In today's episode we're going to look at the evidence of heavy-transport shipping throughout Egypt's history. Their many monumental building projects required the transportation of staggering amounts of material, and there is evidence from Pliny the Elder and Herodotus that much of this transport was accomplished by shipping up and down the Nile. We'll look at the various theories for how objects weighing hundreds of tons were loaded and shipped on the Nile, and we'll see a few depictions of such ships from the pyramid of Unas and the temple of Hatshepsut.

Episode Transcript

In our last episode, we wrapped up our look at the maritime history of ancient Egypt, at least up through the point where their story merges with the story of the Sea Peoples and the overall collapse late in the Bronze Age. In this episode I want to go back and take a look at the Egyptians’ use of boats in their monumental building projects throughout the whole of ancient Egyptian history. 

As I’ve reiterated a few times now, the Nile can be seen as the main highway of Egypt, an artery if you will, that made much of Egypt’s civilization as we know it possible. Without question, the enduring symbols of Egypt’s ancient power are the massive and beautiful stone structures that were erected throughout Egypt. These structures were more heavily concentrated in areas like the burial complexes at Memphis and Thebes, not to mention the Giza Pyramid complex on the outskirts of Cairo. Aside from the pure beauty of these structures, the technological and engineering prowess that they signify is astounding. Part of this significance is that the Egyptians built their pyramids, temples, and tombs with staggering amounts of building material, material was brought to the building sites from distances as far as 900 nautical kilometers away. Moving that material such a great distance required a high level of sophistication and a solid grasp of the physics involved in moving large, heavy objects. 

Now, the Greek mathematician Archimedes has gotten credit for discovering the scientific law of buoyancy in 212 BC, the law that “Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.” I’m sure you all remember this one from primary school science class. Archimedes gets credit for articulating buoyancy as a proper scientific law, but obviously, mankind has intuitively grasped this concept since pre-history, otherwise this podcast wouldn’t have had anything to cover before 200 BC. So we know that basic principles of buoyancy are naturally apparent, but where this principle really comes into play is in the arena of moving enormous, heavy objects by boat. 

To place all of our discussion today into context, remember that the Third and Fourth Dynasties which bookend a timeframe around 2500 BCE, make up the period where Egyptian kings oversaw a veritable explosion of pyramid building projects. We know that kings stretching back to even the First Dynasty built monuments of stone, so even from the start of Egypt’s written history they must have been using boats and barges to transport enormous stones and other building materials. In Episode 006 we looked in detail at the Fourth Dynasty Khufu ship, a magnificent Egyptian ship that shows just how advanced Egypt’s ship- building prowess was by the Fourth Dynasty. Also by this time we saw evidence that Egypt had begun trading with Byblos for cedar wood to use in the construction of temples and ships. At the least then, by the third or fourth dynasty, Egypt was using barges to transport stone, timber, and other building supplies to their construction sites strewn along the banks of the Nile. 

Perhaps the greatest building project in Egypt’s entire history is the one that resulted in the Great Pyramid of Giza. This one pyramid was built during the reign of Khufu, and it is the pyramid beside which the Khufu ship was unearthed. The Necropolis at Giza actually contains three separate pyramid complexes that were built at the direction of different kings over the course of the 3rd and 4th dynasties. In building these pyramids, and temples, even the Sphinx, the builders at Giza took stone from several different locations which geologists have now matched up with the stones in the pyramids and temples themselves. 

As you might assume when I tell you that the Giza Necropolis is situated on top of a limestone plateau, a large part of the limestone used to build the various pyramids was taken straight from the plateau itself, leaving the Egyptians with not too great of a distance to transport their quarried stone. However, the builders also used a thicker, whiter limestone from a quarry at Tura, a location about 15 kilometers south of Cairo. This high-quality limestone was probably used for the original exterior casing, and since Tura lies on the banks of the Nile, it’s likely that the stones could be loaded onto barges and towed to Giza on channels connected to the Nile. Upon arrival, they would be unloaded at the Giza harbor that was connected to the river by access canals. This seems simple enough, though there are various theories about how the harbor was constructed to make the unloading of the huge stones more feasible. 

The more interesting item that was shipped to Giza was granite used in the temples, as well as in the galleries of the Great Pyramid and as columns in the pyramid temple. Granite is much more dense than limestone and is much heavier as a result. Because of granite’s density, the immense size of some of the granite columns in the pyramid temple has puzzled historians who have debated how exactly the ancient Egyptians transported the granite to Giza. Oh, did I mention that the particular granite used at Giza has been matched to a granite quarry in Aswan, a quarry on the Nile that’s over 900 kilometers up the Nile from Giza. It’s one thing to bring limestone a scant 15 kilometers, although that’s actually a feat in and of itself. However, transporting granite over 900 kilometers down the Nile is simply astounding. In looking at just how exactly the Egyptians managed to accomplish this feat, something that they did quite frequently with different building projects that utilized granite, we don’t really have any concrete proof about how precisely it was done. There are a ton of theories out there about how the pyramids themselves were constructed, and there are quite a few additional theories about how freighter ships were used to get the building materials to the construction sites. 

