herculaneum boat, or perhaps a century earlier-but not that much earlier. "It was obvious that it was an ancient boat. I could tell that by the way the frames were laid and the way the planking was joined edge-to-edge. Obviously it belonged to some period in antiquity, but it was not quite like anything that had been recorded in the Mediterranean. There was a method of putting the planks together that was not familiar to me, one that probably applied only to boats in the Kinneret. And the frames were rather crooked and crude. I'd never seen anything quite like that. "It was also very complete for a hull in the Mediterranean Cross-sectional drawing of the Kyrenia ship's keel and a garboard amidships. The locking pegs were driven horizontally into the vertical sides of the keel and garboard strakes. "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 143 this boat is a pickup truck." And then, more to himself than to me, he added quietly, "We sure are a long way from Rome." Dick showed me an already slender plank that narrowed to almost a splinter: "Look here. He's using recycled timber. Planks this narrow, with all the joinery they have on their edges and ends, are something you just don't see in normal Mediterranean construction. I think in the planking he was making do with some secondhand materials stripped from older vessels. You see, in order for him to reuse planks from a previous boat, he had to cut away the mortise-and-tenon joint scars. That's probably why the planks are so narrow. I even wonder ... " "Wonder what?" "Hmmm. I wonder. Some of these planks are so slender that he may not have put them on one at a time. Our boatwright may have built up a regular-sized plank by attaching two or three of these narrow-sized planks together with mortise-and-tenon joints before actually attaching the 'reconstituted' full-sized plank to the hull." And then he added, "But don't quote me on that. It's just a hunch." I assured him that I would not. "How could you tell whether narrow planks were placed on the hull one at a time or as a composite plank?" I asked. One way to determine this, Dick explai.1ed to me, would be to see whether the mortise-and-tenon joints at the planking scarfs are perpendicular to the scarf edges. He sketched a drawing that looked like the one on page 144. That would mean that the planks were attached to each other before being placed on the hull. "On the other hand, if the joints are perpendicular to the plank edges, then they were probably attached separately to the hull," Dick said and drew another sketch like that on page 145. "But that," he said, "will take a considerable amount of study and access to both sides of the hull. That is one question-of many-which will have to be answered by whoever studies the boat after it comes out of conservation." "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 147 As opposed to the use of recycled wood for the planking, the frames were mostly made of "new" timbers-but not quality pieces. In fact, they served only to emphasize the poor selection of available woods. Furthermore, although he would not commit himself to identifying them, Dick thought he saw several different types of timber, particularly in the frames. "This guy was doing everything he could to frame out his boat with whatever he could get his hands on," Dick said. "He wasn't a poor builder. He just didn't have anything better to frame it with." Dick took a deep draw on his cigarette. "There is something pathetic about this hull," he concluded. In ancient Mediterranean ship construction, ships' nails on external fastenings were not simply driven into the timbers. Instead, a pilot hole was drilled through the timbers, and a treenail was hammered into the hole. Then the metal nail was driven down the center of the treenail and "double-clenched" on the inside. The treenail served to distribute the pressure of the nail equally while imparting a watertight fit to the nail. The double clenching-in which the tip of the protruding end of the nail was bent back and then driven back into the timber, leaving a portion of the nail flush with the surface, like a staple-imparted strength to the vessel and prevented the nail from coming loose or being pried out. "Did you notice that our boatwright didn't clench the nails?" Dick asked. I hadn't. "I assume that puts him back in the doghouse," I said. "No. Perhaps the fact that this is a boat, and not a ship, has something to do with it. You don't need the inherent strength. Now," Dick struck his right forefinger against his open left palm, "undoubtedly there are things we have already seen on this boat that were utilized only in the Galilee. But this again would indicate a good, well-trained craftsman. For instance, this method of nailing. You know there aren't any treenails. It's just plain straight nails. Now, you can get away with this on the Sea of Galilee, but I don't think you would want to try it in the storms that you were likely to run into on the Mediterranean. They have much bigger swells." 152 Chapter 5 vessels built with mortise-and-tenon joinery no caulking was used. "What prevented the planking seams from leaking?" I asked. "Once the hull was built, it was floated out into the sea or lake. The water would rush in promptly through the inevitable openings in the seams. But soon the water would cause the timbers to swell, closing all of the seams watertight.7 "When we built the full-scale replica of the Kyrenia ship-the Kyrenia II-we built her with mortise-and-tenon joints and without caulking, because Michael had found no evidence of caulking during the excavation, you see. When we floated her out, she took on so much water that within two hours she had almost sunk," Dick laughed, "The shipwrights who had built the Kyrenia II came from a shipbuilding tradition where caulking was the norm. They didn't think that hull would ever be watertight without caulking, and the fact that she almost sank seemed to confirm their suspicions. But a day later, when we pumped the water out of her, that hull was watertight."8 Several large staplelike iron fastenings were still in place nailed into the strakes across planking seams; others had been found in the overburden. After Dick studied these, he concluded that they, too, were repairs. "They were probably used to strengthen the planking where the mortise-and-tenon joints had begun to weaken," he said, ''but I've never seen anything like them in the Mediterranean. "Remember this boatbuilder had another problem that the people in the Mediterranean don't have. His boat was for fresh water. Fresh water is harder on wood than salt water." "Harder in what way?" I asked. "Generally, in fresh water, wood doesn' t last as long." "Salt water preserves it?" "Yes. In saltwater boats, the rotting often occurs from the inside because of sweating, or condensation. In fresh water you can have external damage. So, perhaps some of the repairs-the staples, for example-were due to the fresh water." 154 Chapter 5 Staple-or clenched nail- on the hull's exterior. Another time, Dick showed me a staple on a portion of the exterior of the hull that had been cleared of mud. "So?" "It's not a staple; it's a clenched nail," he said. Motioning me to look inside the hull, he pointed to the head of the nail protruding from the inner face of Frame 84. "I don't get it. Why would they clench only one nail?" "I think it's a repair," he said. Dick felt the same way about some of the frames . While most of the frames were not attached at all to the keel, eight frames-19, 38, 56, 76, 84, 93, 158, and 153-had nails driven through their upper surface into the top of the keel. Late in his stay Dick noticed little triangular insert pieces in the stern planking. In later ships 156 Chapter 5 his visit. With Karen, whom he had taken on as his recording assistant, Dick quietly recorded the hull as the mayhem of the excavation continued unabated all around them. At the boat's bow, the stem assembly had been carefully removed in antiquity, leaving only the bow extremity of the keel, which ended in a fixed tenon. One day, while Dick was taking measurements in the bow, I asked him about the missing stem assembly. "There are two bow shapes, either of which is possible, and again, I am not going to have sufficient time to determine with absolute certainty which is the correct one." On one hand, Dick explained, the bow might have followed a simple curve upward. The second possibility, which he preferred, however, was that the stem assembly-probably constructed from several timbers-had had the shape of a ramlike forefoot. "You know, I really wish I had more time to study this bow," Dick said wistfully. "I'm sure the clues are here to figure out the shape of the original bow assembly. One day, after conservation, someone will have to extend these bow planks and figure that out." "Why do you prefer reconstructing it in a ramlike manner?" I asked. "See how the keel ends here in a tenon? There is only one example that I know of in which the keel of an ancient Mediterranean ship ends in a tenon rather than a scarf, and that's the Athlit Ram. Had they wished to attach a simple stem, why did they use a tenon to do it rather than a normal scarf? I'm reasonably sure that, because the keel terminates as it does on the Athlit Ram, with a tenon instead of a scarf, we have that shape of bow." The stem construction was only one of a number of missing parts that had been removed in antiquity. What had happened to the stem assembly? Who had removed the two frames in the bow, leaving the nails in place like so many scrawny fingers? Even the sternpost, it turned out later, had been removed. Where had all the timbers gone? "If this boat is any indication," Dick said, "it would seem that "Yep, It's an Old Boat" 167 "What types of tools have you been able to identify so far?" Dick thought for a minute. "Now, I haven't done a tool study, though, from what I've seen, he used a bow drill, several types of hammers or mallets, chisels to make the mortises, and at least two sizes of drill bits, one for the pilot holes for nails and another for the tenon peg holes. He used adzes of several different sizes and shapes. There were saw marks, so he obviously used a handsaw. Probably brushes or trowels, because there was pitch, and it was applied with some heavy form of application. I assume he used a board to trowel the pitch onto the hull. But I think in general he was very limited in the variety of his tools." "He couldn't afford the tools?" "That's one possibility. Or they simply were not available to him." As darkness descended, I asked Dick what he felt was the boat's importance. "It's very significant," he said. "For one thing, it gives us a look at parts of boats in the Classical period that we have not been able to study before. "More important, this boat is on the Sea of Galilee, and therefore it gives us our first look at what water transport was like on the Kinneret. We know less about watercraft on the inland lakes than we do about those on the Mediterranean. At least now we can begin to reconstruct what went on in the Galilee. "The potential is there. That is what I will try to do in my report. I will point out potentials that will need to be elaborated on when the boat comes out of conservation. I hope not too many will need correcting. I am going to be as conservative as possible. "The most important thing about this hull, though, is that it is going to suggest things we haven't even discussed here because we don't know enough to ask the questions yet or to think about these possibilities. "You are going to solve one question and raise five." Dick was silent for a few moments. Then he chuckled, "And that's the story of my life." Chapter 6 The First Jewish Naval Battle Thus pursued, the Jews could neither escape to land, where all were in arms against them, nor sustain a naval battle on equal terms ... . Disaster overtook them and they were sent to the bottom, boats and all. From The Jewish War JOSEPHUS fLAVIUS 1 heard them before I saw them. As dusk settled over the excavation one day, two olive-drab IIsraeli air force Cobra helicopter gunships appeared out of nowhere. They flew low over the lake and sped directly toward the excavation site. Drawing near, they stopped and hovered overhead, like oversized dragonflies, their rotors beating the air. Then they began slowly to circle the site, the pilots observing us from a distance. As we were immersed in excavating the past, the sudden appearance of the Cobras hovering above us jarred me. For a moment I felt as if I had been caught between time zones sepa. rated by millennia. I speculated on how two Jewish gunships might have changed the outcome of a battle that took place over 1,900 years earlier somewhere near the shore on which I stood. When Jesus told the people to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," the face on the coin which he held in his hand must have been that of the emperor Tiberius, during whhose reign Jesus' ministry took place. 2 When Tiberius died in AD 37, Gaius Caligula became emperor of Rome. Rumor had it that Caligula had murdered the aged Tiberius, who was his grandfather. The Romans, who despised the grim and morbid Tiberius, were ecstatic when Caligula came to the throne. Caligula's late father, Germanicus, had been deeply loved and respected, and for the first few years of his rule, Caligula confirmed the expectations of his citizens, instituting many popular acts. It appeared to the average Roman that the new emperor would bring a positive 171 176 Chapter 6 gents was a certain Jesus Ben Sapphia, who was also a chief magistrate of the city. Before Valerianus had a chance to present his offer, a band of armed rebels, led by Ben Sapphia, surprised the Romans. This ragtag group of Jews captured some of the Romans' horses, which they brought back inside the city walls in triumph. The Romans retreated ignominiously on foot. Josephus does not tell us what became of Valerianus, but it is unlikely that he was well received by Vespasian following such a fiasco . Realizing that Roman retribution would not be long in coming, many of Tiberias's leading citizens rushed to Vespasian's encampment. There they begged the Roman general not to destroy the city for the rash actions of a few. Not surprisingly, Vespasian was furious . It was no small embarrassment for Roman soldiers to have their horses stolen almost from beneath them. Remembering Agrippa's concern for the city, however, he set terms for Tiberias to capitulate. To save themselves from certain destruction, the elders immediately agreed to the terms. Recognizing that they would no longer be safe in Tiberias, Ben Sapphia and his followers hastily departed for Migdal. Having been stung by the Tiberian rebels once, Vespasian sent a Roman cavalry unit under Trajan, commander of the Xth Legion (and father of the future emperor of the same name), to reconnoiter Tiberias the following day. Wisely keeping a safe distance this time, Trajan observed the city from a nearby mountain. Only after Vespasian was notified that the city's population was now in compliance with his terms did he march his army to Tiberias. Tiberias opened her gates and, cheered on by the people, who happily accepted the Roman yoke again, the conquering army marched through them. Vespasian ordered a section of the city's southern wall torn down. Josephus relates that this was done to facilitate passage for the soldiers. More likely, Vespasian was ensuring that Tiberias could not revolt again. 