Today's episode is Episode 007 - Old Kingdom Egypt Expands Its Reach. In this episode we'll focus on the scope of Egypt's maritime reach during the Old Kingdom's fifth and sixth dynasties. Topics include the development and refinement of maritime technology like the sail and the hogging truss, the discovery of an ancient harbor at Wadi el-Jarf, and the mysterious land of Punt as it relates to the story of Harkhuf, the boy pharaoh Pepi II, and a pygmy from Nubia.

Episode Transcript

Today’s episode is going to focus on the fifth and sixth dynasties, when Egypt began to really expand its long distance trade following the pyramid building campaigns of the fourth dynasty pharaohs like Khufu, although as we’ll see, recently discovered evidence suggests the Khufu was connected to an Egyptian sea port on the coast of the Suez Gulf. I’ll do my best to lay down a skeletal timeline to provide some context for our discussion and to at least attempt to make this an interesting story rather than a list of facts and names. With all that business out of the way, let’s get into today’s material.

Let’s start with a somewhat pedestrian topic that’s still a bit interesting, that is, a few Old Kingdom representations of ships being built. A very interesting depiction comes from the tomb of a fifth dynasty pharaoh named Ptahhotep, where we can see workmen busy building a series of papyrus reed boats. Some are busy cutting the papyrus which is used to make cordage, while others use their outstretched feet as a lever to bend the ends of the papyrus reeds back toward the middle of the boat. They then take the cordage cut by their fellow workers and use it to tie off the ends and give the papyrus boats their distinctive shape, a shape which we have seen mirrored in the style of some wooden-planked ships like the Khufu ship. Numerous depictions in tombs around Egypt, and throughout the entire Egyptian history I might add, show the basic uses to which papyrus boats were put. Mainly, these uses included hunting and fishing, there are many tomb depictions where we can see Egyptians afloat on papyrus boats, either with their spears poised to kill a hippo or their nets and hooked fishing lines in the water as the fish compete to see who gets cooked first.

Eventually, as we’ve seen, the Egyptians were among the earliest people to make the transition to wooden-planked ships, though the transition was certainly a loose one, as Egyptians still use papyrus boats to traverse the Nile today. Rather, once they began building wooden boats and ships, they were able to travel longer distances, in addition to being able to utilize and refine the sail as a method of propulsion. In the same fifth dynasty tomb where we find the depiction of hippo hunters there’s a fascinating scene carved in relief, depicting around twenty men hard at work cutting the planks for a wooden boat and then assembling the hull of the ship. It’s pretty safe to assume that the ships they’re building are large, since one ship shows nine men inside of it, hammering strakes onto what we assume to be the tenon joints that were commonly used as joints by Egyptian shipbuilders. 

Since the ships are only at a stage where their hulls are being built we can’t really know whether they had sails in the end. But, we do know that Egyptians used sails stretching back into their predynastic period, as we saw on the Gerzean jar from Episode 005, so it wouldn’t at all be a surprise to find out that the wooden ships were outfitted with a sail before being pushed into the Nile. The sail itself, as we’ve seen, probably owed its first invention to the fact that the flow of the Nile and the direction of the predominant winds in Egypt complimented one another perfectly so that a sailor could use a steady northerly tailwind to make his way back up the Nile from the Mediterranean. The early development of the sail in Egypt tells an interesting story of technological innovation and how certain technologies are sometimes retained through custom even though the original reason for using that technology no longer requires it. 

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If we start from the assumption that the earliest of boats on the Nile were the papyrus reed boats which comprise the earliest depictions, then we have to realize that a single pole mast in a reed boat would end up giving you a problem. Even though the sail was a great way to decrease travel time and make transportation on the Nile more efficient, it was apparent to the Egyptians early on that a single pole mast secured in the center of a reed boat would effectively punch a hole through the reeds and defeat the entire purpose of outfitting the boat with a sail. The obvious solution, and the one which they adopted, was to split the mast into two poles that shared the weight equally. By planting these poles in the thicker, outside bundles of the reed boat, the rupture problem was solved. But, once Egypt transitioned to using wooden ships for their long distance travel the bipod mast was no longer necessary; wooden ships could support the weight and force of a single-pole mast in the center of the ship. So, beginning in the fifth dynasty and continuing until the Middle Kingdom, we see the gradual disappearance of the bipod mast and the emergence of the single-pole mast with increasingly complex rigging. The gradual addition of braces to help trim the sail, when taken in conjunction with numerous different sail configurations, leads us to the conclusion that the fifth and sixth dynasties were periods of experimentation for Egyptian sailors. This is a natural conclusion I’d say given the evidence, but before it becomes obvious to us, we must first gather that evidence. We’ll start by meeting the pharaoh who presided over what many view as the pinnacle of Egypt’s political and cultural influence during the Old Kingdom.

Sahure is remembered as the pharaoh who oversaw the expansion of Egyptian trade and foreign relations in the Old Kingdom. The experimentation with sails makes more sense then when we look at it from the perspective of a fifth dynasty Egyptian sailor, or even Sahure himself: quicker travel time equals more trade and more revenue for the monarch, so it’s quite understandable that many sailors would experiment with their sail configurations to try and reach the most beneficial setup to harness the power of the wind. Before I get too far ahead of myself though, it’s important to realize that even though long-distance sea trade may have increased under Sahure, it definitely existed in some form at least as early as Khufu, though we aren’t completely aware of the scope.

Our proof of this early sea trade comes from a site that was discovered in the 19th century, but wasn’t examined in detail until the 21st century. Originally, an explorer discovered galleries hewn into the rock at a site named Wadi el-Jarf, located several miles from the modern coast of the Suez Gulf. He assumed these galleries to be catacombs of some sort and the site was largely forgotten until the 1950s when a French team again examined the site without fully realizing its significance. Then, in 2011, French archaeologist Pierre Tallet began a detailed look at Wadi el-Jarf and came to the conclusion that it was actually an Old Kingdom harbor of sorts, used for sea travel and storage. Over 30 galleries were unearthed, their sizes averaging out to around 65 feet long, 10 feet wide and 7 feet high (in metric that’s about 20 meters long, 3 wide, and 2 high). Each gallery was situated so that they could be sealed shut with an enormous stone block, presumably to protect the contents stored inside.

Those contents are what tell us that this site likely served as a dry-ground harbor for the expeditions of Old Kingdom pharaohs including Khufu, whose cartouche was inscribed on several of the massive stone seals. Inside the galleries, archaeologists found numerous fragments of what could only be objects from Egyptian ships: rope fragments, whole tenons of acacia wood, an entire plank of boat timber, and fragments of boat oars. Although the galleries were probably too small to house complete ships, as we saw in our look at the Khufu ship, the Egyptian construction technique relied on the fact that ships could be easily disassembled into their composite pieces, either for transport or for storage. So, the belief is that these galleries were used to store disassembled ships and the goods they were transporting, as numerous storage jars have also been discovered. The last evidence at Wadi el-Jarf that really rounds out the theory that it was a port comes in the form of limestone anchors, found both in the galleries and on the sea floor adjacent to the galleries. Over 20 of these hewn anchors have been found, varying in both shape and size, but unmistakable in their use as anchors for the Egyptian ships of old.

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All of that about Wadi el-Jarf to say that Egypt was conducting sea trade on the Red Sea side at least as early as Khufu. Even before Khufu, Sneferu was conducting trade to the north and into the Levant area, but when Sahure took the throne in the fifth dynasty, he would oversee the expansion of trade in both directions. As would be expected, Sahure continued the Egyptian maritime connection with the Levant. The oldest definitive Egyptian inscriptions of seagoing ships come from Sahure’s pyramid complex in Abusir. Inscriptions on both sides of a wall at the Abusir complex show the moments of departure and return for an Egyptian voyage north to Syria. Although the inscriptions only show four ships departing and eight ships returning, it is from the people on board the returning ships that we get our best glimpse of why the voyage was undertaken. The four departing ships are manned entirely by Egyptian crewmen. In contrast, the eight returning ships contain both Egyptian crewmen and bearded Syrian prisoners depicted as bowing down to the Egyptian pharaoh. To be precise, the prisoners can only be called Syro-Canaanites, but the main point still applies: Sahure’s ships in this inscription give us our oldest clear evidence of Egyptian ships making a sea voyage to interact with another culture. In addition, it’s fairly tacit from this depiction that Sahure’s voyage to Syria was not made on amicable terms, the Syrians here are depicted as prisoners, forced to pay obeisance to the pharaoh. As for the mechanics of the ships from Sahure’s pyramid complex, they seem to follow the same basic idea as the wooden Khufu ship, even if they show several additions of improved technology. For instance, they were definitely outfitted with the bipod mast structure discussed earlier, as it was still used during the fifth dynasty. In the second scene, depicting the return voyage, the masts themselves are lowered, resting inside crutch-like supports near one end of the ship, a practice that was apparently common when the sails were not in use. 

