Underrepresented Riches from the Sea

In the Late Bronze Age, fish and molluscs played an important role in the diet and the economy of Eastern Mediterranean coastal societies. Fish-roe cakes and dried splits feature in the list of goods traded over long distances, while textiles coloured with the purple dye obtained from murex shells were considered among the most luxurious items of their time and would continue to be so for centuries to come. Accordingly, the ancient textual and iconographic sources deal with these final products as objects of value, in terms of international gift exchanges and temple donations. However, despite their undeniable importance, marine faunal resources rarely surface in the discourse of those who profited from them. Surprisingly few ancient sources explicitly deal with either fish or molluscs, nor are the activities related to their procurement and processing described in much detail, if at all. This chapter aims at investigating the ancient conceptualisation of these resources by combining analysis of the archaeological remains with textual and iconographical evidence and addresses the question as to why these riches from the sea were consistently underrepresented in the sources.