178 Chapter 6 The latter took up a position on the nearby mountainside, with orders to keep the Jews off the walls and to prevent assistance from the city to the Jews in the field . When the archers were in place, Titus led a horse charge against the irregulars arrayed in the field . Unaccustomed to organized warfare, the Jews fought back bravely for a while but were quickly overwhelmed by the cavalry's momentum. Soon the plain was covered with the dead and the dying, their bodies impaled by cavalry lances. Those that survived the onslaught fled back to the safety of Migdal' s walls. Many never made it. Some were trampled under galloping hooves. The horsemen charged and then charged again, and each time, more and more Jews fell to the Romans. They cut down the stragglers with ease, then raced after the swift of foot. Roman horsemen rode past the fleeing men, wheeled around, and attacked again and again. And again. Finally, some Jews were able to make good their escape and reach the walls-only to find utter chaos reigning inside the city. Josephus, during the short period that he had served as governor of the Galilee at the behest of the Jerusalem war council in anticipation of the Roman attack, had fortified Migdal on the sides that faced the Valley of Ginosar. Due to a lack of funds, he had left it unfortified on the side facing the lake. Roman calvary, however, were trained in swimming their horses through water obstacles. The military historian Vegetius, who wrote in the late fourth or early fifth century AD, notes:S Every recruit without exception should in the summer months learn the art of swimming, for rivers are not always crossed by bridges, and armies both when advancing and retreating are frequently forced to swim . . . . It is highly advantageous to train not just infantry but cavalry and their horses and grooms, whom they call galearii, to swim as well, lest they be found incapable when an emergency presses. There were many times in Roman history when this training paid off. One of them took place that day at Migdal. Titus, aware of The First Jewish Naval Battle 181 The Roman auxiliary archers responded with showers of arrows, against which the Jews were defenseless. Some boats tried to break through the Roman line. But the craft were so close that the Romans impaled the Jews on their javelins or actually jumped into the Jewish vessels and slaughtered the occupants by sword. Other boats were captured when they were caught as the Roman watercraft closed in. Those Jews who tried to reach safety by jumping into the water were dispatched with an arrow when they came up for air. In exhaustion, some tried to grab onto the Roman vessels, only to lose their hands or heads to the snicker-snack of legionary blades. Jews died in many ways, all of them horrible. Finally, the remaining vessels were corralled by the Romans and forced toward the shore, where, as they grounded, other Roman soldiers who had been stationed there immediately finished off those who had somehow succeeded in surviving till then. The Kinneret' s waters turned crimson with the blood of the slain that day; corpses covered her shores, while others floated gently on her waters. Wrecks of their boats littered the coast. The Romans ceased their carnage only when there was no one left to kill. In the days that followed the battle, a gagging stench hung over the area as the corpses, left unattended, putrefied. Josephus related that, while the Jews who had survived in the city mourned their dead, this overwhelming smell of death even disgusted the Romans. The body count, which included those killed on land, numbered 6,700. In the aftermath of the battle, Vespasian held a tribunal to determine the future of those still in Migdal. He divided the survivors into those who actually lived in Migdal and those who had arrived at the city just before the battle and had instigated the hostilities. The newcomers Vespasian decided to deal with in a method that might have been taken directly from a Nazi SS textbook. Vespasian gave them his pledge of amnesty and permitted them to leave through only one route: the one that led to Tiberias. Willing 182 Chapter 6 to believe what they wished to be true, the wretches set out carrying their belongings, confident in the Roman general' s word of honor. Vespasian lined the road to Tiberias with Roman soldiers, who prevented anyone from escaping. Arriving at Tiberias, the men were herded into the city's stadium. When he arrived, Vespasian ordered the murder of the weak and the old. His words resulted in the immediate execution of 1,200 men. They had been found guilty of an inexcusable crime: being useless. From the younger, healthier specimens, an additional 6,000 men were selected for slave labor and sent off to Greece to die digging Nero's canal at Corinth. The majority of the remaining men-who numbered 30,400 according to Josephus-Vespasian sold into slavery, while returning to Agrippa those men who had been his wards, permitting him to deal with them as he wished. Agrippa promptly sold his own subjects into slavery. Nineteen centuries after the battle, speculation about the "Jesus connection" to our boat had run rampant in the media and particularly among the foreign visitors, many of whom were Christian pilgrims, who visited the site daily. But for us, the members of the team involved in excavating the boat, and for many local visitors, another question-an important one-was whether the boat might not be one of those washed ashore after the massacre at the Battle of Migdal. Both the place where the boat had come to rest, on the shore near Migdal, and the boat's presumed date made this scenario reasonable, even likely, from an archaeological perspective. The piles of mud that we had laboriously removed from the boat and its surroundings stood near the shores. It was only much later, after the boat was safely back underwater in her conservation pool, that we could direct our attention to these mounds of sediment. When Moshele examined one of the mud piles that had been removed from inside the boat, his metal detector gave off a hum, indicating the presence of a metal object. The source of the 184 Chapter 6 The arrowhead . sault resulted in the conquest of the city. The remaining Jews retreated to Gamla's citadel, which is located on the far western edge of the mountain. Vespasian brought up all of his forces to fight the survivors. The Jews fought valiantly against the Romans and, for a time, held their own, killing many of their attackers, while they remained The First Jewish Naval Battle 187 hons and knew this material well. I asked him to take a look at the arrowhead that Moshele had found. Danny called me after examining it. "At Gamla we found 14 examples of the same type of pyramidal arrowhead," he told me. "Most of them were found within 5 meters [16 feet] of the wall along an 80-meter [262-foot] stretch of wall. Presumably they were shot by auxiliary archers attached to the Roman army during the capture of Gamla." It is an interesting fact of history that some cultures favored the bow as a weapon of war, considering it a "noble weapon" : Akkadians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Parthians, to name but a few. All used the bow in battle and prided themselves in their prowess with it. Other cultures, including the Roman, did not consider the bow a valorous weapon of war. Yet the Romans did realize the practical importance of archery as a long-distance form of warfare and therefore normally had auxiliary contingents of archers attached to their battle groups. These were usually either mercenaries or troops contributed by dependent kings. Josephus relates that Vespasian's battle group included a total of 6,000 foot archers and 3,000 cavalry contributed by three Asiatic client rulers: Antiochus IV, who was king of Commagene in Asia Minor; Soemus, who ruled in Emessa, which was located north of Syria; and Agrippa II. Malachus, an Arab, sent an additional mixed force of 1,000 horse and 5,000 foot soldiers, most of whom were archers. The arrowhead that Moshele had found may have belonged originally to one of these auxiliary archers attached to Vespasian's battle group, perhaps one of the same men who later took part in the battle of Gamla. As Josephus specifically mentions that Vespasian had archers on board his vessels, the distinct possibility exists that the arrowhead found its way into the Kinneret during that battle. As the helicopters continued to hover overhead, I stood in contemplation of those distant times. 188 Chapter 6 Rome and Jerusalem. Jerusalem and Rome. If history is a highway, the first century AD is most assuredly a major crossroad on it. The more I became involved with the boat, the more the past came alive for me. And with the past came some of its personages, who arrived to haunt my thoughts. This was as close as I probably would ever come to having my very own time machine. It was as if these persons had walked off the pages of the history books and were standing quietly, unseen yet felt, next to me inside the barrier around the excavation site. 4ue.p I Josephus, son of Matthias, a Hebrew by race and a priest from Jerusalem-having personally fought against the Romans in the early stages of the war, and an unwilling witness of the ensuing events-propose to reveal the facts to the people of the Roman Empire.9 Barely a day went by during the excavation without someone mentioning Josephus. I had the impression that he was participating in the excavation. In a way, he was. Josephus ben Matthias was born to a venerable priestly family the same year that Caligula took office. Only a year earlier a cruel governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, had been deposed and recalled to Rome. The attempt by Petronius to carry out Caligula's orders may have been among Josephus's earliest childhood memories-he would still have been in diapers (or the firstcentury equivalent) at the time-as he grew up in Jerusalem. As a youth he explored the different streams of Judaism which existed in his day: those of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. For three years he even became the disciple of a Jewish ascetic named Bannus, who dressed in the bark of trees and frequently partook of cold-water baths to purify himself. When he was 19, Josephus chose the path of the Pharisees. Then, in AD 64, at the age of twenty-six, Josephus sailed to Rome for the purpose of liberating some priestly friends who had The First Jewish Naval Battle 191 Roman camp and aided the Romans, particularly during the siege and capture of Jerusalem, where he repeatedly called on the defenders to surrender. Following the fall of Jerusalem, Josephus accompanied Titus to Rome. There he recorded his impressions of the triumphal parade granted to Titus and Vespasian in honor of the dissolution of Judea. The marvelous floats were the most remarkable aspect of the spectacle, according to Josephus. Some of these contraptions were so high-three and four stories high-that there was concern lest they keel over and injure the onlookers. These floats portrayed stages in the conquest of Judea and the subjugation of its people in all the gory and sadistic detail. Josephus notes:1 2 Here was to be seen a prospering countryside laid waste, there whole battalions of the enemy put to the sword; here a party of men in flight, and there others led off to captivity; walls of enormous size were demolished by engines, great strongholds overpowered, cities whose battlements were well-manned with defenders utterly overwhelmed and an army streaming within the ramparts, the whole area deluged with blood. Those unable to resist raised their hands in supplication; temples were set on fire and houses torn down over the heads of their occupants; and, after utter desolation and misery, rivers were flowing, not over tilled soil nor supplying drink to men and beasts, but across a countryside still devoured by flames on every side; for such were the agonies to which the Jews had condemned themselves when they plunged into the war. The art and the marvelous workmanship of these constructions now revealed the events to those who had not seen them happen, as clearly as if they had been there. On each of the stages the commander of one of the captured cities was stationed in the attitude in which he was taken. Many ships also followed .... Josephus did not enlighten us on why ships were being carried in the procession, but it is probable that these vessels commemorated the Battle of Migdal. Indeed, on a sesterius minted by 194 Chapter 6 avoid the obvious catastrophe. Swept up in the revolt, he tried the best he could to organize the defenses of this command. After the fall of Jerusalem, Josephus easily could have abjured Judaism. Instead, he dedicated the rest of his life to recording its history and defending its cause against the anti-Jewish slanders of the GrecoRoman world in which he lived. Josephus-like the builder of our boat-did the best that he could with what he had at hand. For a short time, the helicopters continued to circle above the boat. Then, as swiftly as they had come, they disappeared into the darkening western sky, leaving behind an audio trail of rapidly fading noise. Chapter 7 The Impossible We Do Immediately; Miracles Take a Little Longer "Who are You?" said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, "I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but l think I must have been changed several times since then." " What do you mean by that?" said the Caterpillar, sternly. "Explain yourself!" "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see." "I don't see," said the Caterpillar. "I'm afraid l can't put it more clearly," Alice replied very politely, "for I can't understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing." "It isn't," said the Caterpillar. "Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet," said Alice; "but when you have to turn into a chrysalis-you will some day, you know-and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?" "Not a bit," said the Caterpillar. From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland LEWIS C ARROLL1 hile Dick was finishing his preliminary study of the hull, we were rapidly completing the excavation of the boat's interior. Since that terrible night when part of the stern had fallen in, we had successfully protected the hull from further collapse. During this entire period, the remaining hull had been encased in the mud rostrum on which it stood. Now our accomplishments were prompting new questions. Assuming that the hull remained intact, what, then, were we to do with it? We definitely wanted to study the boat further, and under better conditions than those at the crowded, muddy excavation site. And certainly, this venerable artifact was one that merited public display and attention. Avi, concerned about the lengthy time needed for conservation, had from the outset designated the Allon Museum, with its logistical capability and willingness to take charge of the boat's conservation, as the natural location for conserving the boat. The museum, however, was a good third of a mile up the coast. The manner in which the boat would be conserved dictated how we would have to move it. There were two possibilities. We could take her apart and move her in pieces, or we could try to move the boat all in one piece, as a coherent hull. But which method should we use? In those cases in which ships still have sufficient structural integrity, they have been raised and moved intact. The Mary Rose, for example, which served as Henry VIII's flagship until 1545, when she capsized and sank in the Solent, was raised in one piece. Similarly, the Vasa, a seventeenth-century Swedish warship, which sank in Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage, was also raised in this manner. Both of these vessels, however, are large, W 197 The Impossible We Do Immediately 199 ties would be hard-pressed to come up with the funding required to initiate and sustain the conservation effort. For at least part of the process the vessel, although submerged, could be visible to the public. Why not take advantage of the public interest generated by the boat to exhibit her during the conservation process and then use the funds generated by admission fees to defray the expenses, at least in part. No one would pay to see trays of broken pieces of timber in them, however. Furthermore, Dick soon had to depart, leaving us without a qualified boat reconstructor to record the timbers. In the end, the boat-as usual-decided the issue for us. She told us very clearly that she had no intention of being taken apart. She was holding onto her physical integrity by her nails. Quite literally. While the boat's planks were attached to each other, as well as to the keel, by mortise-and-tenon joints, her frames had been fastened to the planking with iron nails. On ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks, because of the chemical reaction between iron . and seawater, iron nails decompose, facilitating the separation of the planking from the frames. All that usually remains are the holes where the nails had been, along with some minor discolorations and concretions. We were in for a surprise, however, when Orna came back from having one of the loose nails sectioned at a laboratory. There was less than a millimeter of rust on it. "It looked so brand-new," Orna related, "that