> 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.
The idea of a flat earth is not a recent idea; that's not what the "myth of the flat earth" is. The myth of the flat earth refers to the false idea that (educated) Europeans during the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth, or that the ancient Greeks did, etc.
But plenty of other people believed in a flat earth, both back then and in more recent times. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model. More astonishingly, Chinese astronomers used a flat earth model until the 16th century.
> Ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, for instance, used a flat earth model. More astonishingly, Chinese astronomers used a flat earth model until the 16th century.
This is hardly a proof these astronomers did believe their model pictured the shape of the Earth correctly. In fact, a kind of flat Earth model and a (horizontal coordinate system)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_coordinate_system) is used to this day in astronomy to demonstrate how the sky and the celestial bodies appear to an observer on the ground. This was exactly the purpose of earlier astronomers because from this knowledge they could deduce predictions about the seasons and eclipses (and, ok, lucky and unlucky days and so on). If you're ready to deal with a modicum of epicycles and are only interested in purely local ephemerides, the model is actually not so bad as a framework for calculations and the real improvement only comes with a heliocentric model with elliptical orbits, not so much from a spherical Earth.
What is causing the most recent flat earth theory outbreaks all over the world? Could it be some environmental factor like pollutants, IQ is declining, bs online is increasing. Somehow it has to be the ultimate conspiracy theory measured by outlandishness.
The 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.
Agreed. 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.
The ancient world had far more capabilities than we often credit it with. The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit. Almost two and a half millennia between the first and the second.
History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wright Brothers' first flight and then impending moon landings and conclude -- very reasonably! -- that there would be cities on the moon in 2001. And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years.
I'd love to see an alternate history which diverges at 600 BC. What if somebody had managed to connect an aeolipile to a drivetrain to a dialkos bogey, and kicked off the industrial revolution in Greece, at the same time as the circumnavigation of Africa had started the era of Phonecio-Egyptian colonialism? How different would the world look today?
"And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years."
These seem predictably rare events to me. There are very fiew individuals that afford to engage in such endeavors and the odds of succeeding are acting both as deterrent and physical limiting factor to any attempt. The fact that happened is an exception. Not until the odds improve and a strong enough incentive changes things. The incentive for Moon landing has been political. Once achieved, it dissipated, and there isn't much sense for it to be repeated until a new motivating factor will appear.
Addition: Diolkos, considering the cost and efficiency of how it could have been operated and maintained back in the antiquity, was clearly an artifact that could work only for short distances, where the gains were significant enough to justify it, and there was little sense for it to be constructed on the scale that rails were later constructed.
> The one that impresses me is the dialkos, also from the 6th century BC, which was nominally the world's first commercial freight railway, if you stretch the terminology a bit
Or a technology at the peak of its influence. Railroads were a huge thing, but peaked in terms of geopolitical influence in about 100 years. Same with modern highways, telephones, telegraph machines, etc.
Maybe bioengineering is the next big thing. That will probably peak in 100 years too.
Edit: which civilization are you attributing the voyage to? The Phoenicians were past their peak. The Egyptians were at their peak, but they basically were cutting a check.
The potential of a large gap between lunar expeditions is an interesting thought experiment. What course of future events could make it so we don’t return to the Moon for another 1,000+ years?
Sailing around Africa is actually quite easy to do. If you're a qualified sailor and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft single sailed sailboat - no navigation equipment needed.
I read a story of a 16 year old girl sailing around the entire planet - totally solo. Sailing is easy.
Perhaps a HN comment circa year 04000 CE will read: “Circumnavigating the moon is actually quite easy to do. If you’re a qualified astronaut and have enough supplies, you can even do it solo in a simple 20 ft spacecraft — no navigation equipment needed.”
If 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.
> 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.
Maybe a thirdhand accounts of the flying snake (?)
I'm a historian and I recently cited Herodotus in one of my forthcoming papers. Is he reliable? We certainly can't assume so. But the same goes for Thucydides and every other source from the ancient world. It's all about triangulating between different sources rather than relying on any one account.
In my case, Herodotus was describing a Scythian practice (the use of cannabis) that we've been able to corroborate, in its broad outlines, using archaeological finds, which to my mind makes it reliable enough to use.
