The Israelites were content with their supply of incense, for when, in the tenth century BC, the king of Israel, Solomon, and his great ally Hiram, king of Tyre, launched their own expeditions down the Red Sea, the aim was to acquire gold rather than resins. Archaeologists argue, almost at fisticuffs, about how real the picture of Solomon in the books of Kings and Chronicles was; they differ profoundly about the reliability of the stories that record the foundation of the Davidic dynasty, though the latest evidence, from Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tell Qasile in Israel, shows that the biblical version is not all fantasy. Kings tells how Solomon put together a fleet of ships at a place called Etzion-Geber on the Gulf of Aqaba–Eilat, where Israel and Jordan share one of the two northern tips of the Red Sea. The fleet was accompanied by sailors familiar with the sea, supplied by King Hiram, who was presumably also closely involved in the building of these ships. They travelled down to Ophir, where they obtained 420 talents’ weight of gold, a massive amount (about sixteen tons), which they brought back to King Solomon.27 Soon after, following the famous visit to Jerusalem of the queen of Sheba (who came overland in a great camel caravan), more ships were sent south, described this time as King Hiram’s ships, which makes more sense. They brought gold, sandalwood and jewels from Ophir, and Solomon used the wood in the building both of the Temple in Jerusalem and of his palace next door. Some of the fine wood was even fashioned into harps and other stringed instruments, for ‘it was the best sandalwood anyone in Israel had ever seen’. Kings then asserts that at that time silver was of no special value, so everything was made of gold, even cups and dishes; after this expedition, he received 666 talents of gold, according to the Bible, whose authors were almost certainly conjuring a figure out of the air. ‘Solomon had many ships of Tarshish. Every three years he sent them out with Hiram’s ships to bring back gold, silver and ivory, as well as monkeys and peacocks [or baboons]’ – a passage that suggests silver was not quite so worthless after all.28 So much silver was being brought from Spain by the Phoenicians at this period that it is conceivable silver was not exactly worthless, but was at least easy to obtain and lacked prestige.
This was the time when the Phoenicians were beginning to create their outposts as far afield as Cádiz, even if their settlement there is not as old as the traditional date, 1104 BC (the term ‘Phoenician’ was invented by the Greeks and refers to Canaanite traders, whether by sea or by land, who thought of themselves more as natives of particular cities such as Tyre or Carthage than as a distinct people).29 The land rich in silver that they were visiting was called, in classical sources, Tartessos, and it corresponds to parts of southern Spain; it is often assumed that ‘Tarshish’, mentioned again and again in the Bible, was the same place, but the Bible is emphatic that Solomon’s ships were launched on the Red Sea, and the goods they brought back were not the produce of the Mediterranean.30 The phrase ‘ships of Tarshish’, rather like the term ‘argosy’ derived from the city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in early modern times, indicated any fleet of capacious sailing vessels able to breast the high seas. Hiram supplied Solomon with fine timber not just from distant Ophir but from the cedar forests of Lebanon in the hinterland of Tyre; and he sent other goods from all over the Phoenician trading world, as can be seen from the biblical account of how the Temple was built. The Red Sea was a subsidiary, but exotic, addition to the Phoenician trade routes that led across the sea to north Africa, Sardinia and Spain and overland to Assyria. In the sixth century the prophet Ezekiel poured verbal fire and brimstone on Hiram’s erstwhile capital, Tyre, and listed all the lands where Tyre traded – among the easiest to identify are Persia and Yavan (Ionia, that is, Greece), but also Arabia and Sheba, meaning Yemen or somewhere nearby.31
It is possible that the story of Solomon’s fleet is a projection backwards from later times, and it is even possible that a memory lingered of Queen Hatshepsut’s mission to Punt. Reading between the lines, one can see that Hiram played a bigger role than Solomon in this enterprise. But the gold of Ophir was not an illusion; even if the fleets of Ophir were not sailing in the tenth century, they aroused interest in the ninth. A curious passage in Kings, accompanied, as usual, by a much later recasting in Chronicles, tells how Jehosaphat, king of Judah (c.873–849 BC), ‘made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold, but they did not go, for they were wrecked at Etzion-Geber; then Ahaziah the son of Ahab said to Jehosaphat, let my servants go with your servants in the ships. But Jehosaphat was unwilling.’ Chronicles knew, or pretended to know, rather more than Kings, though the author was thoroughly confused between Ophir and Tarshish and offered a different chronology. Jehosaphat received quite a good press in the Bible; for instance, just before the decision was made to build the ships he had expelled the male temple prostitutes against whom the prophets inveighed. Ahaziah, on the other hand, aroused the ire of the authors of the Bible; he was the king of the rival northern kingdom of Israel, which came into existence after the death of Solomon; yet the two kings set aside past enmities, political and religious, and joined together in a pact, constructing a fleet of ships at Etzion-Geber bound for ‘Tarshish’. A mercantile consortium of this type, guaranteed by the ruler’s protection, was perfectly normal at this time. With the prospect of high profits but the danger of heavy losses, the royal court had the resources to bear the risk, and at the same time welcomed the opportunity to acquire gold and luxury goods.32
All went well until Jehosaphat, who tended to have trouble with the very many prophets telling him what to do, became the target of a certain Eliezer, son of Dodavahu, who strongly disapproved of the alliance with the ruler of Israel, a king still tainted with the Canaanite beliefs that his father Ahab had willingly tolerated. ‘And the ships were wrecked, so they were unable to go out to Tarshish.’ The exact meaning of the term vayishaberu, translated here as ‘wrecked’, is not clear, as it could mean ‘destroyed’ in all sorts of ways, and in the standard English translations the word ‘broken’ is used instead. But surely what the Bible points to is ships coming apart, whether because they were poorly constructed, or because they foundered in a storm or on the many reefs of the Red Sea. For even with Phoenician help it cannot have been easy to navigate a little-known sea, either for Hatshepsut’s fleet, or Solomon’s, or this one.
The obvious task of the archaeologists would be to locate Etzion-Geber. The meaning of the name is not much help; it may indicate something like ‘town of the cockerel’; this is not an area, like some in the Middle East, where fairly continuous occupation has preserved old names. However, since the Red Sea ends in a point, now marked by the modern Israeli city of Eilat and its older Jordanian neighbour, Aqaba, one should not have to seek too far. In 1938 the American archaeologist Nelson Glueck, much respected for his work on biblical sites, identified the hillock of Tell el-Kheleifeh, which stands just inside the Jordanian border with Israel, as the location of Etzion-Geber. He thought he had found tenth-century pottery there, of varied origin but dating roughly to King Solomon’s time; but more recent investigations have shown the pottery to be somewhat later, later even than King Jehosaphat, and dating to the eighth to early sixth centuries BC, around the time that the book of Kings was probably being pieced together. Still, it contains clues: some pieces are stamped with the inscription ‘belonging to Qaws’anal, servant of the king’, who may well be the king of Judah.33 Another discovery at this site was a potsherd with south Arabian writing, dating from the seventh century BC or a little later, so traffic up the Red Sea certainly existed. Others looking for Etzion-Geber have pointed to ‘Pharaoh’s island’ a little offshore, the site of a crusader castle; the island possesses an enclosed inner harbour of a type familiar from the Phoenician colonies. The Phoenicians preferred to found their trading settlements on offshore islands, as can be seen at Tyre itself and at Motya near Sicily or Cádiz beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. It would not have been odd to have done the same when they tried to set up a sea route down the Red Sea, whether in the tenth century BC or, more likely, in later centur