the lab technician refused to believe me when I told him that the nail was ancient." Furthermore, as Dick had pointed out to us, the nails were so deeply imbedded in the wood that they still gave the hull some structural integrity. Additionally, the little corrosion that had taken place had permeated the wood, bonding the nails to the surrounding timber. There was no way of taking the boat apart without doing serious, possibly irreparable, harm to her. No, she had to be conserved as an integral hull. But then how does one move a 27foot-long boat which is built of timbers so weak that they might as 202 Chapter 7 In the end, the solution turned out to be close at hand. In fact, it had been incubating inside Orna's mind. The two of us were sitting together on one of the logs that Yuvi and Moshele had scattered about the site during the original probe excavation. We were both bone-weary. Oma puffed on a cigarette. "There is one possibility," she said quietly. "Which is?" "Remember the way I solidified the stem with polyurethane." I nodded. "Well, we could do that on a grand scale. Spray the entire boat, inside and out, with polyurethane. It would keep the hull immobilized, like a doctor's cast on a broken bone." Oma stared off into space. She seemed to have gone for a walk inside herself for a moment. "Of course, the polyurethane alone would not give any structural strength," she continued, flicking the ash off her cigarette, "so we would have to add additional supports to the hull to make sure it doesn't crack the polyurethane coating by its sheer weight." "OK, how do we do that?" Obviously Oma was on a roll. She was silent again for a while. "We could girdle the boat with fiberglass and polyester," she said. "Inside, we could add a fiberglass frame between every two original wooden ones." By the time Oma was done, she had conceived a deceptively simple and yet admirably reasonable method for packaging the boat. One that just might work. "I told you there was a solution," I said with a grin. Oma didn't smile. I immediately conferred with Avi who, quite legitimately, wanted a second opinion before he sprinkled bureaucratic holy water over Orna's proposal. The next day Avi drove down from Jerusalem together with several other Department of Antiquities officials. With him was Dodo Shenhav, who heads the Conservation Laboratory at the 206 Chapter 7 11 And now, here Davidi and I were, for a second time, using fiberglass to cover an 'ancient' fishing boat. Only this time she really was ancient." It took the better part of three days to complete "fiberglassing" the interior of the hull. Davidi and Yohai worked their way toward the bow, creating a fiberglass frame between every two of the hull's framing stations. We now had four separate groups working simultaneously on the boat. This gave the whole scene the appearance of an assembly-line construction sequence. Outside the boat, we carefully began to remove the upper part of the mud podium on which she rested. We were concerned that the hull, without this support, might splay outward . To prevent this from happening, Gill molded vertical Styrofoam braces against the hull's exterior at fixed intervals. At the stern, excavators still lay on the hanging platform removing the remaining mud. As soon as they cleared the timbers, Danny was there stringing, tagging, and photographing them, and then Davidi and Yohai would swath the same area with fiberglass frames . Between, over, and among them, Dick was finishing up his recording. And everything was going like clockwork. While all this was going on, Zvika was diligently enlarging the area around his boat fragments. First, he, together with other volunteers from Migdal using shovels and mattocks, enlarged the area where they had been found, laboriously digging down from seabed level to immediately above the height of the hull fragments. Then Zvika, alone, in what was clearly a labor of love, carefully dug around the timbers. By Sunday, February 23, he had revealed sizable portions of them. Both fragments continued tantalizingly into the mud. They might end a few more inches down, or they might be just the tips of an additional intact hull or two. There was no telling how much of either hull still lay buried out of sight. I would have given anything to let Zvika continue enlarging the area, but it was now time to clear the way so that we could give our full attention to the boat itself. So, after Dick had completed The Impossible We Do Immediately 209 hanging platform. An assistant handed him a spray gun attached to two long black hoses encrusted with rust-colored splashes of old polyurethane; these extended, snakelike, out of the pit to pressurized barrels that had been placed nearby. The workman quietly and methodically cleaned out the spray gun's ''barrels" with a rusty nail attached to the gun by an old and knotted string. When he was satisfied that all was as it should be, he began firing short consecutive bursts of two dark orange liquids into the bow. At each pull of the trigger, the gun made a shfft-shfft noiseas if a snake with a bad case of the hiccups was trying to hissfollowed immediately by the sound of the liquids hitting the plastic sheetings: pllt-pllt. Beyond straightening out the polyethylene sheeting and making sure that the hoses didn't come into physical contact with the hull, there was not much for us to do at this point. So we all stood around watching, and listening, as the hull filled up. To the astonishment of those of us unfamiliar with polyurethane spray, upon coming into contact with each other, the liquids boiled and bubbled, frothed and foamed. And then they solidified into a Styrofoam-like material. In the process, the polyurethane changed in color before our eyes from dark orange to bright yellow. As each squirt solidified, it was covered again, and then again, by further bursts from the spray gun. Into the polyurethane, we put several rigid white PVC pipes, each with its lower end resting firmly on a fiberglass frame. These would allow access to the hull should groundwater seep into the boat from its mud podium. The hull began to fill slowly with polyurethane. Under the soft glow of the fishermen's lanterns, it looked as if a rapidly expanding living organism was slowly consuming the boat. There was something mesmerizing and unreal, even magical, about the whole experience. This feeling was heightened by the surrounding clammy darkness, barely kept at bay by the lanterns. I had the distinct feeling that somehow we all had fallen into the reels of a Spielberg movie. 214 Chapter 7 disengaged the linchpin and carefully removed the entire sternpost. Just before he left to return to Texas, Dick showed me some holes in the planking ends. "Look here," he said. "Someone in antiquity pulled out the nails that held the strakes to the sternpost. And he probably used a pair of pliers to do it, to judge from the marks he left." Hmmm. Curious. As the tunnels progressed eastward, toward the boat's bow, another odd feature came to light. The day after Dick left, one of the tunnelers working under the boat' s starboard bow called me · over. "Take a look in there," he said, pointing to the tunnel out of which he had just reversed, caked in mud. Crawling into the tunnel underneath the hull, I was surprised to find a row of mortise-and-tenon scars in the portion of the keel that protruded beneath the hull. I could think of no purpose that these joints could have served on our boat. This meant that the keel-at least the forward part of it-had been made of reused wood. But there was no time to reflect on that now; it would have to be dealt with later. Danny photographed the mortise-and-tenon scars, and soon afterward they disappeared behind a fiberglass truss and billowing polyurethane foam. In order to package the bow, we had to move the tree stump on which the keel at this extremity rested. After considerable effort, we excavated it and slipped it out from beneath the keel, careful to avoid placing any pressure on the keel. By the next day, Tuesday, February 25, the first row of tunnels had been completed, packed, and filled. We now started on the second row of tunnels through the remaining mud podium, repeating the process. While the fiberglass frames and polyurethane blanket stabilized the hull's timbers, we realized that additional structural support would be required when it came time to move the boat. Eitan "Eitani" Shalem, a member of Ginosar and a builder by 218 Chapter 7 followed with his cameras. Before the assembly had been removed, Eitani had already inserted a set of wire-bound two-byfours through the tunnel, in anticipation of its being filled with polyurethane. As the day progressed, first one, then another, and then a third of the remaining tunnels were finished off, trussed up, and sealed with polyurethane. Eitani, assisted by others, finished the structural base by wiring additional two-by-fours along the length of the boat encased on either side. The boat was packaged and ready for removal; the caterpillar had been entirely encased in its cocoon. The question of how to move the boat had been occupying our thoughts for several days now. The Israeli air force had offered us the loan of one of its larger classes of helicopters to transport the At the end of the process, the boat, without having been moved a millimeter, had been encased in a protective cocoon. The Impossible We Do Immediately 223 And away we go . .. If I had to choose one moment during the entire excavation which was the most meaningful and packed with emotions, it was when the boat sailed out on the lake. I think that everyone who was involved in the project felt the same way. Isaac, who had watched from the shore that day, summed it up. "When the boat began to move out was one of the most emotional moments in my life," he told me, with a twinkle in his eyes. "I shivered to watch it sail away. That was really something, a very emotional experience. I remember thinking at the time, those with weak hearts should not watch this. It was truly an historical moment." We walked the boat through the shallow portion of the lake to the Allon Museum. There we were met by a rowboat crewed by children from the kibbutz's boating school. Our boat was taken in tow by the children, who rowed back to Ginosar's small fisher- 228 Chapter 7 .. . the boat was lifted, finally coming to rest on shore next to the site chosen for its conservation pool. Sometimes at night, when I give my imagination full reign, I see the wife of that cocky engineer we consulted who had been so convinced that it was impossible to move the boat. In this scene, she is sleeping in bed when she wakes to find that her husband is gone. And in his place is a large, shiny ball bearing. Chapter 8 A Pride of Scholars No one lights a lamp and then covers it with a pot. .. Luke 8: 16 1 uring the excavation everyone had been particularly careful to avoid making unqualified pronouncements about the craft. Under the intense pressures of the rescue mission, we had had no time to study the raw data unearthed. Indeed, there had been barely time to record it. When queried about the boat's historical significance, I stressed that we were at present concerned with saving it. The time for understanding it would come later. That time had now come. Could she be one of the boats used by Jesus and his Apostles and disciples as related in the Gospels? Or was she perhaps one of the boats that had washed up on the crimson beach after the Battle of Migdal? These and many other questions had been posed by the media and by visitors, as well as by those of us participating in the excavation. The boat was loaded with a cargo of information; that much was clear. But this information was encrypted in the manner in which she had been built and the ways in which she had been used. It was hidden in the few artifacts which had been found in and around her. The task ahead was to decode the messages. The answers were there; it was now a matter of asking the right questions and finding a means of answering them. Between visits to Ginosar to assist Oma in preparing the boat for conservation and my regular inspections and dives along the Mediterranean coast, I began work on a scholarly publication about the boat for the Department of Antiquities. As I conceived it, this report would relate what had transpired since the ancient vessel's discovery and explore new insights gained into life and seafaring on the Kinneret in its day. D 231 234 Chapter 8 . what the problem is. Once that is accomplished, finding a solution is usually relatively easy. In consideration of this point, I first created a wish list of all the general research questions-"treasure drawers" -that I wished to explore concerning the boat. These questions I then translated into chapter headings. Next to each title I wrote down the name of the scholar (the key) who I considered best qualified to write that specific chapter. The authors of some chapters were already clear. Obviously, Dick would write a preliminary report on the boat's construction. This was to be the heart of the report. Oma would author the chapters concerning the methods used in packaging, moving, and conserving the hull. I asked Danny to write on Moshele's arrowhead. Together with Edna and Kurt, I would author reports on the discovery and the excavation of the boat. What now was to unfold was a true detective story, and in many ways, it turned out to be an experience which I personally found to be no less exciting-and enriching-than the boat's discovery and excavation. The first problem to tackle was the question of the boat's age. When had she lived her life? For a shipwreck found with its cargo intact, dating the hull is normally a fairly easy matter. Date the cargo items, the personal effects of the crew and passengers, and the other articles carried on board, and the ship's date will follow. Our boat, however, contained no cargo, and the few artifacts found in and around her could not be reliably connected to the vessel. The boat chose to be coy and to hide her age. She was going to make me sweat for this one. Dick, in the hand-written report which he gave to Avi on the day he left the excavation, had noted, "If this were a hull found in the Mediterranean, I would date it between the first century BC and the second century AD." Careful scholar that Dick is, however, he had also emphasized in his letter that traditions of wooden hull construction may have continued on the Kinneret long after they had gone out of use on the more cosmopolitan Mediterranean Sea. Dating a shipwreck solely by construction techniques is never prudent, even on the A Pride of Scholars 237 lamp. These first true lamps appear in the Middle Bronze Age I (ca. 2300/2250-2000 BC). One type is simple, with the rim folded in only one location. But someone had the bright idea that more light could be achieved by folding in a round bowl or saucer at four sides, thus creating four positions for the placement of wicks. This "100-watt" lamp gave more light but also required more oil. For some reason, production of the four-wick lamp died out within a few centuries. The simple open type of lamp, however, began a twomillennium-long unbroken tradition, which ended only in the Hellenistic period. While the concept of a bowl with a fold for the wick remained constant, the open lamp underwent numerous changes. The reasons for these changes are unclear. They may have been matters of taste, or there may have been practical reasons for some of them. Throughout the Middle Bronze Age II (ca. 2000-1550 Be), the lamp remained a simple bowl with a pinched rim. During the following Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550-1200 Be), however, the lamp received a rim which splayed outward, perhaps in order to allow the user a better grasp. In the Iron Age (ca. 1200-586 BC), lamps shrank a bit in size. When King Solomon died, the kingdom which Saul had founded and David had extended broke into two different nations, Israel (Samaria) and Judea. This political division was expressed in the lamps. Some Judean lamps had a thick, raised cylindrical base, while the Israelite type, which continued the previous tradition, lacked a base. Styles of ceramic oil lamps flowed back and forth across the ancient world. During the Late Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greeks in the west were importing open Syro-Canaanite or Cypriot ceramic oil lamps from the east. On