Since we can trace the origins of the granite and limestone used in many pyramid projects to the quarries where it came from, we can likewise come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of Egypt’s building project material came from sources near the Nile. The obvious conclusion is that the material was then transported up and down the Nile, as the advantage of water-powered transport was probably indispensable to the projects themselves. On a broad level this makes sense. It’s the technicalities of actually transporting the enormously heavy granite columns and huge quantities of limestone that makes for a more interesting discussion. 

It becomes apparent once you start thinking about how the Egyptians could have transported granite columns and other huge objects that physics quickly comes into play. For example, the granite beams that make up the ceiling of the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid weigh at least 40 metric tons a piece, though several of the nine beams weigh even more. Now consider these beams, single pieces of granite weighing over 40 metric tons, in light of the maritime history we’ve looked at thus far. Every ship that we’ve seen has been a single-hulled vessel of the type that we would normally imagine when we discuss ships on a general level. But, could the Egyptians really have loaded and unloaded a 40 ton granite beam onto a single-hulled ship without capsizing it? And even if they managed to get the beam on board, how in the heck do you steer a ship so heavily weighted? Lets take these questions in turn. 

First, we know from archaeological discoveries at these various locations along the length of the Nile that the ancient Egyptians certainly constructed docks and piers for loading and unloading their ships. The problem is that the Nile has shifted its course over the intervening thousands of years, so that’s basically all we can conclude: there were piers and docks. However, the physics of shipping hasn’t changed over the time that the Nile has, so we can safely make some assumptions. Most of these assumptions today follow on the same types of loading methods that would be used anywhere in the absence of a crane or hoist. A dry dock is one way of loading large quantities of goods onto a ship without having to worry about keeping the ship balanced on the water. This is one theory that’s been proposed. 

The main theory that we have literary evidence for comes from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. In this encyclopedia of knowledge from the classical world, Pliny describes how pharaohs of Ptolomeic Egypt went about transporting the gigantic obelisks which had become prevalent by that period. In Book 36 of Pliny’s Natural History, he tells specifically how an obelisk commissioned by King Necthebis proved difficult to transport. Pliny writes that : 

“Ptolemæus Philadelphus had an obelisk erected at Alexandria, eighty cubits high, which had been prepared by order of King Necthebis: it was without any inscription, and cost far more trouble in its carriage and elevation, than had been originally expended in quarrying it. Some writers inform us that it was conveyed on a raft, under the inspection of the architect Satyrus; but Callixenus gives the name of Phœnix. For this purpose, a canal was dug from the river Nile to the spot where the obelisk lay; and two broad vessels, laden with blocks of similar stone a foot square, the cargo of each amounting to double the size, and consequently double the weight, of the obelisk, were brought beneath it; the extremities of the obelisk remaining supported by the opposite sides of the canal. The blocks of stone were then removed, and the vessels, being thus gradually lightened, received their burden.” 

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, Book 36

What Pliny is describing is essentially this: the 80-cubit obelisk is hewn from the quarry and brought down to the banks of the Nile. In case you’re wondering, 80 cubits converts to roughly 36.5 meters, or 120 feet. Rather than try to move what is probably an enormously heavy obelisk up in the air and onto a ship that’s riding high in the water, Pliny describes the ingenious method of loading the obelisk without even moving it at all. What was in all likelihood a large group of workers dug a canal off from the Nile, leading to the obelisk itself. The canal must have been fairly wide, as the obelisk was 36 meters long and Pliny says that only the extreme ends of the obelisk remained supported by the edges of the canal. In addition, it must have been wide enough for two ships to enter side by side, since that’s how Pliny describes the ships to have been used. The other brilliant method used to accomplish this task was to preload the two ships with small blocks of stone from the nearby quarry, enough stone to weigh down the ships and force them to ride low in the water. Once enough stone was loaded to bring the deck of each ship below the obelisk, the ships would be brought into the canal and positioned under the obelisk. From there, it was a simple matter unloading the small stones from each ship evenly until the ships could rise in the water and meet the obelisk where it lay, using the buoyancy principle to lift the obelisk off dry ground and ready it from transport. This catamaran-style solution is a simple method that easily solves the balance problem of carrying such a densely heavy load on water, though it probably took a large crew to dig the canal and to load and unload the ballast stones. That being said, the idea is simple enough that it could easily have been in use during the various pyramid building campaigns we looked at briefly already. 