ies.34
All this may appear very tenuous, so the best piece has been saved up till last. The mound of Tell Qasile, now contained within the Land of Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, contains the quite substantial remains of a town that the Philistines established on the coast a little north of Jaffa when, arriving from Crete, Cyprus and the Aegean, these Mycenaean warriors migrated across the Mediterranean during the convulsions that saw the collapse of the great Bronze Age civilizations in the region. The town was still active in the eighth century BC, when someone threw away a fragment of a pot inscribed in early Hebrew: ‘the gold of Ophir to Beth-Horon, thirty shekels’.35 As for Beth-Horon, this was either a temple dedicated to the god Horon or a town a little way to the north-west of Jerusalem, in the West Bank, which – rather than lapsing into obscurity – is now the seat of one of the Israeli settlements that have become an obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
V
‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.’36 It has been seen that these three luxuries already shared their history 1,450 years before the birth of Jesus. About fifteen years ago, a colleague at Cambridge was returning from a visit to the Middle East around Christmas-time. When his luggage was inspected by British customs officials they asked him what he had bought, and he declared that he had been visiting Yemen and that his luggage contained frankincense and myrrh. ‘And gold as well, I suppose!’ came the ironic reply, and he was let through without further ado. These items were certainly the prestige products of the earliest trade routes to navigate down all, or most of, the Red Sea. On the other hand, preferences shifted. The Egyptians had a special interest in myrrh, though they were also great burners of incense; the Phoenicians and the Israelites were most interested in gold and had other sources for their incense. And, as in the case of the early navigators down the Persian Gulf, the expeditions to Punt and Ophir were punctuated by long periods of silence, during which, if Queen Hatshepsut is to be believed, contact was lost. Fits and starts characterized this maritime route even more than that of the Persian Gulf. Difficulties in navigating past the reefs and shoals of the Red Sea were one discouragement; the possibility of using land routes was another. One could reach Eritrea by river and land, and one could reach Arabia by following the coast of western Arabia overland. This traffic was rendered much easier by the domestication of the camel, whose date is disputed but may have been achieved, at least in parts of Arabia, by 1000 BC.37 Competition between land and sea routes to south Arabia and the facing shores of Africa would last many centuries. It was not always clear what comparative advantage a sea route offered those seeking frankincense and myrrh. The Red Sea would only be used intensively when ships regularly sailed south beyond the fabled lands of Punt, Sheba and Ophir into the wide expanses of the ocean, and that would only happen when the attractions of the Indies and of the shores of Africa became clear. In other words, the Red Sea flourished not for itself but as a passageway linking Egypt, and beyond that the Mediterranean, to Africa, India and even Malaya.
5
Cautious Pioneers
I
During the first millennium BC, political convulsions in the eastern Mediterranean and the competition between the rulers of Egypt and Babylonia for control of the lands inhabited by Canaanites and Israelites, Philistines and Phoenicians, turned the attention of the great powers away from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea; and it was this, perhaps, that enabled the navies of Solomon and Hiram to take over management of the sea route to Ophir. But there is little evidence in the literary sources, in surviving tablets, or in archaeological finds, for regular and intensive movement by merchant ships up and down these seas. This does not mean contact came to an end; but the emergence of a powerful Persian Empire, which by the sixth century had absorbed Iraq as well, brought land routes into the highlands of Iran to the fore, and Indian goods could also be obtained via the cross-country routes, while caravan traffic from south Arabia kept consumers supplied with frankincense and myrrh.