the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck, which was heading west when it sank, the excavators found new, unused oil lamps, packed together with sets of beautiful Cypriot pottery into large ceramic jars called pithoi, which served as the ancient equivalent of china barrels. During the Persian period, lamps in Israel almost lacked a 242 Chapter 8 der," was almost too small to grasp between one's fingers . The potter had attached it seemingly as an afterthought. The lamp had no decorative elements at all. The dark soot that clung to the wick hole indicated that this lamp had seen use. "This is one of the types of wheel-made lamps that continued to be made while the Roman mold-made lamps were so popular," Varda said. "It is similar to types of lamps that were common during Early Roman and Herodian times." That meant the lamp could date from anywhere during two centuries. "The way the neck is formed" -and here Varda ran her finger against the lamp's neck-"is like those on small cups from a site called Abu Shusha and from [the late Professor] Avigad's excavations in the Jewish Quarter [in the nearby Old City of Jerusalem] . These date to either the end of the first century BC or the beginning of the first century AD." "Where were the other examples of this specific type of lamp found?" I asked. "Let's see." Varda reflected for a moment and then began naming the sites and the archaeologists who had excavated them. "One was found by Siegelman at Abu Shusha. Another one comes from Moshe Dothan's excavations at Afula. Oh, and Nurit Feig recently found a number of them in a tomb that she excavated in Nazareth." "Can you be any more accurate as to the date of the lamps and where they come from?" I asked. "I would date this lamp anywhere from the middle or later first century BC to about the early first century AD, that is, from about 50 BC to AD 50. Judging from the distribution of this type of lamp, it was probably produced in the Galilee, although do keep in mind the lamps found in Jerusalem." Attention now turned to David, as Edna took out of their boxes the cooking pot and the other sherds found in and around the boat. David studied them for a while, not saying anything. If I had sought out Varda' s "vertical" knowledge of lamps of all ages, David had what you might think of as a "horizontal" expertise. In his dissertation, which he had completed only a year 243 A Pride of Scholars o ｾＧＭｩ＠ 2 The lamp. 4cm A Pride of Scholars 247 the artifacts with Varda, Edna and I opened the entrance door and stepped out into the street. Back into the twentieth century. Having an entire boat made of wood permitted another method for determining when she had lived her life: carbon 14 dating. I made an appointment with Dr. Yisrael Carmi of the Department of Isotope Research at Israel's Weitzmann Institute of Science, located south of Tel Aviv in Rehovot. When I had explained the problems concerned with dating the boat to Yisrael and explained that I had no funding to pay for the tests, he kindly offered to do them on a pro bono basis. When I arrived in Rehovot with the samples, Yisrael showed me around the lab and explained to me the nuts and bolts of deriving radiocarbon dates. This method is the single most important form of archaeometry employed by archaeologists to date their discoveries. Carbon 14 dating, also known as C14, 14C, and radiocarbon dating, is based on a radioactive clock. Carbon atoms normally have six protons and six neutrons in their nuclei, giving them the assignation of12C. However, the element carbon exists in two other forms. One of these is the result of the tendency of some nitrogen atoms to become carbon atoms, when bombarded by solar radiation. These newly formed carbon atoms have an additional two neutrons in their nuclei: 14C. These atoms are unstable and begin to decay back into nitrogen atoms at a known rate. Like all radioactive substances, their rate of decay follows an exponential pattern. In other words, it takes a specific amount of time for half of the 14C to decay. This is known as its half-life. It then takes another, equal span of time, or half-life, for the remaining half of the original amount to decay into one quarter of the original. And so on. But all radioactive materials decay at fixed rates. What makes 14C so ideal for archaeologists? Two considerations: availability and timing. First and foremost, all living entities, be they flora or fauna, A Pride of Scholars 255 such a plethora of timber types. In other words, extenuating circumstances must have required the boat builder to use these timbers to construct a watercraft. With the exception of the Lebanese cedar, all the types of wood which Ella identified in the boat could be obtained locally. Ella and Dick both felt it likely that the timbers other than those of cedar or oak, used in the planking and framing of the boat, were probably repair pieces. During the excavation, splotches of red coloration were observed on some of the planking, particularly on the external side of the starboard, where the late afternoon sun would hit it at an angle that emphasized this feature . Dick had pointed out that it was probably the residue of resin applied by the boatwright to prevent rot, which he noted is more of a problem in a freshwater environment than in the briny sea. To learn more about this material, I contacted Dr. Raymond White of the Scientific Department at the National Gallery in London. He graciously agreed to investigate samples which Oma removed from the hull. Using a method known as chromatography, by means of which the constituent parts of amino and fatty acids can be identified, he found that the material was probably a pine resin. One of the five samples from the boat appears to be Aleppo pine resin. Oma was particularly intrigued by the quality of the nails and carried out a joint study with Dr. Itzhak Roman from the School of Applied Science and Technology of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, to learn more about them. They sectioned one of the nails and found it to be of a high quality of manufacture. The nail had undergone hammering, presumably in the process of its production. It was made of relatively clean 0.4 percent carbon steel. This type of steel is still used today. Hours were spent turning Danny's sets of photos of the interior of the boat's hull into composite mosaics. When these were completed, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of the hull's interior Danny had succeeded in recording. Two parts were 260 Chapter 8 height of the lake in Roman times was about 210 meters (689 feet) below sea level, give or take about half a meter. Most of the sediments that surrounded the boat were fine and silty, with some intrusions of coarser material, apparently washed down from nearby Nahal Tsalmon. Thus this sediment in which the boat was found is a curious mixture of layers of coarser sediment combined with layers of fine silt, which are more typical of deeper parts of the Kinneret. "It seems that there is a unique and isolated environment in this particular location that permitted the rapid burial of the boat," Yankele said. The burial of the lower part of the boat must have occurred very quickly to a level of at least 211 meters below sea level, that is, the highest point to which the boat's timbers had been preserved. Under normal conditions, the boat would have been exposed far too long for the hull to have survived. Following its arrival on the lake bed, layers of coarser material were deposited during times of high-energy action in storms, while layers of finer silt settled during periods of relative calm on the lake. The boat's burial may have been facilitated by the liquidlike state of the mud at this location when the boat was deposited. Presumably, fairly quickly after this, the boat was covered with additional sediments. It was this rapid burial in the sediment that saved the lower part of the boat for posterity. Perhaps the burial process spanned several years. What happened after this at the boat site above the -211 meter mark is not clear. There are two possibilities. Either no additional sediments were deposited, or if they were, these sediments were deposited and removed. by the Kinneret' s currents and waves in what can be described as a winnowing effect. And so it continued. Each scholar approached added his or her piece to the puzzle, until the puzzle began to evolve into a picture. Chapter 9 Good Night, Sleeping Beauty They are like trees planted by streams of water, Which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. Psalms 1:3 he boat rested safely on land, having made the journeypresumably without mishap. At least the polyurethane casing had remained intact during the move, which seemed a good sign. We speculated as to how well the boat inside had survived the trip. There was no way of determining this until the entire package was physically in the conservation pool and we could remove the casing. I remember having an irrational fear that, when we opened up the polyurethane, the boat would have vanished. While the polyurethane would probably protect the wood from further dehydration, to be on the safe side Oma cut a row of small holes in the casing along the line of the uppermost strakes of .the hull, into which she inserted a garden-variety drip hose. Another, complementary row of holes was cut beneath the boat. The hose was turned on several times every day, giving the timbers a refreshing shower of water, which flowed freely through the polyurethane cocoon before dripping out through the holes at the bottom. When the crane had lowered the boat onto land, the pool in which it was to be conserved existed as little more than a rectangle, marked out on the ground with chalk. So uncertain was the outcome of moving the boat from the excavation site that no one had been willing to start building the pool until the vessel arrived safely on terra firma . From the moment the boat had "landed" at the Yigal Allon Centre, however, all attention turned to the special conservation pool that was to be built under Isaac Rotem's guidance with funding from the Department of Antiquities. Isaac had been there to greet the boat, his tape measure in hand, verifying the dimensions of the craft and its casing. As the cost of the conservation materials in which the boat was to be T 263 266 Chapter 9 Two kibbutzniks were inside the pool ready to receive the boat. Isaac (with his back to the camera) eased her into place. Good Night, Sleeping Beauty 267 incline, and recent rains had made the ground slippery. Suddenly the huge machine lurched, as one of its hydraulic legs slipped off the wooden blocks on which it rested. The next moments unwound for me, dreamlike, in slow motion. The boat began free-falling. One side of the iron pallet hit the side of the pool, causing the boat to careen sideways. Danny, Edna, and Karen, who were taking photos and observing the scene from their perch on a nearby wall, told me later that their hearts almost stopped as they watched in horror. It seemed that any second the boat would crash down on the men inside the pool. The operator-I never did learn his name-pulled another lever, sinking the hydraulic leg deep into the soft mud. The boat teetered and then stabilized. Momentarily. "Get that boat back on land," I yelled to the operator. The boat was soon safely back on land. I sent the crane operator packing. On his way out of the kibbutz, he got stuck in the mud. The next day another crane, with a more experienced operator, was brought in, and shortly the boat was resting safely inside the pool. To remove the metal pallet upon which the boat rested, we filled the pool partially with water, so that she floated free of it. Then, with Rotem, I unbolted the frame from the runners and slipped the separate pieces out from beneath the boat. We then pumped the water out of the pool, carefully making sure that the boat came to rest in the middle of the receptacle. Now we could finally begin the task of removing the polyurethane cocoon. It was only at this stage that we realized that, in our rush to get the polyurethane onto the boat, we had not given sufficient consideration to how to remove it. Oops. If anyone uses this method in the future, I highly recommend taping cut wires to the outer surface of the fiberglass frames . When the vessel is ready to be unpacked, rings can be attached to the ends of the wires, which then can be used to cut through the polyurethane. Not having had the foresight to do this, we had no choice but to "reexcavate" the boat. A timber framework went up 270 Chapter 9 over the pool, and upon it we stretched the tarpaulin. Under its shade we set to work again. To the sounds of modern Israeli hit songs, emanating from a ghetto blaster that Moshele had wired to the wooden staging overhead, we began to chip away at the polyurethane. Each person brought the cutting device of his or her choosing. One volunteer showed up with an electric turkey carver, but we deemed it too dangerous. Polyurethane contains cyanide, which might have · been given off as a gas if heated by the friction of an electrical knife. I preferred my stiletto dive knife. Edna attached a pruning hook at right angles to a staff for use on those "hard-to-reach" corners. She looked like the Grim Reaper in blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Excavating inside the pool, it turned out, was far more difficult than excavating in the field. Isaac had left only minimal space, with a view to saving the volume of conservation materials in the future. This resulted in our barely being able to maneuver around the boat and her casing. The original excitement and publicity over the boat's discovery had died down somewhat. Thinking that · the boat had been "saved," many of our volunteers had gone back to their regular work, leaving us with fewer helpers. The process of removing the polyurethane progressed excruciatingly slowly. There were occasional moments of humor to lighten the burden of working in those hot, cramped quarters. We kept referring to the removal process as the second excavation of the boat. We thus made a big fuss over the first "artifact" we discovered: a sharp-ended excavation hammer. Someone using it to remove mud from inside the hull had left it there, and it had become incorporated into the polyurethane during the spraying process. As we chipped away at the polyurethane, it rapidly clogged up the spaces on either side of the boat. Several of the women in the excavation took charge of this problem. They would walk around the "excavators" collecting all the loose pieces of polyurethane in large plastic garbage bags. We lovingly called them our "bag ladies." Good Night, Sleeping Beauty 275 "By the time we get water into this pool," someone commented, "the boat will be so dry she will probably float." No one laughed. It was too near the truth. Waterlogged wood doesn' t float-unless it has begun to dry out. The previous day Oma had placed a bucket of water in a corner of the pool. In it we placed the small wood chips that occasionally came loose from the boat, primarily from the edges of the uppermost strakes, which were badly fragmented from having been in contact with the air. I had picked up one of these wood fragments and put it in the bucket. It floated . I weighed it down with a stone and did not tell anyone else. Photographs that Danny took during those difficult days show all of us, without exception, with looks of utter exhaustion on our faces . We have haggard faces, bleary eyes, and sagging spirits. It was obvious that we were losing the battle to keep the boat from drying out. I felt like a surgeon who, after hours of effort, was about to lose his patient on the operating table. Time was running out. Although nowhere near the number which had appeared each day at the excavation, visitors still continued to show up at the pool, brought by their tourist guides. One day an elderly lady politely asked me if she might be permitted to touch the boat. 'Tm sorry," I explained to her, ''but the boat is very fragile. We can't let people handle it." "Have you touched the boat?" she asked me. "Yes, I have." "Well, then, can I touch you?" I cannot begin to describe how uncomfortable that request made me feel. Our response to the imminent danger the boat faced was to double our efforts . Working around the clock, we reached the saturation point of exhaustion. Each day more and more of the Good Night, Sleeping Beauty 279 "Could you please explain something to me?" she asked. "If I can." "How did you get the boat through the doors?" So it goes. Submerging the boat in water was only a first-aid treatment; rather like giving CPR to a crash victim before the doctor arrives. It prevented the boat's timbers from drying out, but it was a temporary measure until the actual conservation treatment could be initiated. Water is loaded with bacteria, which feed on organic materials such as wood. Oma reminded us that it was the portion of the boat that had been buried in mud that had been preserved, while the parts exposed to air and to water had disintegrated with time. In waterlogged wood, the cells are deteriorated, and most of the cellulose and hemicellulose (the internal material of the cells) have been replaced by water. Conservation treatment replaces the water in the wood cells with a substitute material, which then supports them, removing the danger of the cells' collapsing. In this way the weakened wood is strengthened and the dimensions of the timbers are stabilized. The boat, though fragile, was intact and provided a unique opportunity for future study and exhibition. It was imperative that the technique chosen for conservation be safe and tested. The process had to avoid damaging the boat and also preserve its surface qualities and marks. Furthermore, it had to be affordable. There are a variety of methods for conserving waterlogged wood. Some are very good, some less so. Oma had weighed each one in turn. There are methods calling for freeze-drying or the impregnation of resins. One new method calls for impregnating the wood with sugar. Each of these has its advantages and disadvantages. Freeze-drying, the same process used in producing instant coffee, requires preimpregnation with a synthetic wax, followed by extraction of the water in the wood through vacuum freezing. 282 Chapter 9 removed from its bath, air-dried, cleaned of excess PEG on the surface, and finally prepared for study and display. I had chosen Oma to be in charge of the boat's conservation because I felt that she was the person best suited to the task. From the day I called her, after my first visit to the boat, there was no question in my mind that she was the right person. She had supported my efforts by caring for and protecting the boat throughout its excavation and transport. For the conservation part of the project, my role was not to lead but to support Oma in her decisions. This role led to some interesting experiences. Soon after we had got the boat underwater, I received an invitation from U.S. Ambassador Pickering asking if I would be willing to give a slide presentation about the excavation at his residence in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzlia Pituach for the embassy staff and their families. I was delighted to do so. I considered it a small way to thank the Ambassador and the embassy for assisting us with Dick's flight at such short notice. I immediately accepted the invitation. This was to be the first public presentation ever given on the boat. The room was packed. After the Ambassador's introduction, Avi Eitan was called upon to say a few words. In gracious and modest terms, Avi expressed the appreciation of the Israel Department of Antiquities and the Museum for the immediate assistance that the embassy had given us. He also emphasized the problems that lay ahead. Then it was my turn. I truly enjoyed giving that lecture. I felt a very strong desire to tell the story of what had taken place. I remember becoming engrossed in the slides, almost slipping back inside them during the lecture. At the conclusion of the presentation, I was exhausted, as if I had physically relived the experiences we had undergone in the past few weeks. I concluded the lecture by explaining Orna's plans for conserving the boat. As financing the PEG had been heavily on my 286 Chapter 9 One day I overheard two tourists discussing the operation. "You see," said one, pointing to the saw, "they are using a special saw that stops as soon as it touches the wood. That way no harm can come to the wood. Isn't that right, young man?" "Yes ma'am, that's right." I didn't have the heart to tell her the truth. While we prepared the boat for conservation, the water became infested with little red wormlike larvae. Oma, concerned that they might damage the boat, had them examined in a laboratory. They turned out to be a type of mosquito larvae, not threatening to wood or people, but extremely unpleasant companions with whom to share a pool. Oma considered adding an insecticide to the water but feared harming those of us working in the pool. With no apparent solution to the problem, we moved about in the shallow water tending to the boat, while surreptitiously batting at the water around our legs. One morning we arrived to find three large goldfish swimming about in the pool. Moshele, having observed our discomfiture, had come up with the ecologically correct answer. He had stocked the pool with fish, which merrily went about gobbling up every last little crawly creature. Within days the water was clear, and the goldfish, who seemed highly contented, swam idly around the pool. We became quite fond of our new companions. Oma and I were sitting in her small conservation laboratory in the basement of the Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, which is located on Mount Scopus overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. She had just finished preparing a steaming hot finjan (a small metal vessel, with handle and spout) of Turkish coffee on her Bunsen burner and was pouring it into two small handleless cups on a small brass tray decorated with Arabic calligraphy. "I need to go to England," Oma had told me a week earlier. She had a tremendous responsibility in conserving the boat. One of her main problems was the number of different types of wood that had been used in the boat's construction. Each wood Good Night, Sleeping Beauty 287 had a different density and variety of characteristics. Oma had come up with the theoretical solution that would provide a viable answer to dealing with all of the different types of timbers. Before committing the boat to years of conservation that would ultimately require a great deal in funding, work hours, equipment, and electricity, she wanted to be absolutely sure that all bases were covered, all contingencies considered, and that this was the best possible method of conserving the boat. Oma was hesitant to begin the process before she had had the opportunity to discuss her ideas with other conservation experts. "No conservator in Israel has ever before tried to do anything on this scale," she had explained. "I need to go to England to confer with experts at the Greenwich Maritime Museum. They have considerable experience in the use of PEG. I would like to discuss the effectiveness of various molecular weights of PEG, the amount of time required for maximum treatment, the best temperatures to achieve, and the type of heating systems I could use. I need some feedback." I had broached the subject with Avi, hoping that the Department might foot the bill, but I was not surprised to find that a trip for Oma to England was not high on the list of the Department of Antiquities' allocations. The Department would not pay for the trip. Funding for Oma' s stay in England, I knew, would be available though friends at the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society, an English organization that promotes archaeology in Israel. But where could I find the money for her plane ticket? I drew a blank. "I promise that I will get you to England," I told Oma. "In your dreams," she said and continued to sip her coffee. Maybe so. I honestly had no idea how I was going to keep my promise. I just knew that I would keep it. Several days later, Providence came calling in the form of my ringing telephone. Have you ever noticed how sometimes you meet someone who drifts in and out of your life, making no perceptible mark on it? And then months-or years-later he or she suddenly reappears and in some way helps you move along Good Night, Sleeping Beauty 289 same time frame. The ship must have sunk, therefore, roughly 2% millennia earlier, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. I speculated to myself later as I swam back to shore: Perhaps she was a Phoenician ship, the first one ever found! Double caramba! The Ma' agan Michael shipwreck, as that vessel has come to be known today, was subsequently excavated by the Center of Maritime Studies of Haifa University by Dr. Elisha Linder and a student of Dick Steffy's, Jay Rosloff. She probably is not Phoenician. However, that is another story. Since our mutual adventure in the sea, Ami and I had not been in contact. Meanwhile, he had gone to work for a public relations firm. In the course of his work, he had met Oma Fraser, the editor of IsraEl Al, the in-flight magazine for the national air carrier. When she heard that Ami was a diver, Oma told him how much she would like to have an article for her publication dealing with that "Jesus boat" that had been so prominent in the media. "You wouldn't happen to know someone who could write a piece on that boat, do you?" she asked Ami. "Ain ba'ayot [No problem]," Ami told her. "I know the guy who excavated it." That evening, over the telephone, he gave me Oma Fraser's number. Calling her the next day, I agreed to write the article for her. But only on one condition. In place of the normal writer's fee, she had to provide me with a round-trip ticket to England for Oma Cohen. Oma Fraser agreed. "OK, now when do you need the article?" I asked. "Yesterday." I sat down that afternoon and wrote the article out longhand. It was the first manuscript I wrote about the boat. I titled it- forgive me, but I couldn't resist it-"Raiders of the Lost Boat." The piece appeared in the next edition of IsraEI Al, accompanied by a beautiful cover photo by Danny showing the boat about to be floated onto the lifting pallet opposite the Allon Museum. Oma Cohen read it on her way to England. Good Night, Sleeping Beauty 293 "Yes, I'm fine. Karen, you won't believe what I saw." "What was it?" "Early this morning I was driving from Safed [in the mountains overlooking the Kinneret on the northwest where Oma' s parents live] down to the Kinneret to work. It was still dark outside and it was pouring rain. I looked down at the Kinneret, and I saw a rainbow over the lake. It was night out. And it was raining. And there was a rainbow. I almost ran off the road. I had to stop the car to get out and look at it. I got soaked standing there in the pouring rain just staring at it." "I guess Shelley isn't the only one who sees rainbows," Karen chuckled. "I guess not. I was so shocked I'm still shaking. I don't know if I should tell Shelley about it. I've never seen a rainbow at night. Have you ever seen one?" Oma never did bring herself to tell me about her rainbow. She let Karen do it. It seems that when you have something valuable, everybody wants it. Several museums vied for the opportunity to exhibit the boat. One enterprising museum director even called me up to clarify something. "I have just one question," he said. "How wide is the boat?" "Why on earth do you want to know that?" I asked. "I just want to make sure that we can get the boat through my museum' s door." "Oh." I gave him the measurement, said good-bye politely, and hung up. Finally. In 1988-nearly two years after the excavation-the heating and circulation system had been installed and was up and running. The first batch of PEG had arrived. All was in readiness to begin the conservation process. Oma introduced a 5 percent Chapter 10 Putting It All Together For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Luke 8:17 fter inviting contributions to the excavation report by experts in the various research categories, there remained the problem of putting all the pieces together into a coherent whole and attempting to determine how the boat fit into the context of its times. One of the main research issues to be addressed was comparing textual references to boats on the Sea of Galilee in the first century AD with the boat we had just excavated. Was the Kinneret boat representative of the type of boat used by the Apostles and disciples of Jesus as described in the Gospels? Was she the same type of boat as those used by the Jews against the Romans? What . manner of inquiry, I wondered, would answer these questions? Revealing the past, like many forms of problem solving, rarely follows a linear progression. Rather, discovery comes in fits and starts, in dead ends and reversals, in intuitions and hidden revelations. Just when one has given up ever reaching a resolution to an ancient enigma, one hears a knocking at an inner door, and a quiet voice asks, "Oh, by the way, is this what you' ve been looking for?" A One of the most memorable episodes for me during the entire excavation happened the day of Dick's first daylight encounter with the boat. For most of the morning, he had been busily poking here and measuring there. When he had probed enough to form a first impression of the hull, he came over to where I was supervising some volunteers and showed me a drawing he had made. "This is what I think the boat would have looked like," he told me. 301 306 Chapter 10 Late one hot and humid summer evening, I taped a fresh sheet of white paper to my refrigerator, placed my slide projector on a kitchen chair, and projected one of Danny's slides onto the paper. Kneeling on the cool linoleum floor in front of the refrigerator, with a pencil I began to trace each stone used in creating the illustration of the boat. Occasionally I interposed my body between the slide projector and the "screen," intentionally blocking the projection, to make sure I hadn't left out any lines. I began from the top of the depiction, first drawing in the rigging and tackle, then the hull. Finally, I reached the oars. By this time my back was killing me. I filled in the oar nearest the bow. It had originally consisted of a single line of ten stones, nine of which were light brown and one, apparently a repair, white. The oar was angled in a manner that made it clear that the artist intended to depict it at the end of the stroke, when the oar was pulled up against the rower's chest. The second oar was slanted in the same manner. It now contained nine stones, but there was a gap in the center of the line large enough for two additional stones. I turned to the third, aftmost oar. Starting at its top, I began to trace slowly and monotonously the roughly square-shaped stones. As I was doing this, the lower part of the oar was projected onto the back of my hand and wrist, so I did not notice anything unusual about it until I was actually drawing in the final stones. Only then did I realize that the third oar, unlike the previous two, widened at the bottom into two courses of mosaic stones. "Wait a minute. That's not a rowing oar,'' I said aloud to myself. "It's a quarter rudder!" Moments later, the ramifications sank in. "Ohmygod!" The fact that the aftermost oar was a steering oar meant that the prototype of the boat depicted in the mosaic would have had only four rowers, as Dick had predicted for our boat. That meant the boat in the mosaic had had the same crew as our boat and therefore must have been of the same size and type as our boat. Such a vessel would have required a minimum of four rowers and a helmsman or captain at the quarter rudder: a crew of five men. Putting It All Together 307 I began to draw the boat, stone by stone .. Crew sizes. Of course. It was obvious. In fact, it was so obvious that my first thought was why I hadn't thought of that before. Crew size was a possible means of determining the relationship between the boats mentioned in the Gospels, those in the Battle of Migdal, and our boat. Now, if it were only possible to determine how many crewmen were in the boats mentioned in the written record. 308 Chapter 10 I ran to my study, nearly tripping over the slide projector's electrical cord on the way, and yanked my Bible off the bookshelf. From my recent readings through the Gospels, I knew that there were references to only two specific boats. One boat had belonged to Zebedee, the father of James and John; the other was owned by Simon Peter. Quickly flipping the pages to the Gospel of Mark, I read: 1 As he [Jesus] went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee with the hired men, and followed him. Let's see. Grabbing a ballpoint pen and some scratch paper I translated the verses into an equation: 1 [Zebedee] + 1 [James] + 1 [John] + 2 (or more?) ["hired men"] = (5 + ?) men Gottcha. A minimum crew of five men. Zebedee's boat was apparently the same type as ours. I quickly flipped the pages to the description of fishing in John: 2 Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing." They said to him, "We will go with you." They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Presumably the boat referred to here is the one that belonged to Simon Peter.3 Another equation: 1 [Simon Peter] + 1 [Thomas called the Twin] + 1 [Nathanael] + 2 [sons of Zebedee] + 2 ["other disciples"] = 7-man crew Again, a crew of five or more. As more hands were needed to man the nets than just the rowing and steering crew, the two additional men do not change the conclusion that Simon Peter's boat was also the same type of boat. Putting It All Together 315 If we assume that Josephus's boat also contained a skeleton crew, then we arrive at the following calculation: 1 [Josephus] + 7 [soldiers] + (2 + ?) ["friends"] + 4 [sailors] + 1 [helmsman / captain] = 15 ( + ?) men Were there any doubt that these boats could support at least fifteen men, Josephus confirmed this calculation in his reference to the transportation of Tiberian captives in a single boat: 11 Ten citizens, the principal men of Tiberias, came down; these he took on board one of the vessels and carried out to sea. As this boat must have had a crew, we may conclude: + 4 [sailors] + 1 [helmsman/ captain] = 15 men 10 [principal men of Tiberias] While the numbers of "230" boats and "2,600" prisoners in Josephus' s story may be exaggerations, the ratio of boats to prisoners is compatible with 11to12 hostages per vessel. Including the five-man crews, this would have resulted in a total of 16or17 men in each boat. I wondered if our boat could have supported the weight of 15 men. This led immediately to the question of how much men of the Galilee weighed at the time that the boat lived her life. I put this question to Joe Zias. Joe, an expatriate American, is a curator for the Antiquities Authority who specializes in physical anthropology, the study of human remains. "We can' t weigh anybody who lived then," Joe told me with a smile, "but I probably could calculate the weight based on the average height of skeletons of Galilean males. There's a general ratio between height and weight. Give me a while, and I'll work on it." Several weeks later I went to visit Joe in his office, which is located in the bowels of the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. To get to the basement, I took the freight elevator, a relic left over from the British Mandatory period that looks like a refugee from an Agatha Christie novel. The lift is a metal cage with sliding 318 Chapter 10 Josephus emphasized that among the reasons for the defeat of the Jews was that their boats were "small and built for piracy." 12 Now piracy on a relatively small inland lake makes little sense. One of the prime requirements for pirates to be successful in their nefarious vocation is the ability to escape. In the Kinneret there was really no where to hide. Pirates simply could not escape detection. Furthermore, what could they possibly want on the Sea of Galilee? There were no cargo-laden merchantmen here. What would they steal? Pottery going to market? A fisherman's catch? "This is a stickup. Put your hands in the air and give me all the fish you've got!" I don't think so. And yet Josephus was certainly familiar with the lake from his experiences on and around it during his stint as governor of the Galilee. What then did he have in mind? Josephus may be implying that the Jewish boats had something in common with vessels used by pirates on the Mediterranean. Indeed, pirates often used small craft for coastal piracy-to sneak up to a merchant ship slumbering at anchor in the night, for example.13 To escape pursuit by larger craft and to facilitate beaching, a shallow draft on such boats was an absolute necessity. This allowed them to escape to shallow waters where pursuing vessels of deeper draft could not follow. Josephus does not say that the Jewish boats were used for piracy, only that they were made for piracy. The hull of the Kinneret boat may explain his strange comment. One of the elements that had impressed Dick while he was studying the boat was the tight "turn of the bilge." This is the imaginary line along which a vessel's bottom joins its sides. Dick's section drawing across the hull of the Kinneret boat illustrates how boxlike the hull actually is. "This is the tightest turn of the bilge that I have ever seen on a mortise-and-tenon-built vessel," Dick had told me during the excavation. "Any tighter than this, and the tenons would be sticking out of the sides of the strakes." 324 Chapter 10 century. These boats were used primarily for fishing with the large and heavy seine net. During his visit to the Kinneret in 1869, MacGregor recorded that the largest boats that he saw on the lake were about 30 feet (9.15 meters) long with a breadth of about 7 feet (2.14 meters). This is almost identical to the presumed length of the Kinneret boat before her bow assembly and sternpost were removed. Intuitively, MacGregor concluded that these proportions were the limits for larger-sized boats on the Sea of Galilee in antiquity. He writes: 17 The boats now used in the lake by the fishers are all about the same size, rowing five oars, but very clumsy ones, and with a very slow stoke. Generally only three oars were in use, and I much regret that I failed to remark whether there was a rudder, but I think there was none. Their build is not on bad lines, and rather "ship-shape," with a flat floor, likely to be a good sea-boat, sharp and rising at both ends, somewhat resembling the Maltese. The timbers are close and in short pieces, the planks "carve! built," and daubed with plenty of bitumen which is readily obtained here. The upper streak [sic] of the boat is covered with coarse canvas, which adheres to the bitumen, and keeps it from sticking to the crew when they lean upon it. The waist is deep, and there are no stem sheets, but a sort of stage aft. As there appears to be no reason to suppose that the Turks should have altered, or at any rate improved, the Jewish boat on the lake, it is impossible not to regard the modem fishers' boat of Galilee with great interest and to people it at once with an Apostolic crew. In the initial part of the twentieth century the British scholar James Hornell carried out numerous studies on indigenous craft that still continued in use in maritime cultures throughout the world. His meticulous studies, published in scholarly journals such as Antiquity, Man, and The Mariner's Mirror, and in his book Water Transport, are a treasure of ethnological information which is valuable in helping us understand ancient watercraft, their ac- 326 Chapter 10 coutrements, and their uses. This is particularly true as many of the types of watercraft that Hornell observed no longer exist. Director of Fisheries in Madras for the British Mandatory government in the 1930s, Hornell was asked to carry out a survey of fishing in Mandatory Palestine. The result of this study was a slim volume in which Hornell reported on his findings .18 During his visit to the Sea of Galilee, Hornell did not miss the opportunity to examine the boats that plied the Kinneret. He noted that the boats he found were identical to those on the country's Mediterranean coast. None of the boats was built locally, but in Haifa or Beirut. The largest type of boat that Hornell found on the Kinneret was called an arabiyeh and was used primarily for seine-net fishing. The largest arabiyeh seen by Hornell on the lake was 24 feet (7.2 meters) long with a beam of 8 feet (2.4 meters). It was a double-ended boat, one that had decks fore and aft, but it was open amidships. The deck located in the stern was the larger of the two and was needed for transporting the large and heavy seine net. The "calming of the storm" is one of the most cherished Gospel stories for Christians. Although all three of the Synoptic Gospels include a description of it, the Gospel of Mark includes two tantalizing bits of information that are lacking in both Matthew and Luke: But he was in the stern, asleep on the pillow. (Mark 4:38) Why sleep in the stern? Although several interpretations have been put forward in the past, the Kinneret boat supplies an obvious and logical one. The Kinneret boat, like the later arabiyeh boats, was apparently built for fishing with the large and heavy seine net. Boats used in this service required a stern deck on which to place the net. And although the Kinneret boat did not survive up to the level of a deck, it must have had one in the stern originally. Now, sleeping upon the stern deck would have been precar- Putting It All Together 331 In most translations the word is rendered as "rafts." In the Odyssey, however, Homer used the same term to describe the vessel that Odysseus built to escape from the island of the enchantress Circe. 21 Professor Lionel Casson, one of the foremost experts in the study of ancient ships, has shown that Homer was actually describing the shell-first construction of a hull with mortise-and-tenon joints. 22 Furthermore, Anson had pointed out to me that Herodotus, the fifth-century sc Greek historian, used the same term to describe the pontoon bridge built by the Persian king Darius over the Bosporus.23 This was constructed of a platform supported by boats. Vegetius described the use of these floating bridges in his discussion on how the army should cross rivers: 24 But it has been found better for an army to carry around with it on carts "single timbers" [Greek: monoxyli], which are rather shallow canoes, hollowed out of single trunks, very light because of the type and thinness of the wood. Planks and iron nails are also kept with them in readiness. The bridge thus speedily constructed, tied together by ropes which should be kept for the purpose, provides the solidarity of a masonry arch in quick time. This type of bridgework is commonly seen in art depicting Roman armies crossing water obstacles. I gleaned as much as possible concerning the identity of these schedia that Vespasian had built for the battle and derived the following list of attributes for them: • • • • • They were made of wood. They were built by carpenters. They were completed in a relatively short time. They could carry quantities of soldiers. They were more massive and held more men than the Jewish boats. • The Romans were able to leap into the Jewish boats; thus the caprails of the sxedia were either level with or higher than the Jewish boats. Chapter 11 Like a Rock We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul. . . Hebrews 6:19 hips and boats, whether they sail the deep blue sea or the shallow waters of an inland lake, require the ability to hold a firm position in the water. This is the purpose of an anchor, which is to a vessel what brakes are to a car. True, on rivers and canals anchors are unnecessary. A simple stake, hammered into the shore with a mallet will suffice to secure the boat. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians, primarily river navigators, though certainly no slouches as seafarers (they sailed on both the Mediterranean and the Red Seas), never did create a term for anchor even though they obviously used anchors on their seagoing ships. Egyptian stone anchors have been found along the Egyptian Red Sea coast and on Levantine shores. Today most anchors are made of metal and are attached to a ship with chains. But when humans first went down to the sea, metals were unknown. Stones, on the other hand, were readily available and could hold a ship by virtue of their weight alone. And so it was that the first anchors were made of stone, or of stone with ancillary wooden parts, and were attached to a boat with cables of rope, called hawsers in nautical parlance. In some parts of the world, such as the Indian Ocean, stone anchors continue in use to this day. At first, a heavy rock used as an anchor may have simply been wrapped with rope or withies, which could be used to attach a rope. Eventually, however, seafarers realized that if they found a stone of the proper weight with a hole in it, they could tie the hawser directly to the anchor. The next stage was to chisel or to drill a hole through the anchor stone for the hawser. Anchors had been used in our boat during her lifetime of work on the lake. Of that we can be certain. No anchors were S 335 340 Chapter 11 anchor stock. Such stones often have a slit or notch cut down their center to facilitate attachment to the wooden anchor shank, just like Moshele's second anchor stone. One important difference-at least for an archaeologistbetween other types of stone anchors and the killicks is that a stone used in a killick need not have any piercings. Indeed, a simple fieldstone of suitable shape and weight can be employed. This causes problems for the archaeologist, for once the wood has decomposed, there is nothing to identify the stone as ever having served as part of an anchoring device. Sometimes the most persuasive argument for the use of killicks by a maritime culture is not finding other types of anchors. During his survey in the Kinneret with the Rob Roy, MacGregor recorded a stone at Capernaum shaped like "an oval, about four feet long and two feet broad .... In the middle is a deep cut a foot broad, and from two to six inches deep, leaving a sort of neck between two building ends." 1 The sketch which MacGregor appended to this description is reminiscent of the stone stocks of wooden anchors found in the Mediterranean. Since that time, additional examples of grooved stones suitable for killicks have been found in the Kinneret. It was apparently such prototypes which led, toward the end of the seventh century sc, to the development of the full-fledged stone-stocked wooden anchor. Stone stocks flourished for only a short time, however. Stone is brittle, so it is a particularly unsuitable material from which to make a long and narrow anchor stock. As an anchor fell into the sea or was dragged along the bottom, stone stocks frequently broke. Indeed, their remains are often found on the Mediterranean seabed. One can well imagine the chagrin of an ancient mariner watching helplessly as his trusty wooden anchor, sans stock, floated to the surface while the winds and the waves tossed his ship onto a lee shore. You might say that, with stone stocks, the ancient mariners had the right idea for an anchor, but they were using the wrong material. The stone stock was soon replaced by a wooden stock, into which had been poured four separate pieces of molten lead . With the increasing availability of lead-a by-product of the 350 Chapter 11 It is not clear how long the boat was in use on the lake. Boats, like cars, eventually wear out. The repairs noted by Dick on our boat indicate a long work life. But how long is long? This question is difficult to answer. The only parallel material that I have found for the lifetime of boats in freshwater environments in the Middle East is a reference to a type of boat called a Dongola markab, which was described by James Hornell.2 Writing in 1940, he notes that these vessels, employed on the Nile between the Third and Fourth Cataracts, had a normal life expectancy of about eight to nine years. Mendel tells me that he knows of some wooden boats that are still working after 20 years of service. But these must be exceptional. Thus, if we assign to the Kinneret boat a work life of a decade or two between 100 BC and AD 67, we would presumably not be far from the mark. It is now time to address two remaining questions. Both the life of Jesus and the Battle of Migdal fell within the time range to which I had assigned the boat. I had also been able to demonstrate 'beyond a reasonable doubt" that our boat was of the same large type employed by the disciples of Jesus and mentioned in the Gospels. It was on this same type of vessel that the Jews had done battle with the Romans on the lake. Could our specific boat have taken part in one or the other of these episodes? Could this boat have been the one owned by the Zebedee family? Or by Simon Peter? At our present stage of knowledge, the answer to that questions is this: Yes, it could have, but for the present at least, there