Nefertiti and the Uluburun Shipwreck

Or, the Life Aquatic with Gold Scarabs... Around 1325 BCE (estimates vary) a vessel sank near the cape of Uluburun, Turkey. The cargo was immense: twenty tonnes of goods, including copper, ivory, ornamental objects, spices, and more. Amid the finds, a curious item came to light: a gold scarab, bearing the name Neferneferuaten Nefertiti... What was a Nefertiti scarab doing on a trade ship, far from Egypt? And what do the finds tell us about the ship, its crew, and ancient trade?

The Uluburun Shipwreck:

• Date: c.1325 BCE (estimated).
• Cultures: Multiple, including Egyptian, Canaanite, Syrian, and Mycenaean.
• Ship destination: Possibly the Aegean, western Anatolia, or even the Balkans.
• Website: www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com.
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• Logo image: Divers working on the Uluburun wreck, via The Institute of Nautical Archaeology website.
• Catalogue of objects in Beyond Babylon, 2008. Free pdf from MMA.
• Image gallery at The Institute of Nautical Archaeology website.
• Artefacts in the Bodrum museum, on Flickr.com.
• Miscellaneous items, at Wikimedia.
• A replica of the ship, Uluburun II, at Underwater360.
• A lecture by Cemal Pulak, one of the lead excavators. YouTube.

Select Bibliography:

• G. Bass et al., ‘The Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun: 1986 Campaign’, American Journal of Archaeology 93 (1989), 1–29.
• C. M. Monroe, ‘Sunk Costs at Late Bronze Age Uluburun’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357 (2010), 19–33.
• C. Pulak, ‘Analysis of the Weight Assemblages from the Late Bronze Age Shipwrecks at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya, Turkey, Volume I’, Unpublished PhD. Thesis, Texas A&M University (1996).
• C. Pulak, ‘The Uluburun Shipwreck: An Overview’, The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 27 (1998), 188–224.
• C. Pulak, ‘The Uluburun Shipwreck and Late Bronze Age Trade’, in Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. (2008), 289–310. Book available free, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• C. Pulak, ‘Uluburun Shipwreck’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean (2012), 863—876.
• C. Pulak, lecture on YouTube.
• J. Weinstein, ‘The Bronze Age Shipwreck at Ulu Burun: 1986 Campaign, Part 3: The Gold Scarab of Nefertiti from Ulu Burun: Its Implications for Egyptian History and Egyptian-Aegean Relations’, American Journal of Archaeology 93 (1989), 17–29.

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