Sail Like An Egyptian

[Adsos Letter]

Source: popsci.com



photo credit: C. Ward

An archaeologist who examined remnants of the oldest-known seafaring ships has now put ancient Egyptian technology to the test. She teamed up with a naval architect, modern shipwrights and an on-site Egyptian archaeologist to build a replica 3,800-year-old ship for a Red Sea trial run this past December.

The voyage was meant to retrace an ancient voyage that the female pharaoh Hatsheput sponsored to a place which ancient Egyptians called God's land, or Punt. Ship planks and oar blades discovered in 2006 at the caves of Wadi Gawasis provided a basis for the ship reconstruction.

"The planks that we looked at from the archaeological site are in great condition," said Cheryl Ward, the maritime archaeologist at Florida State University who headed the effort.

The nearly 4,000-year-old timbers even contained shipworms which had tunneled into the ships during sea voyages, leaving behind tube-like shells that filled up the wood like a sponge. Ward was able to estimate from the shipworms that the ship endured a six-month, 2,000-mile round trip to Punt -- located in modern Ethiopia or Yemen.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/sail-egyptian?page=

nice photogallery at the site

[leftstreet]

1. Nice!

Can you imagine carrying that thing "piece by piece across the desert?"

[Adsos Letter]

2. Isn't it beautiful, though?!

There is very little in that photo to mark it as modern...we could be looking into the past right there!

[leftstreet]

3. That's exactly what I thought when I saw them!

Awesome.

[Chulanowa]

4. I'll bet it was a lot more colorful, though

The Egyptians just loved color

[bklyncowgirl]

7. Donkey caravans, lots of donkeys. Hatshepsut had a fleet of those ships transported to the Red Sea.

The whole voyage was inscribed in loving detail on her mortuary temple Deir el Bahri.

Like most of those sort of things it was edited to leave out the unglamorous parts.

We see the Queen's moment of inspiration when she decides to send the fleet to Punt mainly to procure inscense for the temples, particularly the Temple of her "father" Amon whose oracle had helpfully proclaimed Hatshepsut King of Egypt.

We see the ships leaving Thebes via the Nile. We see the fleet in the Red Sea--you can tell it's the sea because the fish are different.

We see the Egyptians greeted by the happy Puntites including their enormously fat queen on her teeny tiny donkey. (Since we now know from her recently identifed mummy that Queen Hat was a bit on the plus sized side herself maybe she felt a connection there, by the way, how thrilled the good people of Punt actually were to see several hundred armed Egyptian soldiers descend on their little village remains to be seen).

We see the Egyptians trading beads and trinkets for exotic spices and animals, inscense and gold. (Several hundred armed soldiers can help insure a good buy in the market) On the other hand Egyptian manufactured goods--were exotic to the Puntites who hadn't seen Egyptians for several hundred years. Maybe I'm just being cynical.

We see the fleet sailing home with monkeys and baboons in the rigging of the ship.

We see the triumphant fleet arriving in Thebes greeted of course by the Queen and her court and the entire population of the city.

What we don't get to see is how they got those ships into and out of the Red Sea.

The Egyptians loved to show the spectacular side of their adventures but tended to leave out the the grunt work that got it done. For example, Hatshepsut also showed two of her obelisks (the largest ever quarried at the time) being transported on the Nile. She did not show how they moved this monoliths on land and how they set them up. Maybe they wanted to leave us with some mysteries.

[bridgit]

5. Thanks, Adsos, that's some of the coolest!

:applause:

[bklyncowgirl]

6. She's a beauty!

I hope we get a documentary on this. I'd love to see it.