If anyone's interested, this is a quote from the paper, which is a work in progress and not published yet: When Herodotus described the purification practices of Scythians following elite burials, he wrote of a ritual involving the construction of a tent-like enclosure of “wool mats.” At the center of this enclosure, the Scythians threw cannabis onto “red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it.” According to Herodotus, “the Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath.” The term Herodotus used here – κάνναβις, or kánnabis – was a loan-word from Old Persian (kanab). From Greek, it made its way largely unchanged into Latin (cannabis) and from thence into the Romance languages and English." [Citing A. D. Godley, trans. The Histories of Herodotus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 4.74-6.]
This is probably outside your wheelhouse, but do you happen to know why the Persian word with a single N would have come into Greek with a reduplicated N?
Not only am I interested to hear that "hot boxing" is an ancient practice, but also the sense of immediacy that I now have with ancient Persia over our shared etymology of kanab.
I love history for that. Just knowing about the past gives me a feeling of connection to places I've never been to or times I'll never get to witness.
As an aside, the Scythians were not in what we'd today consider Persia (Iran). They originated around the north coast of the Black Sea, and extended east and southeast from there along the Eurasian steppe.
It truly is fascinating to follow the flow of cultures through time - sometimes coexisting, sometimes crashing against one another, yet other times melting together.
For a look at the least assimilated remaining descendants of Scythians (who were largely absorbed by early Slavs by the early middle ages) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians
“Reading the literature on the word for ‘Cannabis’ in the languages of Eurasia soon puts one in mind of what one is told frequently happens when the authorities conduct a raid to confiscate Cannabis and attempt to identify to whom it belongs: everyone involved says it belongs to someone else, generally someone conveniently not present at the moment.” [0] Some dictionaries claim a Scythian origin.
0 - Miller, R. A.: Korean Evidence for Three Eurasian-Altaic Wanderwörter Scenarios, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 51/3: 296.
A word that was spread among numerous languages and cultures, usually
in connection with trade, so that it becomes impossible to establish its
original etymology, or even its original language.
Interestingly even back in Egyptian times there was a corroded version with H instead of C:
𓎛 𓆰 𓈖 | H.n | cannabis
If the Ethiopians had had coffee in the time of Herodot then the Romans would have taken to it enthusiastically, and Pliny would have mentioned it. Unfortunately, he doesn't!
Title 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).
I'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 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.
I'm trying to visualize the sailing conditions the Phoenicians would have faced at Bojador - and not really succeeding, because I don't know enough about their vessels.
But I'm sure the challenge would be different, and potentially less scary, from Henry the Navigator's bane. The Portuguese were in high-freeboard open-ocean sailing carracks, with no effective recourse to rowing. And Bojador, coming from the north, presents a terrifying lee shore: the winds and current push vessels towards it, with shoals extending from the coast. Sailing close to a lee shore is a bit like walking on a slack line: one mistake and disaster is inevitable. You need to accurately predict your drift over the whole transit, you need hope the wind doesn't veer, and because there's a ferocious current too, the wind must not die. In short, it takes a skilled captain and navigator (and the much better strategy is just to sail offshore, which is what the Portuguese eventually did). Even a modern Bermudan yacht would be challenged attempting to transit Bojador southerly and close to shore.
A Phoenician trireme-type-boat would not be able to sail upwind at all - rowing would have been required for this part of the journey. Maybe on a lull day they could out-row the current? In any case, the challenges were different - and they would have had the additional motivation of not being able to turn back for home.
[0] Source: I'm a sailor!
Footnotes so formatted are a shibboleth of this community, not a practicality.
Also, Hanno the Navigator's journey is slightly better attested and includes traversing the cape north and south. Here is a commented translation of the account, from a Phoenician temple by way of Greek translators: https://www.livius.org/articles/person/hanno-1-the-navigator...
I agree - I don't think it's as big of a challenge as the above commenter thinks.
Phoenician boats would have been significantly shallower drafts, and more importantly, they would have been sailing with the wind and current, not against it, since they were coming north at that point, not going south.
I'm currently reading Clive Pointing's 'World History - A new perspective'. >800 pages of well researched history with a large Eurasian focus (due to the availability of sources, not bias).
He repeatedly makes the point that some technology that Europe 'discovered' in the 13-19hundreds was in fact known in china 1000+ years earlier. Most of recorded history Europe basically played no role whatsoever.
A few examples that struck me, taken from his snapshot pages 'The world in xxxx' which are scattered throughout the book:
5000BCE
* first smelting of copper in Anatolia and Elam
2000BCE
* glass produced in south west asia
* development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china
600BCE
* first production of cast iron in china
* iron working in west Africa
150CE
* First use of paper in china
* compass in use in china
600CE
* 1200 mile long canal built in china
* iron cables for suspension bridges in china
* horse collar used in china
* paper used in china and korea
750CE
* first wood block printing in China
1000CE
* vikings reach north America
* first gunpowder weapons in china
* paper money in china
* horse collar used in europe
1200CE
* multi-,colour printing in china
* European ships adopt Chinese stern-rudder and compass
The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.
The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple.
The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.
I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.
Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.
Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.
Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
I've studied the causes of the Industrial Revolution a little(in undergrad classes) and one of the points that stuck with me is that early-modern machining had greatly improved. Roman-era lathes were of a different character[0] and their limitations in accuracy and power were a major dependency to the development of other machined parts. As well, the Romans had a pre-Newtonian physics and mathematics, limiting the percieved applications of their inventions. There really is a lot that 1000-2000 years of background development gives you.
The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard.
This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work".
The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history.
None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis.
There's... a lot of context to the industrial revolution.
First and foremost was easy access to coal. Energy is really where wealth is at. Coal and iron make modern steam engines and rail and trains possible at all. Get that ball going and the possibilities become endless and feasible.
Secondly was not so much economics but financial structure. England had already well-established notions of corporations and stock trading, which made venture fund raising a lot more accessible than loans.
Whatever labor costs might have been, any level of automation would have greatly improved productivity.
That said, perceived labor costs are important. Where slavery operated, the perception of cheap labor made economies less likely to industrialize -- the antebellum American South is representative of this.
Additional factors include having a middle class, a venture/enterprising culture (think East India company), a permissive government, and other things. Perhaps even the background of recent civil wars and religious strife might have helped, I don't know.
You are completely ignoring philosophy. It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible. China had the tools, sure. But not the incentives. Their emperor could not let lose a zoo of creativity, for fear of destruction of the empire.
This kind of smacks of euro-centrism. Especially considering how the West at that time had colonies that practiced chattel slavery, producing vast wealth for the owners of the colonies.
Short answer, sea power drove technological innovation (reliable clocks etc) and a global empire gave Britain access to more raw material for textiles than it could process by ahd, so there was a huge incentive for automation. Also, plenty of domestic iron ore and coal deposits allowed rapid scaling and positive feedback loops. Much of the IR centered on the north of England because they had good ports and the coal and iron ore was right there and did not need to be transported very far. Northern England developed in significantly different economic and cultural directions from the more mercantilist southern part of the country, which differences persist to this day.
I have no disagreement with the points you make, but they seem to tell a different story than one in which ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men were necessary. Watt's great invention came on the eve of Britain's attempt to suppress these dangerous ideas in its American colonies.
To be fair, I think freedom and individuality are part of the story, but that story is more sociological than philosophical. In part, I wonder if it is a consequence of the reformation and counter-reformation, which arrived at an accommodation in which the populace was allowed some freedom in how it conducted itself, so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state.
In the book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, Sir David MacKay says that the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain might be due to the amount of coal Britain had. Equal (at that time) to the amount of oil under Saudi Arabia.
Relevant paragraph:
"Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the first practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efficient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu-
tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The figure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings,
to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain
was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."
It’s such a good question, and it wasn’t just the industrial revolution either, a whole bunch of stuff happened in Europe- the development of calculus and physics, new ways of organizing politically, the university system, the new economic system of capitalism, fractional reserve banking, it’s crazy how much Europe changed while the rest of the world didn’t. It’s hard to point to any one thing. Part of it may have been that the rest of the world was sacked and conquered by the mongols, but Europe was spared.
If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.
I think it's a hard question because a lot of different things happened in different regions - you can't just point to things that happened in Europe and say "This is why!"
As an example, China had imperial examination[1] for government jobs since 607 - a system not seen in the West until modern times. Ancient Rome built concrete buildings that their descendants couldn't replicate for centuries, yet they failed to start Industrial Revolution.
That is a damn good question that historians still argue over today.
The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have all the precursor technology needed for industrialization by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most commonly held view is probably that society and economics is as important than technology, and that while they at that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what made industrialization something people wanted to actually do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation.
In general, because of the recent history of the west appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view of development as a linear progression towards something, that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long as one advances, eventually it's going to influence it's neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the whole thing has a direction.
