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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC
- tgb 5y agoThe ancient Egyptian (or Persians?) built a Suez canal predecessor? Incredible. Is it a tourist attraction? And imagine building it only to realize that the surface height of the sea and the Nile don't match. Oops! Also I like that the parts of the circumnavigation tale that Herotodus thought unbelievable (sun on the "wrong" side) actually now make it more clearly true and not just another of Herotodus's exaggerations.
- jccooper 5y agoEgyptian rulers of the Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, Persians, Greeks, (probably) Romans, and Fatimids all dug or redug (and probably used, at least briefly) a canal or canals from the Nile to the Great Bitter Lakes and Red Sea. The Ptolemaic version even apparently had a lock to prevent salt water intrusion. It went in and out of service (depending mostly, it seems, on ability to maintain it) until it was closed 767 for political reasons. It seems to have been easier to create, as the Red Sea was closer, but hard to keep open due to silt from the Nile. I don't think it looks like much now, as I'm unable to find any photos of it. The physical remains were unknown until discovered by Napoleon's expedition, so it's probably been quite swallowed by the desert save for archaeological traces.
- jandrese 5y agoThe Suez canal requires constant maintenance (dredging) to avoid being swallowed up by the desert. It is not hard to imagine most evidence of a canal that stopped maintenance in 767 being lost to time.
- baggy_trough 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs
- hahahasure 5y agoWhat, you don't think the greatest harp player can summon a dolphin and ride them across the sea? That said, his political stories are entertaining, and the philosophy is interesting. It just hurts reading wikipedia and seeing how his account vaguely lines up with archeology.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoUp until recently I did not know there was a way out from the Great Lakes into the ocean that does not involve going up North all the way through St. Lawrence. You can go through the Welland canal and shortcuts and end up going down South.
- jws 5y agoYou can also go out the Chicago River and down the Mississippi. There is a path called "The Great Loop" which takes you around the entire eastern United States. (well, most people skip New England and Mississippi (the state), but you could include them if you wanted.) https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/great-loop.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/great-loop.html
- asdff 5y agoThere used to be a canal that went from lake erie all the way down to the ohio river
- slacktide 5y agoUm, there are no locks on the current modern Suez canal. The difference in height between the Med and the Red is only 28 feet. The resulting current is negligible and seasonal. Oops!
- tgb 5y agoWikipedia says that Senusret III specifically stopped building the canal due to the height differences. Ptolemy II later had locks built. Though this was also a canal to the Nile not the Mediterranean and so they were concerned about the salt water mixing with the lower and Nile water. Maybe navigation wasn't a concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs
- WinstonSmith84 5y agoI'm blown away that the Phoenicians (w/ Egyptians) circumnavigated Africa in 600BC and ... during 2000 years, it was assumed that it was a legend, until being proved otherwise only in 1488 - just a few years before America was (officially) discovered.
- edgyquant 5y agoI’m not convinced they did. Not only is this an account by a notorious “liar” (as herodotus is known) but the Egyptians were notoriously bad at sailing due to being spoiled by the Nile. When they travelled in the Red Sea they famously hugged the coast stopping at sundown and they hardly ever went far out on the Mediterranean.
- fpoling 5y agoThe story alleged it were Phoenicians, not Egyptians, who sailed. And those were the best sailors at that time.
- WinstonSmith84 5y agoI do not have the knowledge to judge Herodotus (for his other stories), however even if he lied purposefully on that one, he is right about many things that practically none could have guessed with the current knowledge of his time. 1- the position of the sun when navigating in the southern hemisphere. 2- claiming a journey of 3 years It could be a coincidence of course. But then that would make from him a very smart and lucky liar - smart because he had to know the earth was round and lucky, because 3 years, it's what it would likely take to do it.
- detritus 5y agoAs for one, at least, if the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians knew the world was spherical (as they did, and had an approximate measure of its dimension), this could be easily predicted and might make part of whatever speculative discussion they had that was the equivalence of HN or general interested internerdery here. The second is harder to find an excuse for. (O/T) Of interest to me is something I learned from HN - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador - a large rocky shoal off the North Western African coast that scuppered many attempts at sailing around that area. It was, somewhat naively, the first thing in my long life that made me really appreciate how challenging old sea faring would have been.
- sthnblllII 5y agoThis is just Herodotus' account. I don't see any new evidence here.
- sthnblllII 5y agoThis is just Herodotus' well known account right? I don't see any new evidence here, only an informed guess "reconstruction" of what the trip would have been like.
- jmercouris 5y ago⊙﹏⊙ that must have been a remarkable journey!
- jccooper 5y agoIt's unlikely those camps left behind any identifiable evidence, but wouldn't that be amazing? Makes me wonder if there are any identifiable characteristics of 600 BC Mediterranean grains that might be found out of place in South Africa.
- dpeck 5y agoThat is interesting and from a very layman’s understanding it would be unexpected. I’m just a casual fan of history and have listened to a lot of lectures for Mediterranean history around bronze age, and my takeaway was that the consensus among Egyptologists was that ancient Egyptians never got very good at navigation & seamanship because they didn’t have to be. They had wind to go upstream on the Nile and current to go downstream and hugged close to the coast as a rule. Maybe one-off journeys happened? Handfuls of people do things completely out of the ordinary for their culture from time to time. But if someone did it, it didn’t make much difference back home.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoThe article quotes Herodotus as saying that the Egyptians hired a Phoenician crew for this. Phoenicians criss-crossed the Med for trade and settlements.
- not2b 5y agoI suppose they could have hugged the coast all the away around Africa. It's also possible that the voyage never happened. But yes, being first doesn't matter as much as being first to be successful and following up. Other Europeans got to the New World first but Columbus kicked off Spain's colonization and that led to everything else.
- dragandj 5y agoIt was the Phoenicians who did this, while Egyptians ordered and paid for it.
- runj__ 5y ago>This page was created in 1996; last modified on 12 June 2019. I love the internet.
- fsckboy 5y agoI'm skeptical. No matter how good the Phoenician sailors were, it seems unlikely to me that they could have blithely sailed past Cape Bojador[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador Maybe if they had small enough boats to stick close to the shore and portage. Seafaring on the Mediterranean is simply a lot less complex than it is on the open ocean. The European sailors were not able to pass this point till the 15th century CE; not saying they were better sailors, but that 2000 years later maritime technology was a lot better. [1] I put in footnotes to point out how stupid footnotes are on HN: just past the link into the text up above, it gets highlighted and works just fine.
- progre 5y agoWhy not? The Phoenicians had rowers and could just take down their sails. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme they also beached their boats at night so they must have been quite comfortable traveling over shallows.
- alan-crowe 5y agoDoesn't "rowing" imply having lots of hungry rowers to feed and therefore a limited range?
- clint 5y agoWhy do you think they were stopping every couple of months to sow a whole harvest of grain before moving on?
- kencausey 5y ago"every couple of months" is clearly an exaggeration and they were stopping at most annually. That said, a large number of hands may have indeed explained the need for large quantities of food, or maybe just the passage of years of time and limited storage space or planning.
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- foreigner 5y agoIf you haven't read it I highly recommend The History. Herodotus can be very entertaining. He pretty clearly lays out things he personally saw, things he heard from firsthand accounts, and things he heard secondhand. It's fun to see how things get more fanciful the farther you get away from the Mediterranean he knew. One thing that randomly sticks in my head is he said the Ethiopians were there most beautiful people in the world because they drank so much coffee, but beyond Ethiopia the land is uninhabitable because of all the flying snakes.
- rendall 5y agoVarious readings of Herodotus on LibriVox: https://librivox.app/book/12931 https://librivox.app/book/12931
- hallarempt 5y agoCheck https://mainzerbeobachter.com/2021/05/25/loog-herodotos-over-de-slag-bij-himera/ https://mainzerbeobachter.com/2021/05/25/loog-herodotos-over... (by the same person who manages livius.net) on how Herodotus sometimes isn't all that precise distinguishing between things he knew first-had, and things he had by hear-say.
- HDMI_Cable 5y agoWait the Ethiopians had coffee in 400BCE?
- pushswap 5y agoHerodotus isn't considered reliable at all by historians in any of his writings whether his topic is close geographically or not. Thucydides is a far better option , being at the beginning of the record for the continuous record of reliable historical writing.
- fpoling 5y agoWhat is fascinating is how self-reliant Phoenicians were. Take wheat. Then periodically during the voyage stop to saw it and wait for few months to harvest. Then continue. This was very risky, as they had no idea about climate in new places. But according to what we know was entirely possible along African coast.
- thedogeye 5y agoLove that this page was created in 1996.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoA lot of somehows and must-haves, which would need addressing before this is more than a tall tale?
