David Fabre

Flawed but useful. As near as I can tell, the author, David Fabre, wrote his PhD dissertation on ancient Egyptian maritime trade; a publisher then came along and suggested that with the addition of some photographs this could be converted to a “coffee-table” book of the sort popular among amateur Egyptologists. The result is pretty uneven.


First off, despite the title, the book reflects Fabre’s dissertation in that it is only concerned with Egyptian commercial seafaring; there’s only cursory mention of Egyptian naval power. At various times in history, this was considerable; the Egyptian navy under Rameses III was able to defeat the “Sea Peoples” (who had previously smashed the navies of the Mycenaeans and Hittites) in an epic battle off the Nile Delta. There’s only one paragraph of text on this, and a difficult-to-decipher photograph of a bas-relief from the funerary temple of Rameses III. Since this is the first recorded naval battle in history, you would expect a more extensive study in a book ostensibly about Egyptian seafaring.


Next, the photographs and illustrations are only casually related to the text. They are not identified by figure or plate numbers; thus, when Fabre’s text refers (for example) to illustrations of ships on the walls of the funerary temple of Hatshepshut, those reliefs are reproduced but you have to go leafing through the book to find them. They’re also reproduced without any commentary except a short caption; given the sometimes confusing conventions of Egyptian art it would be very useful to have some of the illustrations “interpreted”, with highlights or arrows overlaid to relate to things discussed in the text.


Much of the book is highly technical, with extensive discussions of the meaning and etymology of various terms relating to seafaring: for example, several paragraphs on the word jmy-jrty, normally translated as “director of the crew” but literally “he who has the eyes”. Unless you are familiar with the convention for transliterating hieroglyphs to the Roman alphabet, you’re not going to get very far with this, even if it interests you. There are whole chapters of this sort of thing, discussing terminology for various port officials, ship’s crew, merchants, and so on. If you want to practice your Egyptian, whole blocks of text are presented in the original hieroglyphs, apparently for no other reason but to show off a nice font.



Although there’s a chapter on “naval architecture”, this is concerned with details of construction and doesn’t go into some of the genuine mysteries of Egyptology: how Egyptian ships worked. For example, the famous “boat beneath the pyramid”: Fabre discuses the method of attaching the planks together, but says nothing about something that has puzzled Egyptologists for some time - how did the oars work? The boat has no oarlocks or even places for rowers to sit; in the reconstruction, the oars are shown leaning against the cabin, not a very useful location. Another genuine mystery is how the sails were worked on an Egyptian sailing ship, specifically how the yards were raised and lowered: Fabre says “This yard was hoisted or lowered with the aid of a halyard that passed over a pulley or a masthead block and tackle...”. The problem with this statement is that there is no evidence the ancient Egyptians knew of the block and tackle. No ancient Egyptian block and tackle has ever been discovered, and no tomb or temple ship illustration, despite being highly detailed in other respects, shows anything like a pulley or a block and tackle. Every ancient ship depiction seems to show the yards more-or-less permanently attached to the mast; yet there are reliefs showing the yards in a raised position and a lowered position. Did Egyptian sailors have to climb the mast, untie the upper yard, then lower it by direct muscle powered? Seems unlikely but there doesn’t seem to be any other way to do it.


Despite these criticisms, there is some useful stuff here. There’s a theory among some Egyptologists that the Egyptians had no seafaring capability at all, confining themselves to Nile travel and conducting all overseas trade in foreign bottoms. Fabre gently but thoroughly debunks this, pointing out temple reliefs that show Egyptian ships sailing over water populated with marine (as opposed to freshwater) life, and extensive Egyptian harbor installations along the Red Sea coast.


Fabre also discusses whether Egyptian ships could tack and how close to the wind they could sail. Pharaonic period ships had no keels, which must have made them interesting to handle in a cross wind; however, Fabre calls attention to a couple interesting features that may have substituted for a keel. One is the steering oar. Egyptian ships almost always have at least a pair, and sometimes more - up to three on each side of the stern. These typically passed through a ring on the outside of the hull and another ring on top of a post or mast near the upper end of the “oar”; thus the oar was only free to rotate. The steering oars are often quite long and projected deep into the water, possibly acting as a keel. Another interesting feature is the “tension cable”: Egyptian ocean-going ships and large river ships had “girdles” of rope wrapped around the bow and stern and connected by a cable which passed over several “Y” shaped supports spaced along the deck. Tightening and loosening this cable would have changed the ship’s shape, and Fabre points out illustrations showing bars passing through the cable, that could have been used to tighten and loosen it “on the fly”, in the manner of a Spanish windlass. Distorting the ship so the center of the hull was deeper in the water may have allowed it to act as a pseudokeel. Finally, Fabre calls attention to a single temple relief that shows the upper and lower yards on an Egyptian ship tilted at a considerable angle to the mast and at an angle to each other, thus effectively converting a square-rigged ship to a lateen rig. (There’s a possibility that Fabre doesn’t mention, though; because of the way the Egyptians treated perspective, this illustration may be intended to show a ship with the yards at an oblique angle to the centerline of the ship but still parallel to the water surface).


One more interesting suggestion is that the feature now known as the Wadi Tumilat/Ismailia Canal may have provided a connection between the Nile and the Gulf of Suez as late as New Kingdom time. Thus, Hatshepsut’s famous expedition to the Land of Punt (usually assumed to be somewhere near Somalia) may have embarked at Thebes/Waset, sailed north up the Nile to this connection, across to the Gulf of Suez, then south to Punt. This watercourse is usually assumed to have been opened by the Late Period Pharaoh Nekau (Necho in Herodotus) and again by Darius during the Persian period, but Fabre cites geological evidence showing it was still an active branch of the Nile at least in the Old Kingdom and possibly much later.


Since this is such a mixed book, I have to give a mixed recommendation. Despite its large format, it’s not really a “coffee table” work, but if you want something for either a maritime or Egyptological library, and you can get it as a remainder, it’s probably worthwhile.… (altro)