Following the conquest of Babylon by the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, Cyrus proclaimed himself ‘king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four corners of the world’, setting himself firmly within a 2,000-year-old tradition that had originated in Bronze Age Sumer. Under his successors the Persian Great Kings expanded their power as far as Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor, and were keen to take charge of Greece proper as well. Greeks visited the Persian court and were hungry for information about the vast empire that had come into being, embracing Egypt, Persia, Babylonia and Lydia in Asia Minor; but it was difficult to make sense of the information that trickled through to Ionia and the Aegean. Judging from the geographical writings that survive in whole or in part, the ancient Greeks were curious about the shape of Africa, Arabia and India; they were also excited by stories of bold explorers who had travelled for years around Arabia or even the whole continent of Africa. Around 500 BC the historian Hekataios, only known from fragments quoted by later writers, mentioned the Gulf and called it the Persikos kolpos, ‘Persian Gulf’, which revealed something about the new political order that had come into being. During the following century the Ionian polymath Herodotos described a remarkable sea voyage around the Arabian peninsula that took place around 510 BC, which suggests attempts were under way to re-establish routes from India to Arabia. Skylax, who came from Caria on what is now the Turkish coast, and was therefore a near neighbour of Herodotos, was commissioned by the Great King Darius Hystaspis to sail with a crew not from the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates but from the Indus, which he reached overland, and to head out into the ocean and westwards round Arabia and up the Red Sea. The voyage towards the port of Arsinoë near Suez took thirty months.1
There is no reason to be sceptical about Herodotos’ story. Darius was attempting something that was, potentially at any rate, revolutionary. He aimed to draw together the Indies and Egypt; and this meant that heavy engineering work was needed at the Egyptian end of the route too. Darius re-created the ancient channel through the delta that led up the Nile in one direction, and out to the Mediterranean in the other. This was not exactly a precursor of the Suez Canal, for the route ran westwards from the bitter lakes a little north of Suez; and the ancient Egyptians appear to have laid the groundwork. The new channel, Herodotos avers, was wide enough for two triremes to pass one another, and it took four days to navigate its length.2 Once this channel was in operation, shipping could, in theory at least, travel from the Egyptian city of Babylon (the present-day Cairo) all the way to the Indus River. An Egyptian inscription from this period found along the route of the canal boasted that ships could ‘sail directly from the Nile to Persia by way of Saba’, which would be south Arabia, and Herodotos saw this canal as part of a wider Persian scheme to conquer the whole vast area between India and Greece; nor was Darius’ ambition confined to the landmass, for he also aimed to become master of the seas: ‘after they had made their voyage round the coast, Darius both subdued the Indians and made use of this sea’.3
Since there was already a port at Arsinoë towards the top of the Gulf of Suez, and since south Arabian pottery was reaching the Gulf of Aqaba, was the Red Sea such a neglected area during the first millennium BC? It is always very risky to argue from silence, and Herodotos, for all his charm, is often unbelievable, and sometimes confessed that he did not really accept all he had been told. But the story of Skylax is backed up by the bigger, and more easily verifiable, story of Persian imperial ambitions. Less credible, with its description of harvests planted and reaped off the coast of Africa, is another tale Herodotos told about navigation out of the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean during the reign of the Pharaoh Necho, or Nekau (610–594 BC):
Libya [i.e. Africa] reveals that it is surrounded by sea, except for the part that borders on Asia; and as far as we know this originally was demonstrated
by Necho king of Egypt. Once he had finished digging the channel which leads from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf [i.e. Red Sea] he sent out Phoenicians aboard ships, commanding them to sail on and to return past the Pillars of Herakles into the Northern Sea [i.e. the Mediterranean] and from there to head to Egypt. The Phoenicians therefore set forth from the Red Sea and sailed through the Southern Sea [i.e. Indian Ocean]; and whenever autumn came, they would put to shore and sow the land, wherever in Libya they might happen to have arrived; and then they waited for the harvest. So, having reaped the grain, they would sail on, and after two years had passed, they turned through the Pillars of Herakles in the third year and arrived in Egypt. And they reported a thing which I cannot believe, but others might choose to believe, namely that in sailing round Libya they had the sun on their right hand.4
Herodotos also reported a voyage sent by a later Persian king, Xerxes (485–465 BC), which was supposed to go round Africa anti-clockwise. The captain, who this time was a Persian named Sataspes, had been sent on this expedition as an alternative to being impaled for raping or dishonouring a noblewoman; but he turned back somewhere in the Atlantic after meeting some small and primitive folk on the shores of Africa and returned to Egypt. There, Sataspes was promptly impaled after all by the unimpressed Great King.5 The problem in Herodotos’ mind was the shape and dimensions of Africa, and whether the Indian Ocean led into the Atlantic, as he and in due course Alexander the Great were convinced it must do. Even so, the geographer Ptolemy would later insist that the Indian Ocean was a closed sea, bordered on its southern fringes by a broad strip of torrid, uninhabitable lands that stretched from southern Africa towards south-east Asia.
The Boundless Sea Page 13