The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Navigation in Daily Life

  Although no remains of ships engaged in ordinary trades have come to light, the importance of boats in daily life, as distinct from large-scale expeditions and courtly functions, can be seen in a number of illustrations from the Old Kingdom onward. Such images reflect life on the Nile as it was played out over millennia. Many scenes show men carrying clay jars or sacks of grain and barley along planks laid between ship and shore. In some cases, storage jars are piled high on deck, while in others they are emptied into larger containers and carried in bulk. These images are a sort of propaganda that helped justify the state’s highly centralized and almost exclusive control of local, interregional, and foreign trade. Livestock was also carried by boat: a Fifth Dynasty tomb picture shows a vessel with a crew of seven and four cattle. One of the most vibrant descriptions of waterfront bustle comes from an account of the delta city of Piramesse, the New Kingdom capital built in the 1200s BCE. After praising the abundance and variety of food available in the city—barley, emmer wheat, onions, leeks, lettuce, pomegranates, apples, olives, figs, wine, honey, fish, and salt—the author writes that Piramesse’s “ships go out and come back to mooring, so that supplies and food are in it every day. One rejoices to dwell within it.” Such a proud sentiment could have been heard in almost any of dynastic Egypt’s busy river ports.

  The degree to which river shipping permeated all aspects of Egyptian life is evident in other ways. Construction of the pyramids and countless other undertakings large and small required the careful organization of labor. Workers of all kinds were grouped in gangs, the names of which were borrowed from shipboard practice, in order of seniority: “forward-starboard, forward-port, aft-starboard, aft-port, and steerage or rudder gangs.” Egyptian literature is also rich with metaphorical allusions to ships that suggest an intimate knowledge of how vessels were sailed even among people who did not live by the river. In “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant” (ca. 2100 BCE), the peasant Khunanup is en route “down to Egypt” from his home in Wadi al-Natrun, about a hundred kilometers northwest of Memphis, when a tenant of the pharaoh’s high steward, Rensi, accuses him of trespassing and seizes his two mules. Khunanup appeals to Rensi, and draws a parallel between the justice of his plea, the stability of a ship, and, by extension, the integrity of the kingdom itself:

  If you descend to the Lake of Ma’at,

  You will sail thereon in the breeze.

  The bunt [midsection] of your sail will not be torn,

  Nor will your boat be driven ashore.

  There will be no damage to your mast,

  Nor will your yards be broken.

  You will not founder when you come to land,

  Nor will the waves bear you away.

  You shall not taste the perils of the river.

  The Egyptian concept of order in the state and the universe, or Ma’at, depended on ethical personal conduct by everyone from farmer to pharaoh. In this appeal, Khunanup is telling the pharaoh’s steward that it is only by seeing the justice of his cause and ruling accordingly that order in Egypt can be maintained. Delighted with Khunanup’s speech, the pharaoh tells Rensi to pretend to ignore him so that he can continue enjoying the peasant’s eloquence. Over the course of nine meetings, Khunanup repeatedly resorts to the imagery of the ship: “Behold, I am on a voyage without a boat,” he tells Rensi. “You who are safe harbor for all who are drowning, Rescue one who has been shipwrecked.” And later he chastises Rensi for being “Like a city without a governor, Like a people without a ruler, Like a ship on which there is no captain.” In a similar vein, five centuries later, the biographical inscription of a New Kingdom official compares Queen Hatshepsut to the mooring lines securing the ship of state against the swift current of the Nile: “The bow-rope of the South, the mooring-stake of the Southerners; the excellent stern rope of the Northland is she.”

  The eloquent peasant’s identification of the kingdom with a ship is the oldest surviving example of the nearly universal metaphor of the ship of state.a The analogy is easily grasped because both the ship and the state can be considered self-contained entities governed by a central authority, and the figure of speech has been extended to other institutions and the planet itself.

  “Upon the Sea of God’s Land”

  For all the natural resources they commanded at home, the Egyptians were not aloof from foreign trade. Attractive though the region above Aswan was for its quarries, security south of the First Cataract was a perennial concern. An inscription on the life of Uni, a Sixth Dynasty official, records two trips there to get granite for the pyramid of Merenre. On his first, his convoy included six barges, three towboats, three auxiliaries, and “only one warship. Never had Ibhet and Elephantine been visited in the time of any kings with only one warship.” Uni capitalized on the peaceful relations on his second expedition during which he undertook significant improvements to navigation by digging artificial channels through or around the First Cataract.

  Egyptians sailed beyond Aswan not just for stone, but also for precious goods available only from Nubia or via Nubian intermediaries. Around 2300 BCE, a trader named Harkhuf made four trading expeditions south of Aswan, the last during the reign of Pepy II, who was then seven years old. Harkhuf’s usual stock-in-trade included incense, ebony, leopards, grain, “ivory, throw sticks and every good product.” His last trip is memorable for his acquisition of a “dancing dwarf,” almost certainly a pygmy, about which he sent a letter from the field. We can still sense the pharaoh’s childish anticipation in his reply. Commanding Harkhuf to come immediately to court, Pepy orders every precaution to ensure the pygmy’s safe delivery: “take care that he doesn’t fall into the water. When he sleeps at night appoint excellent people, who shall sleep beside him in his tent; inspect ten times a night. My majesty desires to see this dwarf more than the gifts of Sinai and of Punt,” both of which were associated with rarities of inestimable worth.

  At the northern end of the Red Sea, the Sinai Peninsula forms both a natural barrier between Africa and Asia and a thoroughfare along which goods and cultural influences were traded between Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Iran. It was also a source of mineral wealth in its own right. The distribution of archaeological finds between Mesopotamia and Egypt suggests that in the Late Gerzean period, the land route via Canaan and Syria was superseded by a sea route between Buto and Byblos (Jubayl, Lebanon). One of the most valuable imports from the Levant was cedar, which could be economically transported only by ship. This trade began in the early third millennium BCE, and according to the Palermo Stone, Sneferu ordered “forty ships filled with cedar logs,” some of which were used to build a fifty-three-meter-long vessel, eleven meters longer than the Khufu ship.

  The oldest written references to Mediterranean trade come from the Palermo Stone, a fragment of a stele incised with the royal annals as of the Fifth Dynasty and the earliest images of Egyptian seagoing ships are found in two nearly contemporary Fifth Dynasty reliefs, from the temple of Pharaoh Sahure at Abusir and the causeway of Pharaoh Unas at Saqqara. One scene in Sahure’s temple shows the departure for the Levant of six Egyptian ships with Egyptian crews, while another shows eight ships returning with Egyptian crews and foreigners sporting Syro-Canaanite dress and hairstyles. Egyptians and Syro-Canaanites also appear aboard the two ships in the Unas relief. While the merchants are from the Levant, the goods they carried were not necessarily limited to what was made or grown in their homelands. Goods of Cretan provenance have been found at Egyptian sites associated with Sneferu, while there are bowls of apparently Egyptian origin in Crete from the same period. At this early date, it seems that these were traded via Levantine intermediaries. Yet direct sea trade may have opened between Minoan Crete and Egypt by the end of the third millennium BCE, when Egyptian sources refer to Crete as a western country. At the time, geographical knowledge was such that people were known by the direction from which they appeared to come. The prevailing winds and currents of
the eastern Mediterranean flow counterclockwise, so the easiest way to reach Egypt from Crete was to sail due south to the coast of what is now Libya—an open-water passage of perhaps three or four days—and then eastward to the Nile delta. Returning home they sailed east with the winds and currents along the Levant and the southern coast of Asia Minor before turning south again for Crete.

  The other channel of Egypt’s overseas trade was the Red Sea, which gave access to the mysterious land of Punt, the second place mentioned by the anxious Pepy. Pharaohs had reveled in the gifts of Punt since well before his time, but the question of its exact location has vexed historians and geographers since antiquity. There is general agreement that it lies to the south along the Red Sea, the most likely places being Eritrea in Africa or Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, or perhaps south of the Red Sea and across the Gulf of Aden on the Horn of Africa, which is today the autonomous Puntland state of Somalia. The Red Sea lies 150 kilometers east of the Nile via the Wadi Hammamat. The arid shores have few trees, and ships had to be carried in pieces to the coast for reassembly and launching. This process is alluded to in an Eleventh Dynasty (2100 BCE) inscription recording an expedition to Punt under Henu, who “went forth from Coptos upon the road … with an army of 3,000 men. I made the road a river, and the Red Land (desert) a stretch of field, for I gave each a leathern bottle, a carrying pole, 2 jars of water and 20 loaves to each one among them every day.” Clearly Henu “made the road a river” by virtue of the fact that the ship traveled along it, albeit in pieces.

