Dalya Alberge - Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years
In the fifth century
BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of
unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia,
the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate
description of the construction of a “baris”. For centuries,
scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological
evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A “fabulously preserved”
wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how
accurate the historian was.
“It wasn’t until we
discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right,” said Dr Damian
Robinson, director of Oxford
University’s centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the
excavation’s findings. “What Herodotus described was what we were looking at.” In 450 BC Herodotus
witnessed the construction of a baris. He noted how the builders “cut planks
two cubits long [around 100cm] and arrange them like bricks”. He added: “On the
strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they
have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate
the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole
in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus...”
Robinson said that
previous scholars had “made some mistakes” in struggling to interpret the text
without archaeological evidence. “It’s one of those enigmatic pieces. Scholars
have argued exactly what it means for as long as we’ve been thinking of boats
in this scholarly way,” he said. But the excavation of
what has been called Ship 17 has revealed a vast crescent-shaped hull and a
previously undocumented type of construction involving thick planks assembled
with tenons – just as Herodotus observed, in describing a slightly smaller
vessel. Originally measuring
up to 28 metres long, it is one of the first large-scale ancient Egyptian
trading boats ever to have been discovered.
Robinson added:
“Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew
what that meant… That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then
we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it
absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”
About 70% of the hull
has survived, well-preserved in the Nile silts. Acacia planks were held
together with long tenon-ribs – some almost 2m long – and fastened with pegs,
creating lines of ‘internal ribs’ within the hull. It was steered using an
axial rudder with two circular openings for the steering oar and a step for a
mast towards the centre of the vessel.
Robinson said: “Where
planks are joined together to form the hull, they are usually joined by mortice
and tenon joints which fasten one plank to the next. Here we have a completely
unique form of construction, which is not seen anywhere else.” Alexander Belov, whose
book on the wreck, Ship 17: a
Baris from Thonis-Heracleion, is published this month, suggests that
the wreck’s nautical architecture is so close to Herodotus’s description, it could
have been made in the very shipyard that he visited. Word-by-word analysis of
his text demonstrates that almost every detail corresponds “exactly to the
evidence”.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion