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 predynastic 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.
Ships and Shipbuilding
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 predynastic 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.
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 twentyfive 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 twentyfive 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-p
ropelled 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.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 7