  Physically and logistically demanding though they were, expeditions to Punt date from at least the Fifth Dynasty. “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” the oldest surviving shipwreck narrative, contemporary with Henu’s expedition, gives a sense of the riches to be gained in the trade. In the story, the sole survivor of a crew of 120 lands on an apparently uninhabited island where a serpent befriends him. In gratitude for the serpent’s help, the sailor offers to send him ships “laden with all the products of Egypt.” The serpent laughs and says, “You do not have much myrrh I am, sir, the Prince of Punt. Myrrh belongs to me.” After assuring the sailor that he will be rescued and see his home and family again, the serpent presents him with a cargo of “myrrh, oil, ladanum, spice, Cinnamon, aromatics, eye-paint, giraffe tails, Large cakes of incense, ivory tusks, / Hounds, apes, baboons, and all fine products.” As the serpent predicts, the sailor is rescued and returns home with gifts for the pharaoh.

  The fullest account of any Egyptian trading mission on the Red Sea dates from the reign of the New Kingdom’s pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled as coregent with her short-lived brother, Thutmose II, and as regent for her nephew and son-in-law, Thutmose III. During his minority she assumed fully the role of a pharaoh—including the pharaonic regalia of a false beard—the only woman in Egypt’s long history known to have done so. Recorded in magnificent detail on three walls of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Thebes, this voyage to Punt took place around 1470 BCE. Artistic representations of ships can be problematic sources for the study of naval architecture because they are often rendered by people who lack technical ability as illustrators, are unfamiliar with the vessels they are showing, or are uninterested in material accuracy. In the case of the Punt expedition artists, however, we have independent verification of their reliability thanks to their carvings of fish, which are so detailed that modern ichthyologists can identify them by species.

  The first five scenes show the departure of the fleet, its welcome in Punt, the exchange of wares, the loading of the ships, and the return voyage. The next two show the presentation of tribute to Hatshepsut and her presentation, in turn, of offerings to the god Amon. The eighth panel shows the goods being measured and weighed, while the ninth and tenth show Hatshepsut announcing the success of the expedition to her court and Amon. If the illustrations are correct, the expedition included five ships. Based on the number of rowers shown—fifteen per side—the ships were about twenty-three meters long. Arriving at Punt, a land where the houses were built on stilts, the Egyptians set up shop—literally, “the tent of the king’s-messenger”—and laid out their wares, including necklaces, hatchets, and daggers in addition to offerings of “bread, beer, wine, meat, fruit, everything found in Egypt according to that which was commanded in the court.” In the Egyptian view there is no doubt as to the status of the Puntites, who are shown giving obeisance and bearing tribute to the Egyptians and who ask, “as they pray for peace…‘Did you come down upon the ways of heaven, or did ye sail upon the waters, upon the sea of God’s Land?…Lo, as for the King of Egypt, is there no way to his majesty, that we may live by the breath which he gives?’ ”

  The fourth scene depicts the true object of the voyage, the return cargo. Two ships are shown, their crews carrying large sacks of cargo and “fresh myrrh trees” in baskets; these were the most highly valued acquisitions, and in announcing the success of the mission to the court, Hatshepsut says that she has obeyed the command of her father (the god Amon) “to establish for him a Punt in his house, to plant the trees of God’s-Land beside his temple, in his garden.” Frankincense and myrrh were important for the performance of sacred rituals, but an enumeration of Puntite exports that runs across several scenes includes “ebony and pure ivory, with green gold … with cinnamon wood” and, echoing the serpent-prince in the story of the shipwrecked sailor, “incense, eye-cosmetic, with apes, monkeys, dogs, and with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children” (presumably slaves) as well as throwing sticks, cattle, silver, lapis lazuli, and malachite.

  The return of Hatshepsut’s ships from Punt on the Red Sea, as shown in the pharaoh’s temple at Thebes (Deir el-Bahri), Egypt. The most important goods are the myrrh trees slung from poles carried on the shoulders of the ship’s crew. The wooden ships were powered by oars and a single square sail and steered by side steering oars. From Auguste Mariette’s Deir-el-Bahari: documents topographiques, historiques et ethnographiques recueillis dans CE temple (Leipzig, 1877).

  Both the exchange between the shipwrecked sailor and the serpent and the later account of Hatshepsut’s trading mission hint at a material inequality between Egypt and the exotic lands to the east. The Prince of Punt dismisses as insignificant the sailor’s offer to bestow upon him the “specialties of Egypt,” and while the Puntites of Hatshepsut’s day are described as overawed by and subservient to the Egyptians, their produce is clearly more valuable than anything the Egyptians have to exchange. This probably posed little problem for the pharaohs, but since late antiquity, complaints about trade imbalances between east and west—the dividing line running more or less through the Red Sea and Southwest Asia—have been a recurrent theme among writers, as are politicians’ calls for sumptuary laws to restrict the import of “precious things.” Older still, as these narratives show, is the western habit of orientalizing, simultaneously investing the east with an aura of exotic mystery and portraying its inhabitants as natural subjects of western authority.

