The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (11 page)

If wooden hulls were first built toward the end of the fourth millennium, as evidence suggests, progress thereafter was quick. Between 1991 and 2000, archaeologists working at the
royal mortuary in Abydos, about fifteen kilometers west of the Nile in Upper Egypt, discovered burial pits containing the remains of fourteen vessels measuring from fifteen to perhaps twenty-four meters in length—six meters longer than the longest of the three ships that sailed on Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage more than four thousand years later. These hulls date to the First Dynasty, about midway between the
Gerzean jar and the
Khufu ship. Although not nearly so well buried as the latter, they were in a remarkable state of preservation thanks to the arid climate. Study of these finds is far from complete, but the presence of the vessels within the most important burial precinct of the early dynastic period testifies to the importance Egyptians attached to watercraft at this critical juncture in their history.

Other vessels may come to light, but it is unlikely that any will rival the Khufu ship for size, completeness, or beauty. Although its exact use is unknown, the Khufu ship was clearly a
ship of state rather than a workboat. It repays careful study especially because it was built “shell-first,” a technique of hull construction that was typical of ship design across Eurasia and North and East Africa until at least 1000 ce. In shell-first construction, builders fashion the hull by attaching planking edge-to-edge. When the resulting external shell is complete, they stiffen it by adding ribs or frames running perpendicular to the centerline of the hull. The Khufu hull has a flat bottom flanked by two nearly symmetrical sets of planking that form the sides. The planks are joined by a combination of cordage and tenons inserted into hundreds of mortises cut into the edges of the planks, and the hull is reinforced with floor timbers, large, curved pieces of
cedar lashed to the strakes.

The use of cordage to fasten planks is common worldwide, and it has a number of advantages over more permanent forms of fastening.
The inherent flexibility of sewn boats makes them less liable to damage in a collision or when intentionally run ashore for loading or discharging goods and passengers, a major concern where piers, wharves, or comparable docking facilities do not exist. Evidence of fixed structures to which vessels could tie up in Egypt is slight before the classical period, and vessels either anchored or were beached when not under way. Another advantage is that sewn boats can be put together and taken apart relatively easily. This facilitates making repairs to damaged planks or disassembling a hull to transport it overland in pieces, a common practice for both trade and military campaigns throughout history.

In other boatbuilding traditions, sewn boats are fastened by stitching adjacent planks to one another along the length of the seam between them, as one might sew two pieces of cloth. However, Egyptian shipwrights used transverse lashings that ran perpendicular to the centerline from gunwale to gunwale and the cordage passed through shallow channels drilled into the planks at an angle so that they did not penetrate the hull. Were planks with straight edges attached by perpendicular lashings, the seams would open up easily as the planks slid against each other. The Egyptians overcame this problem by making the planks irregular in shape, so that they nested against one another somewhat like puzzle pieces. Whether transverse lashing was deliberately
chosen to conserve material or for some other reason, it is a vastly more efficient use of cordage than seam sewing. The
Khufu ship used about five thousand meters of cordage, about one-fifth the amount that would have been necessary to fasten the planks edge-to-edge. This passes through 276 lashing channels, none of which penetrates the hull below the waterline, and there was
no caulking of any kind. Nor was any needed, because when exposed to water the wood would swell, and the rope lashings would shrink, resulting in a strong, watertight fit. The vessels are not strictly comparable, but the
sewn hull of the
Sohar,
a twenty-six-meter-long dhow built in the 1980s, required roughly 650,000 meters of coconut cord that passed through some twenty thousand holes, which were then plugged with coconut husks and a mixture of lime and tree gum.

The deck of
the Khufu ship supports three structures. The deckhouse, consisting of an anteroom and main cabin, is aft of amidships. Forward of that is the open deck, with a light frame for an awning, while toward the bow is a small canopy formed by ten slim poles supporting a plank roof. The graceful forms of the high prow and steeply raked stern pieces give the royal ship its
papyrus-raft profile. Although
Egyptian vessels were often richly painted—“
I conducted the work on the sacred barque, I fashioned its colors,” boasts one Twelfth Dynasty official’s inscription—there is no evidence that the Khufu ship was so decorated.

What role Egyptians thought burial ships played in the afterlife is a subject of considerable debate. The
Nubians may have originated the idea of boats as symbols of royalty, and the practice of burying boats and boat models (less expensive alternatives to real ships) continued for thousands of years.
One theory about the Khufu ship is that it was intended to carry the resurrected pharaoh with the sun god Re in an eternal circuit of the heavens. According to Egyptian cosmography, Re had two boats in which he crossed the sky by day and by night, respectively. It is possible that the Khufu ship was first used as a funerary barge to convey the king’s embalmed body to
Giza, about twenty-five kilometers north of
Memphis, or that during his lifetime Khufu himself used it as a pilgrimage boat to visit holy places and thereby assert or renew his authority.

Whether the Egyptians drew a sharp distinction between ritual and recreational travel is difficult to determine. Certainly they knew both kinds. Hunting from papyrus rafts is the subject of a number of narrative illustrations. The social status of the hunter, who is often shown standing, can be determined from his size relative to the raft and the crew. The latter were not necessarily men. In a story about an excursion by
Sneferu, Khufu’s father, the pharaoh is said to have spent the day being rowed by a crew of twenty naked women,
“the
most beautiful in form.” According to one interpretation, this outing was an imitation of the passage across the sky by Re, who is sometimes depicted as being rowed by the goddess
Hathor. Yet the tone of the text suggests a more carefree day on the water and this might well be the first recorded instance of pleasure boating, an activity that remained beyond the reach of all but the most powerful and wealthy until the nineteenth century.

At the other end of the spectrum from royal yachts and funerary ships were the massive, utilitarian barges required to haul the stone used for the
pyramids and monuments for which the ancient Egyptians are best known. Because stone was not readily available at the most important burial sites, the Egyptians moved the thousands upon thousands of tons of building materials required for pyramids, temples, statues, and stelae hundreds of kilometers from quarries to the major burial complexes near Memphis and Thebes. Granite came from near Aswan; limestone was available farther north; and quartzite was quarried near both Memphis and Aswan. Quarrying expeditions required sophisticated logistics and were considered worthy of commemoration. It is thanks to records carved in many of the granite stones themselves that we have a glimpse of how they were moved.

On the causeway of the pyramid of
Unas (2300s
BCE
), there is a rendering of three barges, on one of which can be seen two columns laid end-to-end; it is captioned: “
Bringing from the workshops of
Elephantine, granite columns for the Pyramid Complex called: ‘The-Places-of-Unas-are-Beautiful.’ ” Yet the most vivid illustration of moving stone comes from the
New Kingdom temple of Queen
Hatshepsut (1400s
BCE
), which shows how
two granite obelisks were carried from
quarries near Aswan to the temple complex at Thebes. Calculating the dimensions of Hatshepsut’s barges is difficult because there is some uncertainty about the size of the obelisks and how they were carried. It was long thought that each of the obelisks was thirty meters long and weighed about 330 tons. A vessel that carried these end-to-end, as apparently shown, would measure about eighty-four by twenty-eight meters, with a loaded draft of two meters. But the obelisks may have been carried side-by-side and rendered as lying end-to-end due to the Egyptian artistic convention of multiple perspective. The shorter vessel needed in this case would have measured about sixty-three by twenty-five meters, about the size of a barge mentioned in an inscription relating to a contemporary official.

Neither building such large vessels nor loading such enormous cargoes posed any special difficulties. Rather than attempt to lift the stone off the ground and lower it onto the ship, the Egyptians brought the stone to the water’s edge via rollers. They then dug a channel under the stone and after loading the barge with smaller stones, the total weight of which was twice
that of the obelisk, “
the ships were able to come beneath the obelisk, which was suspended by its ends from both banks of the canal. Then the blocks were unloaded and the ships, riding high, took the weight of the obelisk.” Such is the explanation given by the Roman geographer
Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century
BCE
, but there is no reason to think that the pyramid builders did not do the same nearly three millennia before his time.

Moving these heavily laden vessels posed more serious challenges. Hatshepsut’s barge is shown being steered by four enormous side rudders and towed by a fleet of thirty boats each rowed by twenty-four
oarsmen. Computer analyses to determine the characteristics of the vessels that carried to Thebes the two 720-ton
Colossi of Memnon about a century after Hatshepsut confirm the accuracy of these images. The quartzite from which the Colossi are carved could have come either from a quarry near Memphis about 675 kilometers downstream from Thebes and on the opposite side of the Nile, or from a quarry near Aswan, on the same side of the Nile, but about 220 kilometers upstream from Thebes. The analysis suggests that a self-propelled barge seventy meters long and twenty-four across could have been rowed upstream from Memphis toward Thebes by a crew of between thirty-six and forty-eight oarsmen. Towing the barge—as shown in the Hatshepsut obelisk relief—would have required a fleet of thirty-two boats, each crewed by thirty rowers.

If the Colossi of Memnon were transported downstream from Aswan, the problem was not one of generating enough power to move the barge against the current, but of controlling the vessel so that it would not outrun the towing boats or careen into the riverbank. To prevent either sort of incident, a wooden raft was attached to the forward (downstream) part of a barge by a
hawser, while a heavy stone
anchor was dragged astern. According to
Herodotus, writing in the 400s
BCE
, the result was that “
the raft is carried rapidly forward by the current and pulls the
baris
(as these boats are called) after it, while the stone, dragging along the bottom astern, acts as a check and gives her steerage way.” In all likelihood, what Herodotus describes is a refinement of the procedures developed by the earliest pyramid builders.

While royal vessels incorporated planks of imported cedar, which is long, straight, aromatic, and resistant to rot, domestic wood used for ordinary boats was available only in short lengths. The sycamore fig grows only to ten or twelve meters, and six meters was exceptional for
acacia. Neither tree grows especially straight. The reliance on planks from such stock led Herodotus to write that “
the method of construction is to lay them together like bricks.” He does not indicate the size of the boats in question, but a Sixth Dynasty inscription tells of “
a cargo-boat of acacia wood of sixty cubits [thirty-one meters] in its length and thirty cubits in its breadth, built in only seventeen days.” Faced
with a scarcity of longer planking for ships, traditional Egyptian shipwrights employ similar “brick-work” construction techniques to this day.

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: