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Noreen Doyle

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THE HYPERPYRUS ARCHIVES: Nautical Archaeology

23 September 2007
Sunday
Nautical Archaeologists "Wood" Do It Better
Subject: Nautical Archaeology, Egyptology

It's one of those age-old material debates, like "cotton or polyester" and "paper or plastic." The question? Egyptian ships: "wood or reed?" Why is it that when anybody outside of the mainstream archaeological community replies to this question, the answer seems all too often to be "reed"? Have these people not seen the magnificent Khufu boat, all 142 cedar-planked feet of it? Are the Dahshur boats--one in Chicago, one in Pittsburgh, two in Cairo--not worth their attention? Have they completely overlooked the ancient iconography, showing boatbuilders assembling wooden boats, plank by plank? No, not at all.

Pharanic woodworking: boatbuilders and carpenters, tomb of Khnumhotep III at Beni Hasan, c. 1897-1877 BCE.
©2002 Noreen Doyle

Much, if not all, of the blame falls on the shoulders of that late giant of maritime exploration, Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002). His efforts to recreate the voyages of early peoples were pioneering and media magnets, but his "Egyptian" Ra I and the more famous (and successful) Ra II, launched in 1969 and 1970, were also grossly misguided and ill conceived.

Heyerdahl began with a premise "based as much on intuition as on concrete facts," as the man himself admitted [The Ra Expeditions, p. 4]. Much of its roots lay in his earlier work with the Kon Tiki, another reed boat with which he tried to demonstrate that the ancient Peruvians had reached Polynesia. (His hypothesis has since been disproved with evidence other than nautical.)

If the Peruvians sailed so far, could the Egyptians--credited by some as having founded or influenced the great American civilizations--have reached the New World by boat? Heyerdahl dismissed the possibility that they had done so aboard their wooden vessels, which he called "vulnerable in a heavy sea" [The Ra Expeditions, p. 5]. The answer, therefore, to the (hypothetical) technological challenge of a pharaonic transatlantic crossing? Reeds.

(Let me take a moment here to make an important point: I do not believe that the dynastic or predynastic Egyptians reached the Americas by wood, papyrus, fiberglass, extraterrestrial nanotechnology, divine intervention, or any other other real or imagined means. My purpose here isn't to debunk the diffusionist or "early global trade" hypotheses, which do not withstand proper scrutiny, but instead to point out some problems in the "reconstructed" boats associated with these viewpoints.)

Heyerdahl knew--correctly--that the ancient Egyptians constructed watercraft from reeds. Despite the lack of remains of reed watercraft from an archaeological context in Egypt, reliefs and models provide ample evidence. But the Ra II was an anachronistic chimera of nautical technology.

The Fourth Dynasty funerary barque of King Khufu (c. 2606-2584 BCE) inspired its arrangement of six enormous oars or paddles mounted forward of the mast: Heyerdahl fixed them in place as leeboards to improve sailing performance. Stepped aboard its reed hull was a bipod mast modeled most closely after images from the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2513-2374 BCE), though it persisted into the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2374-2191 BCE) as the pole mast eclipsed it. The style of the steering gear--a pair of quarter rudders supported by stanchions and a beam--appear in scenes and models no earlier than the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2374-2191 BCE) and are more characteristic of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2061-1665 BCE) and later. The Ra II's free-footed sail was unknown in Egypt until around the time of Tutankhamun (c. 1355-1346 BCE)--and even then it wasn't high aspect (tall) like Ra II's, but low aspect (wide).

Heyerdahl and his associates (including yachtsman and artist Björn Landström, who, having just completed The Ships of the Pharaohs, should have known better) derived all of these details from images of obviously woodenboats. No images of identifiably or even reasonably suspect reed watercraft have rudders. If they have steering gear at all, it is a steering oar (or steering paddle), which, unlike the pharaonic rudder, is not supported by a stanchion. But of course, if Egyptian wooden hulls were part of the transatlantic equation, that would beg the question of why this technology had not also transferred to the wood-rich Americas along with pyramid building. So reed boats are more than a convenience for diffusionists of this sort: they are a necessity. The diffisionists must deny the utility of Egyptian wooden boat construction, never mind--or perhaps mind indeed!--that Egyptian hulls would not have survived such a crossing except by freak chance. Papyrus hulls require similar freak chances and the aid of modern adaptations.

So all right, this was almost 40 years ago. Why the fuss now?

The son of Ra II.

Called the Abora III, it was (note the past tense) the reed-hulled brainchild of Dominique Görlitz, who, like Heyerdahl, wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of transoceanic contact in antiquity. Attempting to explain the presence of New World commodities in ancient Old World contexts (such as traces of tobacco and cocaine purportedly found on ancient Egyptian mummies), Görlitz charted a course from New York to the Iberian Peninsula, via the Azores.

The Abora III differed somewhat from its predecessor. Its reed hull seemed more massive, its sail was squarer, and it employed 14 rectangular leeboards, a development unknown in ancient times. (Steering oars and/or rudders served this purpose; not inconceivably, oars or paddles could have been used as well.) And, unlike the Ra II, the Abora III failed to reach its destination before succumbing to the elements.

Yes, the Abora III is now very past tense, having fallen victim to a storm early this month some 550 miles (900km) short of the Azores. The crew survived, which is, of course, most important. But will Görlitz invest resources--human and financial--in an Abora IV, risking life and limb in another attempt to prove a fantasy?

Such undertakings are costly. How much more would we learn if these resources--including the undeniable intrepidness of people like Heyerdahl and Görlitz--could be directed toward the construction of credible "floating hypotheses," and sailing them in waters archaeologists know or reasonably suspect the Egyptians did ply?

My nautical colleague, Cheryl Ward of Florida State University, is involved in such an attempt for (if my memory does not fail me) a French TV documentary. To recreate the form of a vessel Hatshepsut dispatched down the Red Sea coast to the land of Punt, they are relying on the reliefs of this pharaoh's expedition and Prof. Ward's knowledge of pharaonic hull construction. Some of this evidence now comes from the pharaonic harbor at Mersa Gawasis. Here a team led by Kathryn Bard of Boston University and Rodolfo Fattovich of the University of Naples "l'Orientale" has uncovered ship timbers from not only the New Kingdom (c. 1569-1081 BCE) but also the Middle Kingdom, a period from which we have no known images of Egyptian seafaring vessels. My colleagues Claire Calcagno and Chiara Zazzaro have the enviable task of publishing these remains.

These projects will reveal answers about Egyptian nautical technology and, just as importantly, raise many more questions.

I write fiction, but when it comes to archaeological exploration and scholarship, I insist on facts, not fantasy.

On Thor Heyerdahl:
Kon Tiki Museum

On the end of the Abora III:
Spiegel Online

On the Abora III Project:
Abora III web site

My colleagues and their projects:
Cheryl Ward
Mersa/Wadi Gawasis 2005/2006 report
Mersa/Wadi Gawasis 2006/2007 report

COMMENTS? E-mail me.

26 August 2009
NEWS
Subject: Egyptology, Nautical Archaeology
"An Exploratory Geophysical Survey at the Pyramid Complex of Senwosret III at Dahshur, Egypt, in Search of Boats," which discusses fieldwork performed by my coauthors in 2007, appears in the September 2009 issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. The abstract is available here.

COMMENTS? E-mail me.