This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the conditions where the best way to do this often enough wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.
Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond.
From wikipedia synopsis:
"Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions."
For example the mediterranean region had 5(6?) domesticated animals and had wheat,barley oats and spelt grains. Asia had rice.
The North Americans in contrast, had no domesticated animals and didn't get maize until shortly before the Europeans arrived.
Because North Europe was more inhospitable place overall (for agriculture et all) and during Middle Ages Europeans started accepting and adopting technologies like their lives depend on it (and it often did).
That has slowly over ages created culture that put premium on technological progress.
Lots of reasons, climate, waterways, lack of glass making technology, understanding of astronomy etc. More detailed explanation: https://link.medium.com/fCP369iaCgb
The Antikythera Mechanism is a computer and was created in Ancient Greece around 100BC. That was a period of time before the Roman conquest of the known world. When there is an empire in power, things do not progress. The knowledge of that device got lost in history.
China has been an empire for much of her history. Being an empire does not help in the technological advancement. But fierce competition helps.
I'm no expert, but China has much, much less arable land than Europe. Something needs to finance industrialization, and in preindustrial times, food was finance because that's what supported a growing population.
Footnotes are useful to not break the flow of a thought with text that isn't meant to be read. Also, because of the link included at the end of a sentence, you were not able to include the conventional full stop immediately after the last character of the sentence.
I really like being able to use footnotes, which unfortunately don't work well with Kindle-style flowing text.
I find it useful to explain some concept that most readers probably know, to bulletproof ("yes, I'm well aware there are one or two edge cases but they're really not relevant in general. Let's move on."), historical digressions that aren't important to the general point, and references. (Of course, if it's only references, those work fine as end notes.)
I made no assumptions of your competency. What I said was obvious to me but, your comment indicated that you didn't understand why people use footnotes on HN. To effectively communicate ideas to the largest number of people it is necessary to follow conventions. Bucking convention reduces your possible audience size.
I think have higher standards for obviousness than you.
My comment did not indicate that I don't understand footnotes, not here nor in books, that was something you read in. In fact, my comment indicated facility with the subject. A person unfamiliar with footnotes wouldn't even know to call them footnotes, and a person unfamiliar with how they are used on HN would not say "(a) I disagree with how they are used and (b) because links are highlighted to stand out they are not a distraction". What I just wrote there is obvious to me, why not to you?
nobody knows at the beginning of a comment whether later in the comment conventions are going to be bucked, and I highly doubt in a 4 line comment whether inline links or footnoted links are going to make a difference to audience size, i mean seriously!
Why not? The Phoenicians had rowers and could just take down their sails. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme they also beached their boats at night so they must have been quite comfortable traveling over shallows.
Passing Bojador is something the Phoenecians had no relevant experience for. It’s an extensive shallows extending well out to sea with subsurface channels that cause violent and unpredictable surges.
The only way to do it is to sail far out into open ocean, well beyond sight of land, but the change in the winds drives you even further out to sea. Even in the early 1800s it was lethal, sinking as many as a handful of ships per year. Coast hugging just isn’t going to cut it.
"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.
Oars need to be relatively close to the surface of the water, and where there are oarlocks water can get into the ship. Open seas are heavy seas, meaning the waves are very very high; six foot seas are nothing in the ocean, but a bitch to bob around in. And, in heavy seas you need deep draft--the "height" of the boat under water--for stability. Also, the "powerplant" and "fuel" for oars takes up too much space limiting the freight capacity of a ship. This is basically why rowing technology was abandoned for sailing around the world or across oceans. Paddle steamers were used somewhat, but the paddles just don't have the purchase against the surrounding water to move a heavy deep draft ship.
I think beaching the boats at night and having large rowing crews makes it less likely that they could have circumnavigated Africa. You'd double the amount of time it would take, 6x the amount of food and water needed, and infinitely increase the chance of a hostile encounter.
Not saying it couldn't be done, but the logistics boggle the mind.
Fascinating. A passable route was discovered in 1434 by the Portuguese.
> Examining the Pilot Charts for this area, however, it becomes clear that the main concern lies in the changes in winds that occur at about the point at which Cape Bojador is passed in sailing down the coast. It is here that the winds start to blow strongly from the northeast at all seasons. Together with the half-knot set of current down the coast, these conditions would naturally alarm a medieval mariner used to sailing close to the land and having no knowledge of what lay ahead. In the end it was discovered that by sailing well out to sea—far out of sight of land—a more favorable wind could be picked up.
