The entire social structure was thus attached to a religious infrastructure. Without divine commands, without the expert knowledge of the priestly interpreter, who could decipher these messages? Without the sovereign who desired to obey the orders from high, how could life go on? The obedience which was the rule in the first major human societies, Egypt and Mesopotamia, was therefore not simply the productof blind fear, but corresponded to a certain social coherence, one might even say an awareness of the obligations of collective living. Was everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds? We may doubt that in the light of our own sensibilities, but then these are not competent to judge such distant societies.
II Boats on the rivers, ships on the sea
Even before the network of maritime links throughout the Mediterranean had taken shape, its balance was tilting towards its eastern reaches. The Mediterranean system was after all created to fulfil the demands and the potential of two great social units: Egypt, which had limited but direct access to the sea itself, and Mesopotamia, which used the active intermediary of the Syrian seaboard to obtain access to the ‘Upper Sea’. Regular shipping was only ever established in the service of the powerful, and operated either through Syria, gateway to the valley of the Euphrates, or through the many inconvenient but active ports in the Nile Delta. Egyptian gold and Babylonian silver were the lifeblood of Mediterranean trade, which reached significant levels in the second millennium BC.
But to inaugurate shipping links meant finding vessels and mariners to sail them, neither of which appeared by magic. The shipping that was so well established by the second millennium presupposed other less successful shipping initiatives, well before the glorious days of the pharaohs. This early chapter in the Mediterraean’s life-story remains obscure, however. Few documents have survived. Underwater archaeology has located a few sunken ships. But the sea is less ready to yield up its secrets than dry land, where they are more easily preserved for us to discover.
We do know something of the boats which in very early times plied up and down the rivers – the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and even the Indus – but next to nothing about the ships that sailed on the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Was river navigation an ancient skill and seafaring learned more recently? That seems a bit too simple to be true. But river boats were undoubtedly circulating at the heart of the oldest civilizations in the world: they figure in the earliest iconography of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Seafaring remained marginal to these early civilizations, and although it too must have begun at the dawn of history, its origins are lost in silence. The future, however, was to belong to seagoing vessels.
On the rivers of Mesopotamia
River craft sailed on the Euphrates and even on the Tigris, despite its dangerous whirlpools, from very early times. In the beginning, inflated animal hides must have been used, although we find no formal evidence of them before the Assyrian monuments of the eleventh century BC, which show soldiers riding astride these blown-up skins on their way to attack a city; others are fleeing the enemy on the same strange steeds; sometimes several skins were lashed together to make a raft. These were the Babylonian kalakkus capable of carrying very heavy loads downstream with the current (as the Arabian keleks still do today, using hundreds of inflated hides). Once they reached their destination, the wood and rigging of the rafts was sold, and the skins deflated and sent back by pack-animal.
The most ancient Sumerian cylindrical seals (late fourth millennium BC) show boats being used for ritual processions. They have no masts but both ends are hoisted high out of the water by taut ropes, and they are made of reeds lashed together or plaited, as indeed are the boats still to be seen on the Euphrates, consisting of a basket-work base coated in pitch or covered with leather. In about 3000 BC, canoe-shaped boats were used to hunt wild buffalo in the marshes: a silver model of one of them, discovered in the royal burial ground at Ur, shows seven rowing benches and six pairs of oars.
Sailing downstream with the current, these boats were simply steered by long poles, but going upstream they had to be propelled by oars, or hauled from the bank. Sails must have developed quite early on: trading links with Bahrain and no doubt with the Indian coast, via the Persian Gulf, suggest that sails and seagoing ships were already in existence. These links are known to have been operating by the third millennium BC. At this stage, it is true that they were far from having the density of the traffic on the river. Mesopotamia was obliged by its very nature to depend on internal exchange: the many towns in thelower reaches of the plain needed the stone, timber, pitch, copper, wine and livestock that Upper Mesopotamia produced or imported from neighbouring regions. These floated downstream, while back up the river by boat or pack animal, went grain, dates, even reeds for building houses, and eventually manufactured articles.
Texts from the second millennium describe this activity: the boat-builders in riverside yards, the voyages, the variety of traffic, the lawsuits that followed accidents. A governor from the time of Hammurabi urges one of his subordinates to hasten the building of a boat: ‘Deliver [to the boatbuilder] the grain and dates he will request from you for the reed-weavers and other unskilled workers’. To another boatbuilder in the same yard at Larsa he writes: ‘assemble whatever boards and beams are needed to build a barge’. So at this period, both timber and reeds were being used to make boats. The owner of a boat generally did not sail it himself but hired it out to a boatman. The Code of Hammurabi contains clauses referring to what happens if a negligent boatman lets the craft fall into disrepair: he becomes liable for the damage. If he allows the boat and its cargo to sink, he is sentenced to reimburse the owner in full – unless he has had the presence of mind (and the material means) to refloat the wreck, in which case he will ‘only repay half the money’. We see here surely the kind of relation between employer and employee which already foreshadows a capitalist society.
River traffic on the Nile
All the evidence points to the great importance of river traffic in Egypt: many written or pictorial documents; over eighty words for types of boat, large and small and fitted in various ways; and the very religion of the Egyptian people, which is full of nautical terms and metaphors. The gods and pharaohs all had their boats, and the journey of the dead towards their judgment is imagined as a voyage on the familiar river. Boats had been sailing on the Nile since the pre-dynastic period. We can see what they looked like from artefacts: a pot in the British Museum, a stone vase dating from about the same period (3500-3x00) in the Chicago Museum, or the ivory handle of the marvellous knife of Djebel-el-Arak: these depict ships with square-rigged sails, and high, almost vertical bows and stern, the shape typical of the Mesopotamian reed boats. In Egypt, a more familiar sight was the long flat punt, made of bundles of papyrus carefully bound together. The two ends were slightly elevated, and its low draught enabled it to circulate in the shallow waters of the marches or over sandbanks in the river. This is the boat depicted in hunting or fishing scenes, and invariably it is a boat of this kind which appears on the walls of Egyptian tombs, ferrying the dead on their last voyage.
The same design, developed and enlarged, was used for the Egyptian merchantmen or warships which travelled on both river or sea. Progress consisted of replacing the papyrus with timber; but timber, at least of good shipbuilding quality, was in short supply in Egypt itself. Beside cedar imported from Lebanon, sycamore and acacia wood from the region near present-day Khartoum was used. The treetrunks were sawn up into short thick planks, which were then solidly assembled, using mortice and tenon and even swallowtail joints, or merely leather straps. Such boats were flat-bottomed, and their entire design was reminiscent of the papyrus model. They had no keel, the hull was strengthened by the transoms, and the curved ends were maintained simply by a thick cable running fore and aft which could be tightened as required. A two-footed mast, located forward in the early versions, was replaced by a central mast, carrying a quadrangular sail.
The sail had made
its appearance by the fourth millennium. Boats were also rowed or hauled upstream, but since the wind blows from the north almost all year round in Egypt, this inevitably led to the increased use of sails going upstream. The Egyptian language used two different hieroglyphs to describe journeys on the Nile: the sign showing a boat with a billowing sail meant the voyage south; the sign for a boat with a furled sail referred to the trip north, which could be accomplished simply by going with the current.
The first mariners back in the mists of time
It would be fascinating to know what kind of ships first ventured out on to the open sea, braving its dangers. Alas, we do not. We can speculate for hours on end, but will never reach any firm conclusion, since the very few items of evidence that exist are difficult to interpret.
The first sea crossings must have developed very early, between the tenth and the seventh millennia. But the evidence is flimsy. There is nothing serious to connect the enigmatic drawings engraved on cave walls near Santander, on the Atlantic coast, and near Malaga, on the Mediterranean. Do these vessels date from paleolithic times? The Abbe Breuil thought so, but without further proof, it is rather a rash assumption. Nor does any formal evidence support the hypotheses made by certain geographers that maritime shipping originated on the Red Sea and on the coast of Asia Minor, or in the large islands neighbouring the Aegean. The fact that Crete and Cyprus were apparently already inhabited in the early neolithic era, roughly between the seventh and sixth millennia, would tend to support this notion. These first inhabitants could only have arrived by sea. So rafts or primitive vessels, if not genuine boats, may have existed as early as the seventh millennium, and probably earlier. It is not impossible that traces of habitation going back to the mesolithic or even paleolithic eras will one day be found on one of the islands that has never been linked to the mainland – Cyprus for instance, where not all the caves have yet been explored.2 If so, our problem will have to be reformulated.
My personal view, though with little to back this up, is that attempts to sail out on the open sea go back a very long way. There was after all no insuperable obstacle. Primitive societies in various places have overcome the dangers of the sea: one has only to think of the rafts made by American Indians, or even the reed boats, the caballitos or little horses, in which fishermen still set out to sea on the coast of Peru. Besides, in the case of the Mediterranean, the early development of coastal shipping seems to be the only explanation for the spread of certain commodities.
Thus the spread around the Mediterranean coasts of so-called cardial pottery (the design was impressed on damp clay with a shell, the cardium) could have been achieved via short-haul voyages, perhaps from the gulf of Alexandretta, inshore from Cyprus. From there, rafts could have been sailed to Greece, Italy, Provence, Spain, Sicily, Malta, or even the shores of North Africa – since on all these seaboards pottery fragments showing the same impressions are to be found. It was originally thought that they dated from the third millennium, but recent excavations have pushed the date much further back. But how far? In Thessaly they are thought to date from the end of the sixth millennium. In the western Mediterranean, the date is still a matter of debate – possibly the fifth or fourth.3 What is known for certain is that this pottery everywhere corresponds to the spread of early neolithic agriculture.
It was by sea too that the two waves of settlers came to pre-ceramic Greece, from Asia Minor, bringing with them the secrets of primitive farming (though the first of these waves may possibly have come overland, if the Aegean landmass had not yet been submerged at that time).
Syria, Egypt and the Red Sea
A firmer and less hazardous chronology can only be established by jumping many centuries and dating developments on the great clock– so to speak – of Egypt.
Egyptian ships were sailing both to Byblos and on the Red Sea from an early date – exactly when we cannot say. But cooking oil from Syria was already arriving in pre-dynastic Egypt, carried in pots of non-Egyptian origin. And by about 2600 BC, we know that Egypt already had plentiful contacts with Byblos, through which it gained access to the cedars of Lebanon, pitch from the Dead Sea, gold from the Taurus mountains, and the oil and wine of Syria. The boats which ceaselessly plied to and fro on these trips were known in the middle of the third millennium as the ‘Byblos boats’; but while Egypt certainly financed them, and while their design was Egyptian, we do not know whether they were in fact built in Byblos or in Egypt, nor whether their crews came from one or other place, or both.
These must have been large-scale shipping ventures, as is proved by the number of boats shown being assembled at Saqqarah for the expedition led by King Sahura. Even more conclusive is the huge organization apparently centred, oddly enough, on Elephantine Island, at the first falls on the Nile. In the age of the pyramids, in the twenty-fifth century BC, the royal ‘civil servants’ of Elephantine (whom we may think of as entrepreneurs and even venture to describe as capitalists, to judge by the extravagance of their tombs), controlled shipments of granite down the Nile to the capital, Memphis. They also controlledthe quarries in the desert, the transport of these great blocks of stone to the river, the roads from Coptos to Koseir on the Red Sea, the turquoise mines of Sinai and, lastly, the maritime links with the Punt via the Red Sea, as well as with Syria. There was thus a curious set of connections between the overland routes, the sea passages and the river craft on the Nile, between the granite of Upper Egypt and the squared cedar trunks coming from Byblos. The glimpses we have of them leave us wondering whether we should imagine active seaports in the Nile Delta as early as the twenty-fifth century BC. Alas, everything is buried under mud today.
About a thousand years later, under the eighteenth dynasty, a Theban painter depicted boats built by Canaanites (as the peoples of the Syrian coast were called, the ancestors of the Phoenicians) landing goods from their country on to a quayside. The boats were unquestionably of Egyptian design, similar to, if a little rounder than, the ones which Sahura sent to Byblos, with their familiar raised ends. The boats which Queen Hacheptsut (eighteenth dynasty) launched for her maritime expedition of 1480 BC to the Punt, and possibly to Somalia, were longer and lay lower in the water, but had similar rigging. The mast was in the centre of the hull and carried a large square sail: two long paddles acted as a rudder. The beautiful model of a fully rigged sailing ship in Tutankhamun’s tomb, a hundred years later, shows identical features in hull and mast to the Punt ships. Only the system for the rudder is different.
Typically, these Egyptian-Syrian vessels operated almost entirely under sail. Unlike the small boats on the Nile which used oars, these large sailing vessels used oars only when manoeuvring into and out of port.
But we should not exaggerate the maritime achievements of the Egyptians. At ease on the Nile, they were less enthusiastic about the open sea. Egypt lived a largely self-contained life, with its river and its alluvial plains. The distant world interested the Egyptians, but did not tempt them unduly – or rather, it was more likely to come to Egypt, drawn by its wealth. Why go far afield? External trade was often handled by foreigners who had settled at the mouths of the Nile: Canaanites, Cretans, Phoenicians and finally Greeks. After all, the ‘first Suez canal’ was only dug in 610-595 under Necho. This would link the eastern branch of the Nile with Lake Tinset and the Bitter Lakes, and according to Herodotus two seagoing ships could pass alongside in it. It was undoubtedly a major achievement, but rather a late one: it was to be completed, or rather re-created, by Darius. Similarly, it was Alexander the Great who provided Egypt with its first properly equipped harbour, by building Alexandria. Yet as early as 2150, the Egyptians had not hesitated to open up canals through the hard granite of the first Nile falls at Aswan. The early date of such major works on the river provides a contrast with the later and more episodic interest the Egyptians showed for the sea.
The real thing: the Levant seas
It is doubtful whether Egyptian ships ever sailed on any of the Mediterranean sea cross
ings, except the convenient and familiar route from the Delta to Syria: this meant four to eight days at sea each way. The key progress in shipping came from other directions and can be glimpsed only as part of the composite history of the seas of the Levant: the Phoenician coast, the islands and shorelines of the Aegean, the large island of Crete, and the Greek mainland.
Here too, little is known for certain: there are many doubts and controversies. The only thing we can be sure of is that the sea was effectively conquered during the second millennium BC, by crossings of the Aegean and the Levant seas. But the moment one tries to go into more detail about the circumstances, the chronology or the causes of this development and the technical conditions or kinds of ship concerned, the picture becomes very complicated. The images that have survived, which are the essential documents in this respect, have given rise to various mutually incompatible theories and hypotheses.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 13