A 3800 year old design

In September 2005, researchers built a boat which was similar to the one that plied the bronze age route between Sur in Oman and Mandvi in Gujarat and set sail. This boat, unlike the bronze age ones, had GPS, navigation lights, emergence beacon and life jackets. Also an Indian naval vessel followed it. On the maiden journey, the boat did a Titanic.
In Egypt, recently, they built a ship modeled on a 3800 year old design and set sail.

Douglas fir from North America best resembled the cedar wood used by the Egyptians, in terms of strength and density. Naval architect Patrick Couser drew on better-known watercraft designs from ancient Egypt to design a ship which matched relief images seen on Hatshepsut’s funerary temple.
The 66-foot-long by 16-foot-wide ship was completed by October 2008 using ancient Egyptian techniques. Frames and nails didn’t enter the equation — instead planks were designed to fit like pieces of a puzzle. The timbers swelled snugly together after being immersed in the Nile River.[Sail Like An Egyptian | Popular Science]

They went down the Red Sea for about 150 miles, instead of the 2000 usually covered by these ships, and called it quits. The reasoning was simple: if modern ships cannot face pirates, what chance does a boat made of Douglas fir have?

5 thoughts on “A 3800 year old design

  1. http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Middle_East/Oman/photo313054.htm
    “Tim Severin decided to sail a dhow on a 6,000-mile voyage from the Persian Gulf to China. The design of Sohar (named for an ancient port said to have been the birthplace of the legendary Sinbad) was based on a drawing of a boom (a type of dhow) in a sixteenth-century Portuguese manuscript. The vessel’s hull was built of aini wood from India sewn together with 400 miles of hand-laid coconut cord from Agatti in the Lakshadweep Islands (Laccadives) off southwest India.”

  2. Hi jk,
    Interesting post…. Are these “prove-history” attempts documented somewhere? I had only heard of the Kon-Tiki adventure until I read this post!

  3. The puzzle arrangement of planks is a puzzle for me because you’ve mentioned the boats used to travel 2000 miles or so. Certain mechanics surely must be coming into play over here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *