Ahmose

No, I haven't made any model yet, I just like nautical history/archaeology.

Well, there are several surviving examples of Bronze age fully-sewn ships outside of Egypt: The Ferriby boats from Yorkshire; the Dover boat, which is really impressive; the Zambratija shipwreck in Croatia; also wooden planks belonging to sewn boats which however aren't as well preserved have been found at Goldcliff and Caldicot. There's also the Brigg "raft", which dates from the very beginning of the Iron Age. It is considered to have been a shallow boat with a flat bottom rather than a raft, despite its name. The Novilara stele you posted is more recent than all of the boats I've mentioned, dating roughly to the late 7th or early 6th century BC, and it depicts an Adriatic ship belonging to the Piceni in all likelihood. Like the Bronze Age Zambratija ship, if I had to guess, the Novilara ships would've also been sewn-plank boats, after all, sewn-planks boats were still built in the Adriatic well into the Roman period, see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331018044_Ancient_Mediterranean_Sewn-Boat_Traditions A full-scale replica of a Novilar ship has already been made: https://www.veniceboats.com/it-forum-novilara.htm

"In the past, fragments of Magan boats have surfaced on the island of Umm an-Nar" They were actually fragments of bitumen that beared impressions of reed and wooden boats, but not actually fragments of boats, see: https://www.ancientportsantiques.com/wp-content/uploads/Documents/PLACES/IndOc-Gulf/Gulf-Connan2005.pdf (Page 23) Anyway, the overall outline of the ship seems to be roughly based on the bitumen models from Ur in Iraq, in fact, there are no depictions of boats from Magan-Oman itself, there are, however, several depictions of boats from the land of Dilmun in Bahrain and Qatar, much closer to Oman than Ur is, and they look very different from the Ur boats: the boats of Dilmun are usually much more "angular" and one of the ends of the boats is usually bifurcated, for instance. So this reconstruction is very speculative, to say the least.

Congratulations on your model, it looks quite believable and that new figurehead is beautiful. Unfortunately the few Late Helladic depictions of ships that we have are all very poorly detailed, but to be frank there are even fewer depictions of Levantine ships from that time, if it weren't for the Egyptians we'd be almost clueless about the Eastern Mediterranean ships of the period, with only a part of the Uuburun ship's hull to go by, so of course in making a model of a Bronze Age ship there's always a great degree of speculation. One thing that seems evident to me is that sewn-plank construction was very widespread, ethnographically it's been observed almost all over the world. In the Bronze Age specifically it's attested not only in Egypt, but also in the Zambratija shipwreck off the coast of Croatia, and in Britain at several sites. So, pretty much, in all known Bronze Age sites where significant remains of boats have been found, excluding the Uluburun ship, or, of course, log boats. Even almost 7 centuries after the Bronze Age collapse, the two archaic shipwrecks from Marseille known as Jules-Verne 7 and 9, were still basically sewn ships, even if tenons and dowels were present. The same applies to the Cala Sant Vicenc¸ wreck, which is also thought to have been built in Marseille. Even the Mazarrón I boat, discovered off the coast of South Eastern Spain, while Phoenician (although likely built in the Western Mediterranean), dispays sewn seams, in addition to pegged mortise-and-tenon joints. As for Late Bronze Age commerce, I was talking about the Uluburun shipwreck specifically, but I'm personally of the idea that the Mycenaeans had a huge role in the commerce of the time, especially in that between the Western-Central Mediterranean and the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, while Adriatic Italy, South Italy, Sardinia and Sicily yielded a lot of Mycenaean materials, only a small quantity of Bronze Age Canaanite vases has been found in these places. I am convinced that before the Early Iron Age the Canaanites didn't have a significant role in the West, if they visited it before then, they did so only sporadically. The only "Levantines", if they can be described as such, to have had a significant role in the Western Mediterranean back then, in my opinion, were the Cypriots. Not only for the influence of their metallurgy on the West, or for the great quantity of Cypriot oxhide ingots found in Sardinia (greater than anywhere else, excluding the shipwrecks themselves), but also for the fact that their pottery is also found in significant quantities in the West, albeit not nearly as much as the Mycenaean pottery is. Not only that, but Cypro-Minoan signs have been found etched in the Canaanite amphorae discovered at Cannatello in Sicily. Another opinion that I hold is that some of the natives of the Western Mediterranean were also sailing during the Late Bronze Age. Certainly, they were sailing along the short-medium range regional trade networks, which had more or less existed since the Neolithic. The natives of Sicily not only had colonized far off islands such as Lampedusa, the Maltese archipelago, Pantelleria, or Ustica, but they had fortified the latter three too during the Bronze Age. Another Western group that seems to have been significantly active during the Late Bronze Age were the Nuragic Sardinians, lately their pottery has come up in a considerable number of sites, as far as Ugarit. In one of them, the aforementioned site of Canatello in Sicily, Nuragic pottery has been found in great numbers, greater than those of any other kind of pottery except for the native Sicilian type, and significantly it's both imported pottery and locally made with typical Nuragic shapes and techniques, which suggests that a group of Sardinians lived there for some time. There's also undeniable evidence that the inhabitants of the Italian Peninsula traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean. Handmade pottery with typical Peninsular Italian shapes has been found at several sites in the Aegean, such as Chania in Crete, and as far as Tell Kazel in Syria. Note that we're talking about locally made pottery, implying the presence of "Italian" crafstmen in the Eastern Mediterranean. Whether they made the trip in their own vessels or in Aegean ones is however not possible to say with certainty.

I wonder why Wachsmann insists that the sea peoples' ships depicted at Medinet Habu are galleys, considering that oars are never seen, only side rudders are present, unlike the Egyptian warships in the same relief which are all oared. The Uluburun ship probably wasn't a helladic vessel. Most of the cargo originated from the Levant and Cyprus, the wood used was cedar wood, typical of the Levant and Cyprus, not of Greece, plus even the jawbone of a mouse found on board was that of a species typical of Syria, the Mycenaean objects on board were only a small minority of the total. All these clues combined together hint at the ship having been Levantine. Of course a few Mycenaean passengers might've been on board, it's not impossible, but most of the crew was probably Levantine, as well as the shipwright who built it.