The Wreck and the Promissory Note
The Islamic Golden AgeA Ship Stitched Together
In 1998, fishermen diving for sea cucumbers in the Gelasa Strait, off Belitung Island in Indonesia, found a low mound under seventeen metres of water. It was ceramic, and under the ceramic was a ship. What made the hull extraordinary was that it held no iron. The planks had been drilled and lashed together with cordage — the sewn-plank technique of the western Indian Ocean, not the nailed carpentry of Chinese yards. Reconstructions put the vessel near eighteen metres long and six across. Its timbers were mixed: African Afzelia, Indian teak, rosewood. The maritime archaeologist Michael Flecker, who documented the site, judged it an Arab vessel; others argue some species point east, leaving the building yard genuinely open.
Sixty Thousand Bowls
Two seasons of salvage brought up around 60,000 objects, and most were cheap. Some 57,500 pieces came from the Changsha kilns of Hunan, mostly painted bowls, stacked by the hundred inside big stoneware jars that worked as ninth-century shipping containers. One bowl carries an incised date — the sixteenth day of the seventh month of the second year of the Baoli reign, or 826 — which fixes the earliest the ship can have sailed. With the cheap ware rode the exceptional: an octagonal gold cup, the largest Tang gold cup known, silver flasks, bronze mirrors, and three blue-and-white dishes from the Gongxian kilns, the earliest intact Chinese blue-and-white so far known. This was not court gift exchange. It was mass manufacture for a market an ocean away.
How the Evidence Came Up
No archaeologist dug this wreck. Indonesia licensed a German commercial firm, Seabed Explorations, which raised the cargo across 1998 and 1999 with a monsoon break in between, during which the exposed site was looted. Conservation of the objects was careful; the first season's recording was not up to archaeological standard, and in 2005 the collection was sold as one lot to a Singapore buyer for a reported thirty-two million dollars. In 2011 the Smithsonian cancelled a planned Washington showing after three American archaeological associations and several of its own research units objected that exhibiting salvaged material rewards the practice. Both sides have a case: the cargo survives, and questions a controlled dig would have settled are now unanswerable.
The Note at the Desert's Edge
The other road ran overland. In 951 the geographer Ibn Hawqal reached Sijilmasa, on the Sahara's northern edge — the furthest south his travels can be documented. He describes a sakk — a written instrument of debt — for 42,000 dinars, drawn up at Awdaghust, a town on the desert's southern rim usually identified with the ruins at Tegdaoust in Mauritania, and owed by a trader living there to a merchant back in Sijilmasa, both of them Sijilmasa men. He is often said to have gone to Awdaghust himself, but the whole case for that is this one sentence; Nehemia Levtzion argued in 1968 that it will not carry the claim. At the standard dinar of about 4.25 grams, that is roughly 180 kilograms of gold, existing as writing. He wrote that he had seen nothing comparable in the East, and that when he told the story in Iraq, Fars and Khurasan it was thought remarkable everywhere. The figure rests on his word alone; historians have read it both as a traveller's flourish and as ordinary for a trade exchanging West African gold for Saharan salt.
What Else the Ships Carried
Techniques travelled on this commercial plumbing, and they travelled every way at once. Paper came from China, though the loved story that Chinese prisoners taken at the Talas River in 751 taught papermaking to Samarkand appears only in al-Tha'alibi, writing some three centuries later — and paper seems to have been in use around Samarkand before that battle. Indian astronomy and Indian numerals reached Baghdad from Sind. Al-Khwarizmi's manual on reckoning with those numerals is lost in Arabic and survives in Latin, having carried on into Europe. Even the pleasing claim that cheque descends from sakk is unproven: the English word's documented trail runs through chess and the Exchequer. The network received at least as much as it sent.
Key Dates to Remember
- 751 — Battle of the Talas River. A tradition written down some three centuries later credits it with carrying papermaking west to Samarkand; the claim is doubted, and paper was likely there already.
- 826 — The date incised on a Changsha bowl in the Belitung cargo — the earliest the ship can have sailed, not necessarily the year it sank.
- c. 951 — Ibn Hawqal reaches Sijilmasa and reports a sakk recording a debt of 42,000 dinars, drawn up at Awdaghust, between two Sijilmasa merchants. Whether he travelled to Awdaghust himself is disputed.
- 1998 — Sea-cucumber divers find the wreck in the Gelasa Strait; Indonesia licenses a commercial firm to raise the cargo over two seasons.
- 2011 — The Smithsonian cancels its planned showing of the finds after archaeological bodies object to exhibiting commercially salvaged material.