So, that’s one of the problems solved. But getting the obelisk or granite pillar onto transport ships is just the first problem. The second problem is keeping such a heavy load under control while traversing the currents of the Nile. Our best evidence about this phase of shipping heavy loads comes not from a source contemporary with the building of the pyramids, but from The Histories of Herodotus. This compendium of information about the ancient world was compiled from various sources and observations sometime during Herodotus’ life in the 5th century BCE, therefore, quite a long time after the pyramids were built. That being said, just like Pliny’s observation about the loading of ships, the method that Herodotus describes could easily have been used by Egyptians far back in their history, as it is a simple yet effective method. Here’s what he described in Book II of his Histories, the book that focuses on the “geography, customs, history, and tales” of Egypt. 

Their boats with which they carry cargoes are made of the thorny acacia, of which the form is very like that of the Kyrenian lotos, and gum exudes from it. From this tree they cut pieces of wood about three feet long and arrange them like bricks, fastening the boat together by running a great number of long bolts through the three-foot pieces; and when they have thus fastened the boat together, they lay crosspieces over the top, using no ribs for the sides; and with they caulk the seams with papyrus.” Up to this point, he’s described the Egyptian method of using irregular planks in their construction as well as the ribless structure of their ships, like the Khufu ship we discussed earlier. Herodotus continues, “They make on steering-oar for it, which is passed through the bottom of the boat; and they have a mast of acacia and sails of papyrus. These boats cannot sail upriver unless there be a very fresh wind blowing, but are towed from shore: down-stream, however, they travel as follows:—they have a door-shaped crate made of tamarisk wood and reed mats sewn together, and also a stone of about 114 pounds weight bored with a hole; and of these the boatman lets the crate float on in front of the boat, fastened with a rope, and the stone drag behind by another rope. The crate then, as the force of the stream presses upon it, goes on swiftly and draws on the baris (for so these boats are called), while the stone dragging after it behind and sunk deep in the water keeps its course straight. These boats they have in great numbers and some of them carry many thousands of talents’ burden. 

- Herodotus, The Histories, 2.96

Assuming that Herodotus here is using the measure of a Greek talent, then one talent weighed in the ballpark of 26 kilograms, or 57 pounds. Obviously, when we multiply that out to even a few thousand, we’re talking about ships that could carry massive amounts of cargo, or, a few very huge and dense obelisks or granite pillars. Essentially, what Herodotus is describing here is the same idea as an anchor, but here it doesn’t weigh enough to anchor the ship in one place, just enough to slow it down and keep it under control. The wooden raft-type float that he says was attached to the front of the ship would catch the current, pulling the ship forward, while the stone attached to the ship’s stern would slow the force of the downstream current, allowing the sailors to steer the ship. This method would have been used often, since the Nile River winds blow north-to-south, preventing the ships from using a sail when traveling downstream, as was often the case for the stone and materials that were quarried in Upper Egypt and brought north. There is some debate about the fact that Pliny’s example gives the impression that a dual-barge was used to transport an obelisk, while Herodotus only alludes to single ships transporting the “many thousands of talents’ burden.” The catamaran-like dual barges would have worked in theory, but as we’ll see, there isn’t any real pictorial evidence of that type of transport vessel. 

Speaking of pictorial evidence, lets transition over to looking at a few examples of heavy-transport ships from the different periods of ancient Egypt. The oldest depiction of such a vessel discovered to date is from the causeway of the pyramid of Unas, a pyramid that was built at the end of the fifth dynasty, circa 2300 BCE or so. The image of the ship itself and the columns that it is carrying are hard to make out, and really don’t tell us that much about the structure of the ship in any event. The inscription accompanying the image though tells us that the columns came from the granite quarries of Elephantine, or Aswan, a prime source of granite in ancient Egypt. 

The most useful depiction of heavy-transport ships come from later on in Egypt’s history, specifically, from a depictions associated with the 18th dynasty queen, Hatshepsut. The 18th dynasty roughly spanned 1500 to 1400 BCE, and another 18th dynasty pharaoh before Hatshepsut was Thuthmose I. We know that he also used heavy transport vessels thanks to an inscription that was commissioned by an official from the reign of Thuthmose I, a man named Ineni. Ineni’s inscription is almost like a biography of the accomplishments he oversaw during his tenure, this specific accomplishment making mention of obelisks being transported by ship to Karnak, where Ineni was the architect overseeing the construction of the Temple of Karnak: “I inspected the erection of two obelisks ////// built the august boat of 120 cubits in its length, 40 cubits in its width, in order to transport these obelisks. (They) came in peace, safety and prosperity, and landed at Karnak.” Of these two obelisks, one is still standing at Karnak to this day, so we know that the two together weigh over 350 tons, and the length conversions lead us to conclude that a single ship of 63 x 21 meters, or 206 x 69 feet, was able to carry both of these massive obelisks. The obelisks themselves are 23 meters long, so as we will discuss further below, it’s possible that they were laid end to end, but some scholars believe they were laid side-by-side on the deck. 