  We know little of how the Egyptians navigated the Red Sea, which even today is notorious for its tricky currents and innumerable reefs. Visual observation would have been essential and navigation at night seems unlikely. Northerly winds prevail year-round in the Red Sea as far south as 19°N, well south of Egypt’s modern border with Sudan, but the best season for a voyage beyond that point would have been between June and September when the prevailing wind is from the north-northwest and blows at a steady eleven to sixteen knots. With favorable winds, a fast passage to Eritrea might take two weeks or more, and considerably longer northbound, with deeply laden hulls straining against wind and current. Given the dryness of the environment, the ships would have to have carried ample supplies of water, beer, and wine, all of which would quickly go bad in the heat. In addition, food, cargoes, and the ships themselves had to be carried to the port of embarkation, which suggests a highly sophisticated and experienced organization. If Henu needed three thousand men to launch one ship on the Red Sea, Hatshepsut’s expedition
probably required at least five times as many.

  New Kingdom Recovery and Expansion

  Unique though Hatshepsut was as a woman pharaoh, her dynamism was characteristic of the New Kingdom in general and especially the Eighteenth Dynasty (1570–1315 BCE). Although Egypt had periodically extended its political influence east and west from the Nile delta and south of Aswan, prior to the start of the New Kingdom the pharaohs generally refrained from overtly expansionist policies. The reasons for the demise of the Middle Kingdom are not known, but by the 1600s BCE most of Middle and Lower Egypt was under the rule of the Hyksos, foreigners likely of Syro-Canaanite origin. Murals at Avaris, the Hyksos capital in the northwest delta, are stylistically similar to those found on Crete and Thera and hint at the possibility of a Cretan expatriate community there, too.

  The Hyksos seem to have adapted rather than uprooted Egyptian conventions, but they remained an alien elite distinct from native rulers who continued to control Upper Egypt from Thebes. In the 1560s BCE, King Kamose mounted a riverine campaign to wrest Avaris from the Hyksos. His soldiers used their vessels as mobile bases from which they conducted operations ashore rather than for ship-to-ship operations. One incentive for overthrowing the Hyksos was to eliminate them as middlemen in Upper Egypt’s trade with the Levant. In an account of his victorious campaign, Kamose boasts “I have not left a plank under the hundreds of ships of new cedar, filled with gold, lapis lazuli, silver, turquoise, and countless battle-axes of metal.… I seized them all. I did not leave a thing of Avaris, because it is empty, with the Asiatic vanished.” The narrative suggests a complete rout of the enemy, but credit for the final ouster of the Hyksos goes to Kamose’s successor, Ahmose, the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom.

  Following the sack of Avaris, the Egyptians pursued the Hyksos into Canaan, a move that signaled a deeper engagement in the region than they had attempted previously. The Near East was undergoing political upheaval thanks also to the westward expansion of the Mitanni kingdom from their homeland in northern Mesopotamia. Ahmose and his successors remained committed to the region, and in the course of seventeen campaigns Thutmose III extended Egyptian control as far as southern Syria. The military expeditions to and administration of this territory depended on Egypt’s control of Levantine ports including Byblos, Ulazza, and Ardata (just south of Tripoli, Lebanon), where Thutmose stockpiled matériel for his Syrian campaign. According to the Barkal Stela, “Now every harbor His Majesty came to was supplied with fine bread, various breads, oil, incense, wine, honey, fr[uit]…more numerous than anything, beyond the comprehension of His Majesty’s army—and that’s no exaggeration!” On his eighth campaign, Thutmose sailed his army to Byblos, whose stocks of shipbuilding timber would prove invaluable to the next phase of his expedition against the Mitanni. The invasion was largely unopposed until it approached the Euphrates, where the Egyptians bested the Mitanni in several engagements. When the Mitanni withdrew east of the river, Thutmose launched his prefabricated vessels into the river and proceeded downstream, destroying towns and villages as he went and driving the Mitanni to seek refuge in caves. In bringing the ships up from the coast, the Egyptians drew on their long experience of transporting ships from the Nile to the Red Sea, a significantly longer distance across far more inhospitable terrain.