For example, we now have multiple solid lines of evidence that ancient Polynesians were making it all the way from Oceana to Peru, and back, with some degree of regularity. We see this in human genetics on both sides, as well as the introduction of the potato to Oceana. The Polynesians had a very different approach to navigation than europeans, one based on amassing a great deal of knowledge about currents, bird and sea life behavior, as well as intuitive celestial navigation.
It seems likely the first folks to make this trip were forced into it via a storm or such, but what's stunning is it's clear some of them were able to map the path well enough to be able to find their way back home later. There are still some people who use these navigation skills today. Look up the maps they make with sticks and twine. They're pretty interesting.
In any case, my point is there's historically been a lot of variation in sailing techniques and technology. If you looked at an ancient Polynesian proa, you'd almost certainly assume it's impossible they could cross such a vast distance. But they did. No doubt many drowned, but we know as an empirical fact some made it, and made it back.
The ancient Phoenicians were brilliant mariners. They invented the trireme, the keel, the amphora, etc. It's easy to think of these as crude technologies, especially based on hollywood portrays, but the reality is these were the NASA astronauts of their era. Coordinating large number of rowers that are stuck in the hull and blind to their surroundings is not as trivial as it might seem.
As another comment points out, triremes and similar vessels usually beach at night. The sailors are capable of dragging the things considerably away from the water line. In fact they have to do so relatively often to let the boats dry out for some number of days. Likewise we know of several places around the med where ships were dragged considerable distances over standardized portage/ferrying routes routinely.
This is very different from the ships the Portuguese were using in the 1400s. Their ships were bigger, with deeper draft, and with rock ballast in the lowest hold for stability. They'd have a limited capability to use poles/oars to push themselves through shallows where they were partially dragging, but covering longer distances on land with such ships is infeasible without far more people. Combine that with an aversion to sailing out of sight of the coastline, and you can see why they'd face more issues in this area.
In any case, I'm no authority on these topics, just another curious person on the internet, but I find it entirely plausible the Phoenicians simply walked their boats past this obstacle.
Modern humans have an unfortunate habit of projecting our own perspective on labor onto ancient peoples. Humans are capable of truly astounding things with nothing more than their bodies when focused on a common goal for a sustained time. The best example is neolithic architecture. There was no magic trick to building Stonehenge. They just used a ton of people over a long time to drag the rocks there, and then sea saw them into position.
Herodotus gives us three important reasons to believe it happened: 1) he tells us that Africa is surrounded by water except at Sinai -- how would he know this if the trip hadn't happened? 2) he tells us the sailors saw the Sun to their North when South of the equator -- how would he know this if they hadn't at least gone that far?! (well, he could have posited it had he known the Earth is round, but then he'd probably have told us that too) 3) he tells us how long the voyage took and that the sailors had to grow their own food, which tells us how large Africa was and is (though I can't judge if three years was enough given their technology) -- how would he have known that Africa was that large?!
Three correct details (Africa mostly surrounded by waters, Africa straddling the equator, Africa being very large) that would have been hard to make up out of sheer fantasy. Especially (2).
Though the Egyptians almost certainly long had known by then that the Earth is round and it's possible that he made very educated guesses and told us a fantasy just cause, and pretended to not believe the bit about the Sun just to make his story more mythical to his contemporaries. But is that likely? Did he do a lot of that?
I believe the account has them sailing the other way: down the Red Sea. They pass Bojador eventually, but in the opposite direction, which would be quite different, I would think (for encountering winds, etc).
The 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.
Egyptian 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.
The 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.
Up 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.
You 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.)
Um, 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!
Wikipedia 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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
That 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.
The article quotes Herodotus as saying that the Egyptians hired a Phoenician crew for this. Phoenicians criss-crossed the Med for trade and settlements.
I 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.
It'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.
What 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.
I'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.
I’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.
I'm not sure it's true either, but the fact that his account does correctly describe the position of the sun in the sky and the fact that Herodotus includes this information to discount the story to me tells of at least some kind of trip down to the southern portion of Africa. Total circumnavigation, though, I do doubt.
Edit: Also, it wasn't Egyptians that did this but Phoenicians at the order of the Pharoah.
I 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.
As 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 - 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.
Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth pretty well in 00240 BCE. Aristotle claimed it was round around 00350 BCE, and might have had a correct value, but uncertainty about units of measurement means his error could have been as large as a factor of 2, and the roundness of the earth was still a matter of debate at the time.
Herodotus died around 00425 BCE and probably wrote closer to 00435 BCE.
They were all "ancient Greeks" (and Eratosthenes lived in Egypt, so I guess he was an "ancient Egyptian" too) but that doesn't mean they were contemporary. Imagine someone in the year 04542 CE writing, "If the ancient Terrans knew about nuclear energy (as they did, and had unreliable and inefficient fission power plants and nuclear weapons), then Lincoln could have easily used atomic bombs in the US Civil War!" The timespan from Lincoln to Hiroshima was 80 years, from Herodotus to Aristotle about 100 years, and from Herodotus to Eratosthenes about 200 years. And those were very eventful centuries, much like our own.
Yes, and there is a large chasm between discovery and information that is widely known and accepted among the population. For instance, many Europeans went with Ptolemy's less accurate calculation (made hundreds of years after Eratosthenes's) until the 16th century.
> there is a large chasm between discovery and information that is widely known and accepted among the population
There are even more extreme examples of this. The Moscow Papyrus is from 01850 BCE, and it explains how to calculate the area of a hemisphere from its diameter and how to calculate the volume of a truncated pyramid, so this information had already been discovered 3870 years ago—perhaps for many centuries.
Yet what fraction of people today know it? Try asking your taxi driver next time you're on vacation in Perú or the Philippines. Heck, I don't know the pyramid-volume thing myself! I'd have to work it out by integrating a quadratic.
(I recall that studying the calculus as a kid was a bit of a transition for me, because for the first time I came face to face with the realization that most adults' intellectual development was arrested around the year 01583 for some reason. It wasn't that they took a long time to grasp differentiation, or that they had some weird irrational belief at odds with reality, but that they just stopped learning and never grasped differentiation in the decades and decades they lived, converting themselves into intellectual dwarfs. I was still young enough to imagine that somehow I would avoid this...)
The phenomenon I'm talking about is not that people learned how to differentiate functions in college, then forgot, though that certainly does happen. I'm talking about people who never learned to differentiate at all, or never learned linear algebra, or never learned group theory, or never learned complexity theory. And not because they were busily learning something else and just hadn't gotten to group theory yet, but because at some point they just stopped learning things.
I'm not convinced of this finite-space theory. I mean, yes, in a physical sense, there's clearly finite space in your skull. But even the synaptic connections outnumber the bits in the textbooks for a B.A. by about four orders of magnitude, and the potential neural DNA methylation sites outnumber synaptic connections by another six orders of magnitude. So I don't think this intellectual stunting is accounted for by space limitations.
Mediterranean countries had artificial candle-or-whatever light with which to play upon spherical fruit dangling from trees, which otherwise in the daytime caught specular light glimmering through leaves.
Knowing the Earth was round, I don't find it hard to imagine that interested minds of the day picked a fruit and toyed with it in hand, squinting a bit and considering the implications.
True, and surely some did—not just in the Mediterranean but in Perú and in Punt, and not just 2500 years ago but even a quarter million years ago—but, despite the whole lunar-eclipse thing, nobody had a really compelling argument until Eratosthenes precisely measured its curvature.
That is, though the wise could imagine a spherical Earth for as long as they have had fruit, they could just as easily imagine a non-spherical Earth. More easily, I think, because, I mean, look around you, it looks flat. It wasn't until Eratosthenes that the wise lost the ability to believe that the Earth was flat.
There’s this guy, Randall Carlson, who claims the great pyramid of Cheops is a scaled version of the northern hemisphere. If true, I guess it would mean the Egyptians knew the earth was round.
_If_ they thought that was a scale model of half of earth, they must have thought the earth has the shape of an octahedron (possibly a slightly deformed one), not that of a sphere.
well, this trip sounds way more plausible than Troy/Iliad story. And Troy was discovered based on folk tales more or less. So who knows, may be Egyptians did it.
Second this, it is the first thing that comes to mind whenever I hear about this voyage. Gives a very bright picture of the ancient world, and it is also a great story of love and friendship.
The article does not contend that "Egyptians Circumnavigated Africa" it says that Egyptians hired Phoenicians to engage in an Egyptian-funded circumnavigation of Africa"
As 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.
This 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.
I 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.
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.