Another technological improvement on the Sahure ships is the use of a hogging truss, which was a support feature necessary on Egyptian ships. To explain briefly, since Egyptian ships lacked both internal frames and the structural support provided by a keel, they quickly discovered that the forces exerted by sea-strength waves upon a loaded ship would cause the ship to ‘hog’, an unintuitive term that means basically this: when a loaded Egyptian ship would crest a high wave–and keep in mind that these ships were fairly large, 150 feet long in some cases–the extreme ends of the ship would actually sag down as the crest of the wave supported the center of the ships hull. In extreme cases the ship would ‘hog’ into two pieces, the downward force of the load and the upward force of the wave causing the ship to essentially snap in half. To counter this phenomena, the hogging truss would provide the necessary force to keep the ship’s extreme ends from sagging. In its simplest form, cable girdles were attached around both the bow end and the stern end of the hull. Then, a long cable running the length of the hull along the deck would be attached at either end to the girdles and raised well above deck level by a series of forked stanchions. To achieve the desired tension, a stick was thrust between the cable strands near the center of the cable's length and twisted to increase or decrease the tension on the hull as needed. Problem solved.

The hogging truss became a common part of Egyptian sea-going ships, as is shown by another fifth dynasty depiction from the fifth dynasty pyramid causeway of Unas, the last pharaoh of the fifth dynasty. This depiction of a sailing ship on the causeway wall of the Unas pyramid complex at Saqqara shows us that still, about 100 years after Sahure sat on the throne, Egyptian ships were making trips to the Levant and returning with Syro-Canaanite prisoners. Again, the ship makes use of a hogging truss to ensure its seaworthiness, and in place of the bipod mast there is a tripod mast. Unas reigned at the end of the fifth dynasty, a period that was roughly concurrent the rise of Sargon and his Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia. It’s one of the intriguing coincidences of history that both the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire came to their separate ends at about the same time, but before we get to the demise of the Old Kingdom, let’s take a look at one more maritime topic that’s actually one of the continuing mysteries focused on by maritime historians and Egyptologists alike.

When we think about ancient mysteries, we tend to think in terms of what a certain object was used for, how an ancient culture could have built a particular structure, or why they did things the way they did. This ancient Egyptian maritime mystery is something altogether. The Palermo Stone first introduces us to the land of Punt when it says that during the reign of Sahure Egyptian ships returned from Punt laden with 80,000 measures of myrrh for use in temple rituals, 6,000 measures of the natural metal alloy electrum, and 23,000 wooden logs. The problem that has left us with a historical mystery to this day is that there is little to no revelation in Egyptian texts about where Punt was, how the Egyptians went about getting there, or how long the journey took. In several texts the land of Punt is referred to as Ta netjer, which isn’t really helpful either, since it literally means “the land of the gods” or “God’s land.”

If you don’t mind my condensing a several hundred year, ongoing debate into the basics, the general consensus is that the land of Punt likely lay somewhere to the southeast of Egypt. The debate continues as to whether it was purely within the confines of the Red Sea, along the coast of modern-day Ethiopia, or whether it extended out into the Gulf of Aden or possibly even around the Horn of Africa and even further along Africa’s eastern coast. Our best evidence though comes purely from the goods which returning voyagers commemorated as having come from Punt. We have evidence of multiple voyages to Punt in the Old Kingdom period, starting with Sahure, but also commissioned by the fifth dynasty pharaoh Djedkara Isesi who is also known to have made expeditions north and into Byblos and Syria, as was probably common for Old Kingdom pharaohs after the fourth dynasty.

The only mention of Djedkara Isesi’s expedition to Punt comes from a letter that was written by the pharaoh Pepi II over 100 years later. This letter was addressed to Harkhuf, the chief of the scouts under both Pepi II and his predecessor Merenra. The transition from the fifth dynasty to the sixth dynasty over that 100 year period saw a marked shift in the focus of the pharaohs and the source of their fears. Where for hundreds of years they had little worry about the security of their rule, Pepi I, Merenra, and then Pepi II witnessed a shift in the attitudes of Egypt’s southern neighbors, a people they commonly referred to as the Nubians. The Nubians had been conquered early on in Egypt’s history and had paid tribute to the pharaoh’s for a long time, but beginning in the sixth dynasty, the pharaoh’s started sending scouts south, deep into Nubian land to survey the political climate and report back. It is in this context that the story of Harkhuf first comes into play. His story is inscribed outside his tomb on the west bank of the Nile near Aswan in Upper Egypt. From this inscription we are told how on orders of the pharaoh Merenra, Harkhuf made an epic journey far up the Nile to the land of Yam, a place beyond Egypt’s control. He returned to Egypt, brining both exotic goods and word that the political situation in Nubia was growing dire. Such news resulted in his being sent on a second mission south, where he again sent back word that the Nubian people were growing restless and discussing the possibility of throwing off their Egyptian oppressors. Another return, and a third journey to Yam only shed further light on the reality that the politics of Nubia had shuffled and that Upper Egypt would do well to pay heed.

Before Harkhuf returned from his third journey, however, Merenra died and Pepi II took his place on the throne. At six years old, Pepi II was certainly unfit to serve as king, but his advisors attempted to maintain the order of things by sending Harkhuf on a fourth journey. The tenor of the journey changed though, from the intel gathering missions that Harkhuf had undertaken for Merenra to a more standard trade mission to gather tribute for the new pharaoh. Even as Nubia began to plan an uprising, Harkhuf traveled the land gathering exotic goods to proclaim Egypt’s authority over Nubia, an act that the historian Toby Wilkinson likens to Nero’s apocryphal fiddling as Rome burned. This whole story connects back to maritime history here, in the following inscription from Harkhuf’s tomb that commemorates what he obviously felt was the honor of receiving a letter from the boyhood pharaoh. In response to a letter which he’d received from Harkhuf, Pepi II wrote back the following:

I have noted the matter of your letter, which you sent to the king, to the palace, in order that one might know that you had descended in safety from Yam with the army which was with you. You said [in] your letter, that you brought all great and beautiful gifts, which Hathor, mistress of Imu hath given to the ka of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferkara who liveth forever and ever. You said in your letter, that you brought a dancing pygmy of the god from the land of spirits, like the pygmy which the treasurer of the god Burded brought from Punt in the time of Isesi. You said to my majesty: "never before has one like him been brought by any other who has visited Yam.”

Pepi concluded his letter with what can only be seen as the impatience of a child waiting for his latest toy…

Come northward to the residence immediately! Hurry and bring this pygmy with you . . . to delight the heart of the Dual King Neferkara, who lives forever. When he goes down with you into the ship, appoint excellent people to be around him on both sides of the ship, lest he fall into the water! When he lies down at night, appoint excellent people to lie around him in his hammock. Inspect ten times per night! My Majesty wants to see this pygmy more than the tribute of the Sinai and Punt!

This story of the Harkhuf the chief scout, Pepi the boy pharaoh, and the fascination with a Nubian pygmy tells us a few things. One, Egypt definitely had maritime ties far south into Africa and far north into the Levant, at the least. We’ll see in future episodes how more detailed evidence from the New Kingdom can help shed a bit more light on where exactly the land of Punt was located, but for now it suffices to say that it was probably to Egypt’s southeast and accessible by sea via the Red Sea and beyond. The other thing that Harkhuf’s story tells us is more unfortunate, but is a reality of history. As he made these expeditions into Nubia, some by land and some by sea, he kept sending back warnings about the state of politics in Nubia and the danger it posed to Egypt’s power. By and large, these warnings went unheeded, especially after Pepi II took the throne. Centuries of overreach by the central Egyptian rulers and their leeching of resources to support their vast mortuary cults and temples led to the Egyptian government becoming weak. Internal weakness, the rise of regional power bases, the threat posed by Nubian solidification, and an untimely drought in the 22nd century BC led to a rapid decline of Egyptian power. The boy Pepi II reigned for almost eight decades, but instead of brining stability, his long-term weakness as a ruler only contributed to Egypt’s decline. By the time of Pepi’s death, Egypt had entered the First Intermediate Period, a period that was nearly in line with the collapse of the Akkadian Empire and the Gutian Interlude, a transition that has also been connected to the drought that contributed to Egypt’s decline. Little evidence of maritime trade has been taken from the First Intermediate Period, so as we wrap this episode up, we’ll say goodbye to the Old Kingdom of Egypt and all that came with it.

Sources

• Lorenzi, Rosella, Most Ancient Port, Hieroglyphic Papyri Found, Discovery News (12 Apr. 2013).
• McGrail, Seán, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (2009).
• Navine el-Aref, Egypt's King Khufu's harbour in Suez discovered, Ahram Online (11 Apr. 2013).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Tallet, Pierre, Ayn Sukhna and Wadi el-Jarf: Two newly discovered pharaonic harbours on the Suez Gulf, British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Vol. 18 (2012) pp. 147–68.
• Tomb inscriptions of Harkhuf.
• Vinson, Steve, Boats of Egypt Before the Old Kingdom (August 1987) (M.A. Thesis, Texas A&M University).
• Vinson, Steve, Boats (Use of), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles (2013).
• Wachsmann, Shelley, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (2009).
• Wilkinson, Toby, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010).