listen to part of a lecture in an archeology class. So in our last class, we looked at Bronze Age trade routes. And remember when we say Bronze Age, we\'re talking about the period from about 5000 years ago until about 2500 years ago. And when we discussed trade routes, we looked solely at land routes. Today, we\'ll concentrate on sea routes. And first, I want to talk about a shipwreck. It\'s called the uluburoon shipwreck. The uluburoon shipwreck was discovered in 1982 off the coast of Turkey. It was a large ship capable of carrying about 20 tons of goods, and since 1984 archeologists have been studying the ship and its cargo and the cargo. Well, the cargo included things like copper, tin glass from Egypt, pottery. There was ivory from Africa. There was also a small amount of gold and silver. But for an archeologist, the richest part of the shipwreck wasn\'t the items, but what we\'ve been able to learn from the items. So for example, the copper and tin. Copper and tin together made up the largest part of the ship\'s cargo. This was unworked metal raw materials being shipped to a place where it would be processed into bronze and then worked into finished goods like tools and weapons. The tin is particularly interesting because there\'s no source of tin near the Mediterranean. We\'re pretty sure that the copper came from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which was the source of most Bronze Age copper. But the tin might have come from Central Asia. Of all the cargo on the ulubarune ship, the tin probably traveled the farthest. And this sort of confirms our ideas about the general flow of raw materials from an east to west direction from the Middle East and Central Asia to Greece and areas farther north after copper and tin the largest part of the cargo was made up of a substance called terebinth. Terebinth is a resin, sort of like tree sap that hardens. And there were jars containing about half a ton of it aboard the ship finding such a large quantity in fact, the largest quantity ever found points to a large scale commercial trade in this product Terebinth had two uses at the time The primary use was as an incense So it was used in religious ceremonies And since terebinth has antibacterial properties it\'s possible that it was added to wine as a preservative Now there might have been some informal trading going on during this period, but what we\'re seeing here is evidence of a state controlled, highly regulated trade network. So for example, among the artifacts recovered were sets of balance weights If you\'re a merchant the ability to weigh out goods in standardized amounts is essential for conducting trade in an official system It\'s your most important tool And the balance weights aboard the ship Well, it\'s the largest collection ever found, 149 objects used for precise measuring of tiny amounts of gold and silver,as well as everyday trade goods. Looking at the weights recovered from the Ulu baron ship, we can tell there were probably four merchants aboard. Another clue that tells us about the merchants is weapons. One large and very ornate sword was found that probably belonged to the chief merchant. Three smaller swords were found as well. And judging by the style of the weights and the swords, as well as some other personal belongings found in the shipwreck, we believe that the merchants were most likely from Greece or Cyprus. So when we consider all of these fines together that it was a merchant vessel with a very diverse cargo there are a number of social and economic implications of this So the first is that the finds originated from a very, very large, interconnected area. We\'re talking about Egypt and Ethiopia in Africa as well as Central Asia, the Middle East Turkey, Greece and Italy. This whole area was connected in a sort of exchange network. And evidence of this complex trade in raw materials is something that is very rarely seen on land where the archeological finds are usually finished.