Moving forward, the most detailed and vivid depiction of a transport-ship comes from the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, the same place where we saw the most enlightening depictions of Egyptian voyages to Punt. This depiction shows a large ship carrying two obelisks laid end-to-end. The problem is that some interpret this depiction literally, that the Egyptians actually transported the obelisks end- to-end on the deck of an enormous ship. The obelisks at Hatshepsut’s temple at Thebes are 30 meters long and weigh around 330 tons each, so if they were really laid end-to-end, then the ship would have to be substantially larger than the ship described in the inscription about Ineni transporting the obelisks to Karnak. However, some archaeologists have pointed out that the Egyptians didn’t always use literal depictions, rather, the image of two objects, one above the other, is often supposed to convey the idea of one of them being behind the other. Thus, we can’t be 100% certain that the Hatshepsut ship carried the obelisks end-to- end, and then on top of that there’s the possibility that the dual-barge method described by Pliny was also used and just not depicted in a convention that makes sense to our modern eyes. 

While we can’t definitely know the technical details of this ship, the depiction does show at least five hogging hawsers, presumably such a large number because of the sheer weight of the ship’s cargo. One final detail from the relief confirms the fact that when heavy-transport ships were making their way downstream, against the wind, they were towed by tugboats. Again, we can’t discern the details from this depiction, but there’s enough there to tell that there were multiple ships involved in towing the heavily burdened ship down the river. I wasn’t able to find a full image of this depiction, but in his oft-quoted compilation Ancient Records of Egypt, James Henry Breasted described the relief like this: “A large tow-boat with the obelisks lying trussed upon it, is being towed by three rows of oared barges, nine in a row; each row headed by a pilot-boat. The tow- boat is accompanied by an escort of three boats in which religious ceremonies are being performed.” He also includes a very disjointed translation of the inscriptions which accompanied the image of the obelisk transport, translations that tell a tale of the transport of the obelisks, a great gathering of people to rejoice over their safe arrival, and a dedication ceremony before they were erected at Hatshepsut’s temple. 

When all is said and done, we know that the ancient Egyptians were proficient shipbuilders who could us the advantage those ships provided to transport enormous monuments and amounts of building material. There’s perhaps no better example than the famed Collosi of Memnon, the imposing twin statues of Amenhotep III that sit across the Nile from modern-day Luxor. Amenhotep III reigned about a century after Hatshepsut, so the fact that these 720-ton statutes were transported from the quartzite quarry where they were cut confirms the fact that Egypt had fine-tuned it’s ability to ship enormous objects. And don’t let Wikipedia fool you when it says that “They are too heavy to have been transported upstream on the Nile.” Although the nearest possible quarry where the quartzite could have come from is over 220 kilometers upstream from where the Collossi now sit, recent studies have shown that the Egyptian ship-building abilities demonstrated in the Hatshepsut barge and in earlier depictions would have been more than enough to build a ship capable of carrying one of the colossal statues. The authors of this study did multiple computer simulations to find out whether Egyptian ships could indeed carry a 720-ton statue. Even when they used plank and construction techniques similar to those used on the Khufu ship, a ship that was built a thousand years before the Colossi of Memnon were transported, they came up with a ship that was physically possible of bearing the load. That result is just staggering to me, and I think it shows that we don’t give ancient cultures enough credit for their ingenuity, but then again, maybe ancient alien theories rope in the listeners. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today’s episode, and that’s all we’re going to look at for ancient Egypt at this point. 

Sources

• Breasted, James Henry, Ancient Records of Egypt: The eighteenth dynasty (1906).
• Herodotus, The Histories, (Macaulay's English translation, republished 2004).
• Hocker, Frederick M., & Cheryl A. Ward, The Philosophy of Shipbuilding: Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Wooden Ships. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 35: 354-355.
• Löhner, Franz, Stone quarries in ancient Egypt. [link]
• Löhner, Franz, Transporting stone blocks down the Nile. [link]
• McGrail, Seán, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (2009).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, (Bostock's English translation, 1855).
• Wilkinson, Toby, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010).