- mgerullis 5y ago> When he started his reign, there were serious military problems on Egypt's northeastern border. Funnily we are still having the same situation
- mabbo 5y ago> These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right - to northward of them. It's 600BC. The idea that the world is a sphere isn't accepted yet. Herodotus explicitly says he doesn't believe what these sailors said- that the sun was to the north. Yet we know that if a sailor had done what is being described, this unbelievable fact would have been seen (and is regularly seen today by those living in the southern hemisphere). If they didn't do it, where would this odd fact have even come from? To me, that leads a lot of credence to the tale. Lots of challenges in the doing, but with the right experienced sailors not impossible at all.
- zamadatix 5y agoThe article itself says they traded with Yemen and even that is south of the tropic of cancer. Also doesn't take the world being a certain shape for this to occur.
- canjobear 5y agoAgreed. The sailors' claim is strong evidence that the voyage really happened. The fact that Herodotus doubts the claim shows that people were likely to doubt it, and so it's not the kind of thing someone would have made up. The only reason for the sailors to make such a potentially-discrediting claim is that it is true.
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- KingOfCoders 5y agoThe Greek intelligentia believed in a spherical earth at least starting in the 5th century BC, Herodotus died 430/420 BC according to Wikipedia. "After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round." -Wikipedia [0] Indeed the idea of a "flat earth" is a very recent idea [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Pythagoras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Pythagoras [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
- rsj_hn 5y agoTitle is a bit misleading. It was the Phoenicians who circumnavigated Africa, but the trip was sponsored by the Egyptians. Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations were not the same, and the Phoenicians were the master sailers/travellers of the mediterranean at that time, whereas the Egyptians were known for other accomplishments (such as growing wheat, central administration).
- etrevino 5y agoAs a data point in the story's favor: there was the Phoenician Ship Expedition (conducted in, I think, 2010) which circumnavigated Africa in a replica ship. I assume it managed to get past Cape Bojador because of the boat's shallow draft.
- herodotus 5y ago"The Histories" by Herodotus is a wonderful read, but it really matters which translation you use. The is the one I read is translated by Robin Waterfield. https://www.amazon.com/Histories-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199535663/ref=sr_1_3?crid=NEBRHE4OJFO0&dchild=1&keywords=the+histories+herodotus&qid=1622154928&sprefix=The+Histories+Herodut%2Caps%2C206&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Histories-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0... I also have a newer one translated by Tom Holland, and it seems to be a good choice too. This is how Robin Waterford translates the quoted section (Book Four, section 42): "After all, Libya is demonstrably surrounded by water, except for the bit of it that forms the boundary with Asia. King Nech of Egypt was the first to discover this, as far as we know; after he abandoned the digging of the canal from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, his next project was to dispatch ships with Phoenecian crews with instructions to return via the Pillars of Hercules into the northern sea and so back to Egypt. So the Phoenicians set out from the Red Sea and sailed into the sea to the south. Every autumn, they would come ashore, cultivate whatever bit of Libya that had reached in their voyage, and wait for harvest time; then, when they had gathered in their crops, they would put to sea again. Consequently it was over two years before they rounded the Pillars of Hercules and arrived back in Egypt. They made a claim which I personally do not believe, although someone else might - that as they were sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right." Notice that the tone of this translation is informal, which is partly why it is an enjoyable read. But notice also the key difference in the final sentence: the one used in the article (de Selincourt) adds "to the North of them". This is missing from Waterfield and Holland. I suspect that de Selincourt added this as a clarification. I assume he took other liberties in his translation too.
- generalizations 5y ago> They made a claim which I personally do not believe, although someone else might - that as they were sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right. I love this about Herodotus. He takes the accounts he's given and records them as they were given to him, without editorializing the parts which seem in-credible. It often leads to fanciful stories, as another commentator mentioned, they get more fanciful the more indirectly they are sourced - but they also mean that no information is lost. In this case, the unbelievable information he left in the account becomes the information that lends it credibility.
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- a0-prw 5y agoI sailed off the east coast of South Africa in a small racing yacht in the late 80s. I am very sceptical that a sail/oar powered boat could make it. There are long stretches of coast where it would be very dangerous to beach your craft. There are stretches where it is still quite dangerous with modern equipment. If the story is true, they must be the luckiest sailors in history.
- prox 5y agoThe Phoenicians were at the top of the game when it came to sailing and long journeys. If anyone could do it, it where them.