The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (10 page)

By any measure, the Khufu ship was an astonishing discovery. The largest and best-preserved ship from antiquity or any other period for the next four thousand years, it reveals the technological sophistication of the ancient Egyptians on a far more intimate and accessible scale than do the pyramids or the more arcane arts of embalming and mummification. Like these practices, the burial of the Khufu ship was clearly linked to death rituals in some way, and there is no clearer indication of the central place of boats and ships in Egypt of the third millennium
BCE
than their honored place in the sacraments of the afterlife. Together with the other twenty-one Egyptian vessels thus far discovered by archaeologists, to say nothing of the hundreds of models, tomb paintings, and written descriptions of ships and boats, as well as records of river and sea transport, the Khufu ship forcefully highlights the importance of watercraft to a civilization that flourished along a fertile ribbon drawn through an African desert.

The dynastic period of ancient Egypt began around 3000
BCE
. The
Old Kingdom (Third through Sixth Dynasties), during which the pyramids of Giza were built, lasted from about 2700 to 2200
BCE
. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties of the Middle Kingdom lasted about two centuries, ending in about 1700
BCE
. The
New Kingdom, the period of pharaonic Egypt’s greatest prosperity and most active foreign relations, began about 1550
BCE
and lasted five hundred years. Thereafter the land came under increasing domination by foreigners from the south and east. In the meantime, Egyptian culture attained a degree of sophistication unmatched anywhere in the world. The Egyptians were literate masters of engineering, the visual arts, medicine, and religious, political, and social organization whose work is characterized by an almost obsessive attention to detail. Their culture thrived for more than two thousand years, their peace and prosperity interrupted only occasionally, and in the great scheme of things briefly. The pyramids at Giza and elsewhere date from relatively early in the history of unified Egypt, but the society that produced these monuments neither appeared nor ended abruptly. Although the conquest of
Alexander the Great brought the dynastic age to a close in the fourth century
BCE
, Egypt has throughout its history been a center of commercial and
cultural exchange thanks to its position astride the Nile, the longest river in Africa, and at the intersection of the land crossings between Africa and Asia, and between the Mediterranean and
Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

The Nile rises in the mountains of east-central Africa and flows northward into
Sudan. In the sixteen hundred kilometers below Khartoum, the river’s course is broken by six major cataracts, or sets of rapids. In antiquity the northernmost of these, the First Cataract at
Aswan, represented a natural barrier between Egypt and
Nubia (northern Sudan), and the early pharaohs’ fortification of the island of
Elephantine made it a gateway to the south. This was by no means an absolute boundary, and New Kingdom pharaohs pushed as far south as
Napata in Kush, between the Third and Fourth Cataracts. North of Aswan, the Nile valley widens slightly for its last thousand kilometers, hemmed in on either side by the Sahara. Egyptian civilization arose within this slip of land, no more than twenty kilometers wide in Upper Egypt but annually inundated by the sediment-rich floodwaters of the Nile until the construction of the Aswan Dams in the twentieth century.

To the west are a few remote oases linked to one another and the Nile by desert tracks, but these were not large enough to support populations capable of threatening the stability of the valley and they offered little to attract any but the most hardened traders. The landscape to the east is bleak but the mountains are rich in deposits of quartzite, alabaster, and gold, which have been mined since pre-dynastic times. Beyond the mountains lies the Red Sea, which was reached via arid, narrow valleys cut by seasonal streams, called
wadis.
The most important Egyptian towns were generally located near where these wadis reached the Nile, strategic sites that afforded their inhabitants an easy command of north–south and the more limited east–west trade. In the early period these included Elephantine,
Hierakonpolis (Kom el-Ahmar),
Naqada,
Coptos (
Deir el-Bahri), and the important royal burial site at Abydos. The majority of these towns were located on the west bank of the river, although Coptos was near
Wadi Hammamat and the point on the Nile closest to the Red Sea. At the head of the delta near modern Cairo,
Memphis straddled the boundary between the rich agricultural lands of the delta and the traditional centers of power to the south. Memphis was also the city through which Mediterranean commerce funneled into or out of Egypt via the many branches of the Nile and the delta ports, of which
Buto was probably the most important from pre-dynastic times. The capital was also near the terminus of the major overland trade routes to Sinai (a major source of
copper and turquoise),
Canaan (
Palestine), and beyond.
Thebes (Luxor) later emerged as an important capital near Coptos, with a corresponding mortuary site on the west bank of the Nile.

Upper and Lower Egypt constituted distinct cultural regions and of the
towns noted above all but Memphis and Buto were located in the former. By about 3000
BCE
, Upper Egypt appears to have been technologically superior, and the ruling elites at Hierakonpolis,
Naqada, and Abydos showed the traits of divine kingship and centralized control that would characterize pharaonic rule in a united Egypt. Administrative authority was necessary to guarantee the stability of a society dependent entirely on the Nile for its existence. Although the river’s annual inundations followed predictable patterns and in normal times nourished farmers’ croplands, the flood was sometimes insufficient and stockpiling grain in times of plenty was a hedge against years of drought and famine. Communication within Egypt depended mostly on the river, too, in part because lands adjacent to the river were either underwater or otherwise impassable for several months each year. Likewise, crossing the innumerable
irrigation canals radiating out from the Nile would have entailed the use of endless ferries or bridges. Not until the period of Roman rule in the first century
BCE
were substantial road-building projects undertaken.

Below Elephantine the Nile is an almost ideal cradle of navigation. On its predictable, northward-flowing current, paddling or rowing toward the Mediterranean is easy. Although the gradient of the river between the First Cataract and the sea is only about 1:13,000—that is, it drops only one meter in every thirteen kilometers—paddling or rowing against the current was challenging, especially when the river was in flood between June and September. However, the prevailing wind is northerly, blowing from the Mediterranean against the current, so that voyagers returning upstream could do so with a following wind. This advantage was amplified after the invention of the sail, and it is hardly surprising that the Egyptian word “to sail” also means “
to sail southwards, go upstream.” When it first occurred to Nile boatmen to harness the wind cannot be determined, but the oldest known picture of a sail anywhere in the world is found on a vase of the Late
Gerzean Culture at Naqada, dated to about 3300–3100
BCE
.

Shortly after this, early in the First Dynasty, the rulers of Upper Egypt moved their capital north to Memphis, which became known by the epithet “
Balance of the Two Lands,” namely Upper and Lower Egypt. So the invention of the sail and the emergence of a unified Egyptian state seem to have been nearly contemporary events, and it is reasonable to speculate that the development of the sail gave the people of Upper Egypt a technological edge that enabled them to bring Lower Egypt within their political and economic sphere. Were this the case, it would not be the last time that nautical advantage had such decisive results. A centralized government requires above all a means of connecting the outer limits of its dominion to itself. Without the development of
river craft capable of traveling back and forth reliably and
economically, commerce between Upper and Lower Egypt would have been intermittent and probably limited to small quantities of high-value prestige goods, as was the case in the pre-dynastic period. The development of vessels that could head north on the current propelled by paddles (or oars, after about 3000
BCE
) and return south under sail removed a major barrier to unifying the Nile valley between the First Cataract and the Mediterranean. Adoption of the sail ensured ease of communication throughout the land, the mobility of government officials and military forces, and the movement of raw materials from agricultural produce to wood and stone, as well as manufactured goods. Reliable transportation, in turn, ensured the well-being of the people subject to the pharaoh’s rule—that is, everyone.

The great diversity of Egyptian vessel types is evident from writings, renderings in tomb paintings, sculptural reliefs or models, and archaeological finds of ships and ship remains. While watercraft played a role in political and religious ceremonies, most vessels in daily use were employed for fishing, hunting, and carrying passengers and cargo. The
Pyramid Texts written on the walls of
Old Kingdom tombs about a century after
Khufu include descriptions of more than thirty types of vessels, built from
papyrus or wood, and all told,
ancient Egyptian sources document about a hundred different kinds.
The score of wooden hulls discovered in whole or part represent five different ship types, and all but two sets of fragments are associated with funerary rites or pleasure craft.

The earliest watercraft on the Nile were floats or rafts made from bundles of papyrus. Such rudimentary vessels are common to temperate regions worldwide, and they are found today in such widely dispersed locations as Mesopotamia, Lake Chad in central Africa, and
Lake Titicaca in
South America. Their use in Egypt can be traced in the pictorial record from pre-dynastic times. Even after the development of wooden boats and ships, Egyptians continued to build papyrus craft, especially for short-distance pursuits such as fishing, hunting, or navigating canals.
Larger reed rafts used for hunting were about eight to ten meters long, although if an image showing sixteen paddlers on a side is to be believed they could be longer still. Clay models show that planks were sometimes fitted in the center of the raft to provide a more comfortable and stable platform and to distribute the weight of the passengers and crew more evenly. Because reed rafts tend to sag at the ends, builders turned the ends upward and secured them by running one or more stays to a pole or some
other part of the vessel. (Throughout history shipwrights have often resorted to such a solution—commonly called a hogging truss, whether rope or erected as a wood or steel frame—to provide longitudinal support for hulls.) Egyptian builders eventually stiffened their rafts by securing a taut railing rope along the upper edge of the outer bundles of reeds and the upturned ends became less exaggerated. While papyrus is relatively inexpensive and requires little technological sophistication to work, it has a number of drawbacks. Papyrus craft are rafts that rely more on the inherent buoyancy of the papyrus than on the shape and structure of the hull. Moreover, as they become saturated with water, they lose their shape and gradually sink or fall apart, and their working life seldom lasts more than a year.

Wood, on the other hand, is a far stronger and more versatile material with which it is possible to fashion a true displacement hull—a built form that floats thanks to the equilibrium between the downward pull of gravity and the upward thrust of buoyancy. When wooden boats were first built in Egypt is unknown, but it is unlikely to have preceded the development of copper tools, toward the middle of the fourth millennium, a few centuries before the Gerzean jar depicting a sail. Because wood has greater longitudinal strength than papyrus or reeds, on the sheltered waters of the Nile there was little structural need for turned-up ends. Nonetheless, builders of wooden boats retained the papyrus-raft shape—at first, perhaps, because of inexperience with the new material, but later in conscious imitation of the earlier reed forms, especially for ritualistic vessels like the
Khufu ship associated with funerals and the afterlife. To achieve the papyriform effect, such watercraft were adorned with extravagant stem and stern pieces, including stylized finials carved in the shape of a cluster of papyrus leaves.

Apart from the sail, the most noticeable thing about the vessel on the Gerzean jar is the highly stylized hull form, but whether the artist was depicting a hull of reed or of wood is impossible to say. The body of the hull has a pronounced sheer to it, with the mast and sail placed well forward, and a small cabinlike structure aft. One reason to suppose that the Gerzean jar shows a wooden-hulled vessel is that the sail is set from a single pole mast.
A bipod mast—one with two legs erected like a narrow A-frame—would seem more appropriate to a reed hull because the downward pressure exerted by a mast on a single point would easily work through the hull.
The oldest rendering of a ship with a mast, found in
Kuwait on a
ceramic disc of the sixth millennium
BCE
, apparently shows such a configuration, and bipod masts are found in various parts of the world where reed boat construction is still practiced today. This does not necessarily reflect the practice in ancient Egypt, and there is no evidence of bipod or tripod masts before the
Old Kingdom, when they were stepped in wooden seagoing ships.

The oldest known image of a sail is seen on this ceramic jar of the Naqada/Gerzean II period, named for Gerzeh, Egypt, the site of a cemetery on the west bank of the Nile about eighty kilometers south of Cairo. Dating from the late fourth millennium
BCE
, just before the start of the dynastic period, this vessel sets a single square sail well forward, and small structures of unknown function are located fore and aft. Courtesy of the British Museum, London.