A slightly unusual historical post from me today, being about an event over half a millennium later than my normal era. Today I am writing about an expedition commissioned by Pharaoh Necho II, a 26th dynasty Egyptian who reigned around 600 BCE. He is famous for a couple of things, not least being the fact that he was the first pharaoh to cross the Euphrates River since Thutmose III – over 800 years earlier. Sadly the military world had passed the Egyptians by, and by the end of Necho’s reign he had been driven back again, and almost all of their former territories had been captured by the Babylonians.

But Necho was more than just an over-ambitious general – he enthusiastically sponsored major building works and exploratory journeys. Perhaps the most impressive of these, and the one which ought to be remembered as one of the world’s great expeditions, was to commission Phoenician sailors to go around Africa. They set off from the Red Sea, and after some three years reappeared through the Straights of Gibraltar to dock at Alexandria. Not all of the journey was at sea – they moored for long enough in a few places to grow crops. The account comes down to us via the Greek historian Herodotus, and confirmed to the ancient world that Africa could in fact be circumnavigated. It took European sailors until 1488 to replicate the rounding of Africa.

There is general agreement that the Phoenicians were great sailors and explorers. Their homeland was in what is now Lebanon and Syria, but Phoenician colonies were located in many parts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts of north Africa, Spain and Portugal. The city of Carthage was originally a Phoenician colony which attained considerable influence and power in her own right, until being crushed by Rome. Phoenician and Carthaginian ships certainly reached the British Isles, and there are regular speculations just how far their crews travelled. Did they reach the groups of islands out in the Atlantic? Possibly the Americas? There is no certain evidence of this, but their ships were certainly seaworthy enough for it to be a real possibility.

In fairness one should point out that not all Egyptologists feel that the story is credible. Opinion was similarly divided in the ancient world: Pliny believed it, but Ptolemy did not. Herodotus records his personal disbelief, but does faithfully record evidence that the ships were at very least south of the equator, with the sun at noon to the north rather than the south. Given the knowledge we now have about journeys that the Phoenicians did undertake, and the general robustness of their ship construction, we can certainly say that they could have done it.

Why am I writing about this? Well, I have been reading up about Phoenician shipping as very early research for another idea… the next book after The Flame Before Us is complete!

(Picture and map source – http://www.phoenicia.org.uk/)