is no archaeological evidence to support such an identification. How probable is it that this specific boat is one of the two mentioned in the Gospels? To answer that question, we must first determine how many boats might have existed on the lake during the 170-year period to which the boat is assigned. Needless to say, this is not easy. 354 Chapter 11 ber, a Roman general leading three legions in the field could easily appropriate any timber available, whether it was stored up at a boatyard or had to be cut down from the groves of fruit and nut trees that grew in the Valley of Gennesaret. Such definitely was not the case for the average Sea of Galilee fisherman . Two and a half years after the completion of the excavation, in the summer of 1988, I delivered the entire manuscript to Ayala Sussmann, the editor of 'Atiqot. After much editorial TLC, the report was published in 1990 as Volume 19 of the English series under the title The Excavations of an Ancient Boat in the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret). Many questions raised by the boat's discovery remain to be answered. And if Dick was only half-joking, many more will be raised after conservation is completed and the reconstruction phase begins. In looking at the completed excavation report, however, I was surprised to discover how much we had learned . Even though many of the pieces of the puzzle are missing, it is still possible to paint a coherent picture of the boat's history. That story follows. Chapter 12 Once upon a Boat Phantom ships are on the sea, the dead of twenty centuries come forth from the tombs, and in the dirges of the night wind the songs of old forgotten ages find utterance again . From The Innocents Abroad MARK TwAIN 1 bout 2,000 years ago, give or take a century, a master boatwright set about building a boat on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He had considerable experience in his trade. Perhaps he had gained it building ships on the Mediterranean or had learned it from someone, possibly a relative, who had. In any event, he brought to his task on these inland shores a knowledge and an understanding of Mediterranean hull construction techniques and traditions. He may have built the vessel at a boatyard located north of Tarichaeae-Migdal Nunya, although there probably were other boat-building locations on the lake. It is unlikely that he built the · ship on speculation; this boat's creation presupposes a need. We would probably not be incorrect in assuming a transaction between the boat builder and a customer. One important consideration in determining the vessel's price was the quality of the materials used in its construction. Whether by choice or, more probably due to a lack thereof, the future owner chose to purchase a vessel in which many of the timbers used in its construction had already seen better days in the hulls of other boats and ships. In fact, many of the timbers were of such poor quality that they would have been tossed aside as worthless on the Mediterranean coast. But here, on the inland lake, they would suffice. Alternately, wood may have been so scarce that a condition of "wood starvation" existed in the region. We have no evidence of such a situation, however, in other sources. Indeed, Vespasian was able to commandeer "an abundance of wood" near or at this boatyard for use in the construction of his attack fleet prior to the Battle of Migdal. A 357 362 Chapter 12 the boat or to assist in fishing operations, the family head would hire additional workers. These perhaps received a percentage of the catch as in-kind payment for their work. Presumably the family was Jewish. At the time the boat was built and lived her life, the Kinneret could well be termed a "Jewish" lake, virtually surrounded on all sides by predominantly Jewish settlements; many of these had their own small fishermen's harbors to accommodate the numerous fishing boats that plied the lake's waters. Only on her souilieastern flank, where the cities of Hippos (Sussita) and Gadara (Hammat Gader) were situated, was the lake bordered by pagans. Upon receiving their "new-old" vessel from the boatwright, the owner and his family rigged it with the necessary accoutrements. To sail, the boat would require oars, quarter rudders, a mast, a yard, a sail, and rigging. They furnished it with four rowing oars and a pair of steering oars which hung at the quarters. A full crew would have consisted of five men: four rowers and a helmsman or captain. The boat's captain need not have been her owner, although in the case of the boat which concerns us this would have been likely. It is not clear if the boatwright supplied the rigging, oars, and sail. Perhaps the buyer had saved these items from an earlier boat, or had purchased them from a chandler. We can only conjecture about these accoutrements, for none of them have come down to us. The boat's anchor would have been little more than an unshaped stone of limestone or basalt, which was pierced with a hole to take the hawser. Alternately, the anchoring device may have been of composite construction, a killick-like device fashioned out of a tree crook with a heavy, roughly hewn stone employed to weigh it down. The single square sail was carried from a mast, which was stepped into the small mast step, actually little more than a chock. The mast was supported longitudinally by fore and aft stays and perhaps also by shrouds. The yard was raised and lowered by means of one or two halyards and was controlled by a pair of Once upon a Boat 363 Texas A&M University graduate student Bill Charlton puts the final touches on a 1:10 display model of a generic Sea of Galilee first-century AD fishing boat. braces attached to the extremities of the yards. The sail was probably made from pieces of linen sewn together. And if the vessel's hand-me-down hull is any indication, the boat's sail was also likely to have been of a dingy, oft-repaired patchwork design. The crew spread and took in the sail by working the brails. These ropes were attached to the foot of the sail and then rose vertically, perhaps through wooden rings sewn to the fore side of Once upon a Boat 365 was ideally suited to work with the seine nets, it could also have been employed with the other types of nets commonly used on the lake. Occasionally, a crew member or a passenger, seeking a place to rest, would crawl in beneath the stern deck, on the few loose boards that served as ceiling planking, and go to sleep. There, out of the way of the captain and crew, he might find some peace and quiet, as well as a certain measure of solitude in the darkened space. As he rested there, he would hear through the planks the sounds of the water gurgling and splashing against the hull as it cut through the lake's waters. Above him and about him, the boat and its rigging would creak, but this creaking would become a soft and welcome litany. Below him, bilge water would scurry back and forth through the limber holes. Perhaps a rough sandbag, kept in the boat for ballast, served as his pillow. The air might be a bit stale. The smell of fish would also permeate the air, but his nostrils would have been well accustomed to it. Loose scales left behind by previous catches were likely to be found clinging to his clothing. The Kinneret was a vital source of food, and fishing was a significant industry for the settlements that grew up around the lake. Although we are probably right in inferring that fishing was the main source of the family's income, any other services which the boat could render, and which could put a few more coins into the family purse, were not to be ignored. And as the lake was an important transportation hub, currency could be made in other ways also. Thus, on any given day, the boat might be found transporting supplies-ceramics from the pottery shops at Kfar Hananya, for example, or foodstuffs-between the cities and the settlements that surrounded the lake. At other times, the boat may have served as a waterborne taxi, transporting paying passengers from one side of the Kinneret to the other, as well as along her shores. At such times, if business was good, as many as ten passengers could be taken on board at once. Together with a full fiveman crew, however, the boat would have been quite crowded. Of course, the passengers themselves may have helped to row. In 368 Chapter 12 events is correct, the boat was floated out into the lake, perhaps to keep her from blocking the shore. The buoyancy of the remaining timbers assisted the wreckers in moving the hull into the water, even though it was now full of water, which rushed in through the open stern and stern. Whether by intent or by chance, the boat's bow came to rest on a loose tree trunk, a common enough commodity along the shores of the Kinneret. Perhaps the stump was intended to facilitate future access should additional parts be desired for use. If so, this never took place. Instead, the tree stump continued to support the hull at the bow, while the stern settled into the mud. The boat, perhaps nudged by the current, came to rest with a distinct list to port. In time, the hull was forgotten by those ashore. Soon the lower parts of the hull became enveloped in a soft, silty mud. As time passed, the soft sediment became hard-packed clay, supporting a hull which progressively weakened as its timbers became waterlogged. The hull rested in the anaerobic embrace of the Kinneret's bed, which limited greatly the ability of microorganisms to continue their ongoing attack on the hull. The upper parts of the remaining hull-the strakes and futtocks which shared the misfortune of remaining above the sediment-slowly succumbed to the ravages of time. They disintegrated in the oxygen-rich water, leaving behind only small piles of the iron nails that had previously held them together. At some point after the boat's arrival on the lake bed, an arrowhead, perhaps shot from a bow during a bloody battle on the lake, came to rest inside the boat and was entombed with the hull. The region where the boat rested subsequently continued to serve as a center for boat building. Additional hull fragments, and perhaps hulls, joined the boat and became buried in the mud alongside her. Time passed. This could be measured first in years, then in centuries, and finally in millennia. Armies clashed. Kingdoms and empires rose and fell. Cultures came and went. Battles and wars were won and lost. Continents were discovered, rediscovered, Epilogue The cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked goodnatured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect. "Cheshire Puss," she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. "Come, it's pleased so far," thought Alice, and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a great deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where-" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat. "-so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation. "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the cat, "if you only walk long enough." From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland LEWIS CARROLL1 ome might feel a certain sense of disappointment in the inability to provide a definitive identification for the boat. While this might be a natural and understandable response, we are forced to think further. Although the boat cannot be linked scientifically to the Gospel stories or the Battle of Migdal, she speaks volumes on both these subjects. She is, as best we can ascertain, an anonymous traveler from the past: a generic Sea of Galilee fishing boat that lived her humble life-one of effort and toil-on the lake during an era of great events. Though this is the last chapter of the book, in truth, I have barely begun to tell the story. The previous pages dealt with a view of the past, imparted to us by the boat. There is, however, another view, one that faces the future. In 1988, I was invited to the United Kingdom to deliver a series of slide lectures about the excavation. By that time, the boat had been in the pool at the Yigal Allon Centre for two years, submerged in plain water. This, remember, was merely first-aid treatment. Never far from my thoughts was the knowledge that those parts of the boat not covered by the lake's protective sediment had not survived. The conservation process needed to get under way as soon as possible, but it was far from clear how we would pay for the heating and circulation system, without which the PEG treatment could not begin. At Nitsa's request, Karen had spent considerable time and effort submitting grant proposals to numerous agencies for funding the boat's conservation. Our hopes especially rested on approval from a prominent foundation known for its interest in the conservation of antiquities. To our dismay, we were informed politely that the project did S 373 376 Epilogue continually renew itself rather than remaining static. The research would include the final study of the boat's construction, the construction of an authentically built 1:1 scale replica-like the Kyrenia II-of the boat for sea trials, the search and study of other ancient boats that surely exist beneath the Kinneret' s seabed, perhaps even some that took part in the Battle of Migdal. And that was only the beginning. When you know where you want to go, it is a lot easier to get there. I was excited. In those short scribbled notes, there was a target at which to aim. As the plane began its descent and I stowed my notes, I decided that upon my return to Israel, I would plant the seeds for the boat museum. The museum would not happen overnight. We were in for the long haul. After the plane landed in Dublin, I took a taxi to the university. The cabby stopped at the university's main gate. I paid the fare, added a tip, collected my bags, and got out. Only then did I notice that I was standing opposite a large, wall-sized advertisement. The notice sang the praises of a wellknown and large company that manufactures electronic equipment. In no uncertain terms, it promised a steady stream of remarkable products to make life easier and more pleasant. But it was the large multicolored rainbow cascading down the center of the announcement that caught my attention-as rainbows tend to do these days. As I followed the rainbow down, my eyes came to rest on the short one-liner written across it. Chills ran up and down my spine. In letters big enough to be read at night under the light of a new moon it said: YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET "What the . . . ?" I said out loud to myself, oblivious of the fact that I was standing on a busy thoroughfare. Passers-by stared at me strangely. I barely noticed. And then, with a chuckle, I said, "Well, actually, why not?" and, shouldering my bag, I headed for the university. Postscripts On February 15th, 2000, the boat completed her voyage through eternity. She took to the air for a third time as she was safely moved into her final "Fair Havens"-a specially-built museum wing of the Yigal Allon Centre. The boat as she appears today, lying on her stainless steel support structure . 2000 O n February 15th, 2000, after months of diligent preparation by Oma, Nitsa, and a small army of other experts and workers, the boat was moved successfully to a new wing of the Yigal Allon Museum, which will be her permanent home. On the next day, Wednesday, February 16th, the fourteenth anniversary of the day on which we began the excavation, Oma began the "third excavation" -the disassembling of the boat's packaging. (Oma swears the date was not intentional!) The pavilion for the boat will soon contain a state-of-the-art exhibition: As I write these words artisans are completing the displays that will relate the boat's story, both ancient and modern. And perhaps it is fitting that this particular boat, discovered in 1986, finally arrived in her permanent home-her "Fair Havens"-at the start of the new millennium. I guess dreams can come true. Clearly, much has happened since I completed the manuscript for this book, more than five years ago. When we left her in 1994, the boat slumbered gently in her solution of polyethylene glycol (PEG) under Orna's watchful eyes. Although the vessel had disappeared from view, many visitors-pilgrims, tourists, and Israelis-continued to visit a boat that they could not see. Finally, with the second stage of the PEG treatment completed, in June of 1995 Oma oversaw the careful final removal of the PEG from the pool. This was a long, arduous process, and a potentially dangerous one for the boat, but she emerged glistening from the bath, her timbers strengthened. 378 380 Postscript Program and guided by expert ship constructors; they would follow the original construction techniques-down to the last mortise-and-tenon joint-and employ the same types of timber used in the original boat. With the hull, its rigging and geai: ready, Kinneret II would be shipped to the Sea of Galilee for sea trials. Once this research has been completed the replica would be presented to Israel as a gift, to be exhibited at the Yigal Allon Centre together with the original boat to give visitors a real-life impression of what she would have looked like in her heyday. Alternately, the replica could become the centerpiece of a traveling exhibit: a roving goodwill ambassador for Israel. The boat has changed the face of tourism on the Sea of Galilee. Today, in place of the metal boats that once carried pilgrims to the holy sites, a fleet of wooden planked boats, named after the Apostles, sails her serene waters. And while these boats are not accurate copies of the boat, they do convey a feeling of past times that had been lacking on the lake previously. The boat's significance for understanding, and for experiencing, the days of Jesus' Ministry on the Sea of Galilee appears to be taking on meaning with Christians worldwide. I am hopeful that Jews, too, will hear the boat as she tells of an ancient battle that was, until her discovery, remembered almost solely in Josephus's faint whispers. In a very real sense, this fragile craft has brought that story back to life. As part of this Jewish heritage I would like to see the Israeli Defense Forces have its swearing-in ceremony for naval cadets take place at the boat, in memory of, and out of respect for, that first desperate Jewish naval engagement. There can be little doubt, in my view, that in the coming years the boat, showcased in a setting that can finally do her justice, will become a major attraction for those curious about our shared Judea-Christian past. And for each of those visitors the boat, undoubtedly, will weave her very own special brand of magic. Shelley Wachsmann College Station, TX March 2000 2009 It has been over eight years since I wrote the postscript to the second edi- tion of this book. Much has happened since then. The boat, now safely ensconced in its permanent exhibition hall at the Yigal Allon Museum, has become a major tourist attraction. Tens of thousands of visitors come to see the boat each year. In fact, since 1995, over 760,000 people have viewed the boat. They come from all over the world . On my last visit to the boat I was pleasantly surprised to see visitors from India. To support this influx of visitors, an entire tourist industry has developed around the boat, from the wooden boats that now carry visitors and pilgrims on the Kinneret to the Yigal Allon museum store. Study on the boat continues unabated. Two important publications appeared in 2005. One is Oma's final report on the boat's conservation process, up to and including the boat's transfer from its pool to its present exhibition hall. 1 A second article, by Ella, discusses the types of wood used in the boat's construction and repairs .2 For the original report, discussed above on pages 251 - 255, Ella had studied samples from fortyone timbers. For Ella's final report Oma removed samples from an additional 139 samples for a total identification of 180 timbers. In the initial study Ella had been able to identify seven types of wood. The additional samples allowed Ella to identify five more-Carob (Ceratonia siliqua), Sycamore (Ficus Sycomorus), Laurel (Laurus nobilis), Terebinth (Pistacia atlantica), Plane (Platanus orientalis)- for a truly remarkable total of twelve types of wood.3 Of particular interest is Ella's discovery that the keel was made of not two, but three(!) timbers, each part prepared from a different type of wood. The bow section of the keel was made of Cedar (Cedrus), the central portion from Carob, and the aft portion from Siddar/Christ-Thom (Ziziphus spina-christi) The numerous types of woods used in her construction and repairs are a constant fascination to visitors who come to see the boat. It was one of these visitors who gave Nitsa the idea to plant a row of trees on the left side of the esplanade as one approaches the museum from the parking Notes Prologue 1. SFAC: 92. Chapter t . The Boat That Made Rainbows 1. Bibby 1969:31. 2. See Rabinowitz 1994. Chapter 2. A Sea of Legends 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Twain 1870:507. The Jewish War III:516-518. MacGregor 1870:113. MacGregor 1870:249. MacGregor 1870:253. Twain 1870:512. Vilnay 1978:126-127. Vilnay 1970:414-415. Albright and Mendenhall 1942; Su kenik 1947. Barton 1940:217-218; Ullendorff 1962:342-343; Margalit 1976:172-177; 1981. 11. Margalit 1981:134. 383 Notes 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 387 Reich 1991 Meshorer 1984-1985, 46--47, 56, No. 56,PL 15:56. Macgregor 1870:357- 358. Hornell 1935. MacGregor 1870:358 Th e Jewish War II :614-6 19; Life ofJos ephus XV Il- XVIII:87- 96 Odyssey 5.244-257. Casson 1971 :217- 219 . Herodotus, History IV:88,97. Vegetius lll:7. Chapter 11 . like a Rock I. 2. 3. 4. MacGregor 1870:341. Hornell 1940: 127. John 6:23- 24. John I :35-43 Chapter 12 . Once upon a Boat I. Twain 1870:512- 513. Epilogue 1. Annotated Alice: 87- 88. Postscripts I. 2. 3. Cohen 2005. Werker 2005. On the biblical connections of these trees see Zohary 1982: 63 (Carob), 68- 69 (Sycamore), 120 (Laurel), 110- 111 (Terebinth), 129 (Plane). Glossary I. The nautical terms are derived from Steffy 1994:266- 298 and Hocker, in press. Bibliography Josephus Quotes from Josephus are taken from the following translations: The Jewish War Josephus: The Jewish War. Ed. G. Cornfeld. Grand Rapids. 1982 Life of Josephus Josephus I: The Life and Against Apion. Trans. H . St. J. Thackeray. (Loeb Classical Library.) Cambridge. 1976. Prologue SFAC Stories from Ancient Canaan . Ed. and trans. M. D. Coogan. Philadelphia. 1978. Chapter I. The Boat That Made Rainbows Bibby, G., 1969. Looking for Di/mun . New York. Rabinowitz, A., 1994. Inside the Israel Antiquities Authority. Biblical Archaeology Review 20/2:40-45. 389 393 Bibliography Gracey, M., 1986. The Armies of the Judean Client Kings. In DRBE, pp. 311-328. Grant, M., 1970. The Roman Forum . London. Hart, H. St. J., 1952. Judaea and Rome: The Official Commentary. Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., 3/ 2:172-198, pis. I-VI. Jones, B. W., 1984. The Emperor Titus. London. Meshorer, Y., 1982. Ancient Jewish Coins I-II. New York. Payne, R., 1962. The Roman Triumph. London. Rajak, T., 1983. Josephus: The Historian and His Society. Philadelphia. Schurer, E., ·1973. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (1 75 B.C.- A. D. 135) I-III. New English version rev. and ed. G. Vennes and F. Millar. Edinburgh. Suetonius, Caius Suetonius Tranquil/us: The Twelve Caesars. Trans. R. Graves. Revised with an Introduction by M. Grant. Harmondsworth. (Reprint.) Thackeray, H. St. J., 1967. Josephus: The Man and the Historian . New York. Vegetius Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science. Trans. with notes by N. P. Milner. Liverpool. 1993. Williamson, G. A., 1964. The World oflosephus. Boston. Chapter 7. The Impossible We Do Immediately; Miracles Take a Little Longer Annotated Alice The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll. Illus. J. Tennie!. Introduction and notes by M. Gardiner. New York. 1960. Chapter 8. A Pride of Scholars Adan-Bayewitz, D., 1990. The Pottery. In: Kinneret Boat: 89-96. Adan-Bayewitz, D., 1993. Common Pottery in Roman Galilee. Ramat Gan. Amos, E., and D. Syon (Friedman), 1990. Photomosaics of the Boat's Interior. In: Kinneret Boat: 57-64. Carmi, Y., 1990. Radiocarbon Dating of the Boat. In: Kinneret Boat:127-128. Feig, N., 1990. Burial Caves at Nazareth.' Atiqot (Hebrew Series) 10:67-79. (In Hebrew.) Bibliography 396 Nun, M. , 1993. Ancient Stone Anchors and Net Sinkers from the Sea of Galilee. Ein Gev. Wachsmann, S., 1990. The Date of the Boat. In : Kinn eret Boat: 129- 130. Chapter 12. Once Upon a Boat Twain, M. 1870. The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City's Pleasure Excursions to Europe and the Holy Land; With Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents as Th ey Appeared to th e Author, San Franc isco. Epilogue Annotated Alice The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Class, by Lewis Carroll. Illus. J. Tennie!. In troduction and notes by M. Gardiner. New York. 1960. Postscripts Cohen, 0 ., 2005. Conservation of the Ancient Boat from the Sea of Ga lilee. Atiqot 50: 2 19-232. Werker, E., 2005. Identifi cation of the Wood in the Ancient Boat from the Sea of Galilee. Atiqot 50: 233-236. Zohary, M. , 1982. Plants of the Bible. Cambridge. Glossary Hocker, F., in press. Glossary of Nautical terms. In : S. Wachsmann , Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bron:e Age Levant. College Station, TX. Steffy, J. R., 1994. Wooden Ship Building and the /111erpretation of Shipwrecks. College Station, TX. Glossary I have attempted throughout this book to avoid technical terms when possible. Some terminology is unavoidable, however, particularly when one is talking about details of ship and boat construction.1This glossary will hopefully aid in clarifying those terms. Adz Woodworking tool with the blade set at right angles to the handle. Aft Toward the stern. Akkadian Semitic language written in a cuneiform script. Amidships In the middle of the vessel. Amphora Ceramic jar, used in antiquity primarily for the transport of liquids. Anchor Any device employed to hold a vessel to the sea floor by means of a cable. Anchor shank The shaft of an anchor. Anchor stock A weighted crosspiece designed to cant the anchor so that one of its arms will dig into the seabed. Aramaic The predominant (Semitic) language spoken by Jews in their homeland during the Second Temple period. Auxilia Foreign troops that augmented the Roman legions. Backstay Line running from the mast aft. Ballast Heavy material placed low in a vessel to improve its stability. 397 400 Glossary cid king Antiochus IV and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC after it had been desecrated. Mast Spar used to support a sail and associated rigging. Mast step Wooden block placed above the keel into which the mast is stepped, or secured. Merchantman Trading ship. Mortise-and-tenon joinery One of several methods for attaching planks or timbers to each other by means of a projecting piece that is fitted into one or more cavities (mortises) of corresponding size. Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) A technique that allows the "fingerprinting" of certain type of artifacts. Pharisees One of the three main forms of first-century AD Judaism, from which modern Judaism evolved. Pithos (pl. pithoi) Large amphora. Port (a) Harbor; (b) left. Procurator Roman official governing a minor province such as Judea. Quarter The after part of a vessel's sides. Quarter rudder Rudder affixed to the side of a hull at the stern. Rabbet Groove or cut made in a piece of timber so that the edges of another piece can be fitted into it to form a tight join. Rigging General term for the lines (ropes) used in conjunction with masts, yards, and sails. Sadducees One of the three main forms of first-century AD Judaism; the priestly class which ceased to exist following the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Scarf An overlapping joint used to connect two planks or timbers without increasing their dimensions. Second Holy Temple The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Holy Temple, built by Solomon in Jerusalem, and exiled the Jews to Babylonia in 586 BC. King Cyrus of Persia, who defeated the Babylonians, allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem in 538 BC, after which they built the Second Temple. The Second Temple was repeatedly enlarged, 402 Glossary d I Rigging (brailed rig) and general terms pertaining to ships and boats. Key: ayard; b- backstay; c-forestay; d-braces; e-brails; f-halyard; g-mast; hshrouds; i-sheets; j-quarter; k-quarter rudder; I-starboard (right); m- port (left); n-bow; o-amidships; p-stern. Glossary 403 m Nautical terms for a vessel's parts. Key: a-cutwater stern; b-caprail; c-strake; d-futtock; e-half-frame; f-floor timber; g-rnast step; h-keel; i-garboard strakes; j-diagonal scarf; k-hook scarf; I-rabbet (apparently not present on the Galilee Boat's now-missing stern and sternpost); m-stempost; n-deck. A metal fixture at the bow of an oared warship which transformed the vessel into a rowed torpedo used in ramming enemy ships with the intention of incapacitating them; the nautical weapon par excellence in the Mediterranean from about 900 BC to the sixth-century AD. Yard A spar employed to spread a sail. Zealots Jewish sect that advocated armed opposition to all foreign rule. Waterline ram Illustration Credits Acknowledgments p. xiv. Photo courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority. Chapter I. The Boat That Made Rainbows p. 17. Drawing: D. Johnson. Courtesy Institute of Nautical Archaeology. p. 18. Drawing: D. Johnson. Courtesy Institute of Nautical Archaeology. p. 19. Drawing: R. Reich. Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority. p. 20. Photo: S. Wachsmann. Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority. p. 23. Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority. p. 24. Courtesy Israel Antiquities Authority. Chapter 2 . A Sea of Legend p. 43. From MacGregor 1870:287. p. 45. From MacGregor 1870:255. p. 46. From MacGregor 1870:frontispiece. p. 48. From Twain 1870:497. 405 Index Abiluma, 53 Abu Shusha, 242 Acco. See Akko-Ptolomais Adzes, 359, 360 defined, 397 Aegean Sea, iim Aft, defined, 397 Afula, 8m, 242 Against Apion Uosephus), 192 Age of boat. See Dating of boat Agrippa I, 174 Agrippa II, 174, 176, 180, 182, 183, 187, 253,310,322 Akkadian, 51 defined, 397 Akko-Ptolomais, 8m, 173, 175, 250 Aleppo pine, 253-254, 255, 366 Alexander the Great, 238 Alexandria, iim, 172 Aliturus, 189 Allon, Yigal, 13, 254 Allon Centre (Museum), 13, 197, 201, 219, 223, 225, 254, 263, 264,373 Alurninumfoil,89,204,285 Am ha'aretz, 112 Amidships, 22, 204, 285, 297, 322, 326, 360, 361, 364, 402fig. defined, 397 Amino acids, 255 Amnum. See St. Peter's fish Amphora, 18, 289 defined, 397 Anat, 51-53 Anchors, 335-347, 362 defined, 397 Anchor shank, 340 defined, 397 Anchor stock, 340-343 defined, 397 Andrew (Apostle), 352 Andromeda, 327 Anglo-Israel Achaeological Society, 287 Antifungal agents, 292 Antioch, iim, 173 Antiochus IV, 187 Antiquities of the Jews Uosephus), 192 Antiquity, 324 Ants, 295 Apostles, 301, 314, 317. See also individual apostles Aqhat, 51-53 Arabiyeh, 326, 329 Arabs, 55-56 Aramic,defined,397 Archers, 177-178, 187-188 Argonauts ship, 323 · Arrowheads, 183, 187-188, 234, 352, 368 drawing of, 184 Arrows, 181, 183, 185 Artifacts, 28, 65, 347-348. See also specific types initial discovery of, 22-24 typology of, 232 Ashkelon, 8m, 239 Asophon, 250 Assembly l , 160, 161 Assembly 2, 160, 162 Athlit harbor, 8m, 125 Athlit Ram, 30, 156 'A tiqot, 354 Attanu-Purlianni, 50-51 Auxilia, defined, 397 Avigad, Nahman, 242 41 t 424 University of Pennsylvania, 128 Uranium, 248 Valerianus, 175-176 Valley of Gennesaret, 354 Valley of Ginosar (Biqat Ginosar), lOm, 40, 174, 178 Vasa, 197, 280 Vegetius, 178, 180, 331 Vespasian, 129, 131, 175-188, 190-191, 192,332,353-354,357 Vesuvius, 130m Victory, 374 Video, 298 Viking ships, 374 Volunteers, 75-77 Wale, 321 Waterline ram, 30, 125-126 Waterlogged wood, 84, 275, 279, 368 Watertightness, 152, 361 Water Transport, 324 Weather, 120-121 Wedges, 358, 367 Weight, of ancient Galileans, 315-317 Weight anchors, 336 Weitzmann Institute of Science, 247 Wick of lamp, 236, 241 Willow, 254, 366 Index Winds, 303, 364 Wood dehydration of, 263, 271-275 evaporation from, 292 types of in boat, 147, 251-255, 281, 286-287 waterlogged, 84, 275, 279, 368 Wooden anchors, 340 Wooden stock anchors, 340-342 Work life of boats, 350, 351, 366 Yam Kinneret. See Sea of Galilee Yannai, Alexander, 250-251 Yard, 362 Yassiada, iim Yassiada shipwreck, 128, 160, 163 Yatpan, 52, 53 Yavneh (Jamnia), 172 Yibush ha-bitzot, 44 Yigal Allon Centre. See Allon Centre Yorn Kippur War, 100 Zealots, 190 Zebedee,308, 309, 350,351 Zionism, 35 Ziziphus spina-christi. See Christ thorn tree