Ancient Maritime History

11:48 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT
This is a timeline of events in maritime history.

Age of Discovery[edit]

See also: Timeline of European exploration

Maritime history dates back thousands of years. In ancient maritime history,[1] evidence of maritime trade between civilizations dates back at least two millennia.[2] The first prehistoric boats are presumed to have been dugout canoes which were developed independently by various stone age populations. In ancient history, various vessels were used for coastal fishing and travel.[3]
The Arabian Sea has been an important marine trade route since the era of the coastal sailing vessels from possibly as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, certainly the late 2nd millennium BCE through later days[4] known as the Age of Sail. By the time of Julius Caesar, several well-established combined land-sea trade routes depended upon water transport through the sea around the rough inland terrain features to its north. Navigation was known in Sumer between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE, and was probably known by the Indians and the Chinese people before the Sumerians.[5] The Egyptianshad trade routes through the Red Sea, importing spices from the "Land of Punt" (East Africa) and from Arabia.[6][7]

Ancient Seafaring[edit]


Indigenous Americans making a dugout canoe, a practice which they had done for centuries

Maritime prehistory[edit]

The Indigenous of the Pacific Northwest are very skilled at crafting wood. Best known for totem poles up to 80 feet (24 m) tall, they also construct dugout canoes over 60 feet (18 m) long for everyday use and ceremonial purposes.[8]
The earliest seaworthy boats may have been developed as early as 45,000 years ago, according to one hypothesis explaining the habitation of Australia. Humans used boats for travel and eventually for food resources. In the history of whaling, humans began whaling in pre-historic times. The oldest known method of catching whales is to simply drive them ashore by placing a number of small boats between the whale and the open sea and attempting to frighten them with noise, activity, and perhaps small, non-lethal weapons such as arrows. Typically, this was used for small species, such as Pilot Whales, Belugas and Narwhals.
Over thousands of years of human migrations and the rise of ancient civilizations, seafaring exploration led to ocean trade routes. The earliest known reference to an organization devoted to ships in ancient India is to the Mauryan Empire from the 4th century BC. It is believed that the navigation as a science originated on the river Indus some 5000 years ago.

Ancient routes and locations[edit]

Ancient maritime routes usually began in the Far East or down river from Madhya Pradesh with transshipment via historic Bharuch (Bharakuccha), traversed past the inhospitable coast of today's Iran then split around Hadhramaut into two streams north into the Gulf of Aden and thence into the Levant, or south into Alexandria via Red Sea ports such as Axum. Each major route involved transhipping to pack animal caravan, travel through desert country and risk of bandits and extortionate tolls by local potentiates.[9]
Names, routes and locations of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea at the turn of the first millennium.

Much of the Radhanites' Indian Oceantrade would have depended on coastal cargo-ships such as this dhow.
Maritime trade began with safer coastal trade and evolved with the manipulation of the monsoon winds, soon resulting in trade crossing boundaries such as the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.[2] South Asia had multiple maritime trade routes which connected it to Southeast Asia, thereby making the control of one route resulting in maritime monopoly difficult.[2] Indian connections to various Southeast Asian states buffered it from blockages on other routes.[2] By making use of the maritime trade routes, bulk commodity trade became possible for the Romans in the 2nd century BCE.[10] A Roman trading vessel could span the Mediterranean in a month at one-sixtieth the cost of over-land routes.[11]
See also: Ship transport

Egypt[edit]


Egyptian ship, 1250 BC

World's oldest depiction of a stern-mounted steering rudder (c. 1420 BC)
The Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of sail construction.[12] This is governed by the science of aerodynamics. A primary feature of a properly designed sail is an amount of "draft", caused by curvature of the surface of the sail. Hannu was an ancient Egyptian explorer (around 2750 BC) and the first explorer of whom there is any knowledge. He made the first recorded exploring expedition and wrote his account of the exploration in stone. He traveled along the Red Sea to Punt and sailed to what is now part of eastern Ethiopia and Somalia. He returned to Egypt with great treasures, including precious myrrh, metal and wood. It must be said also about warships. Undoubtedly, warships of Ancient Egypt began in the early Middle Kingdom, and perhaps - at the end of the Old Kingdom, but the first mention and a detailed description of a large enough and heavily armed ship dates from XVI BC. "And I ordered to build twelve warships with rams, dedicated to Amunor Sobek, or Maat and Sekhmet, whose image was crowned best bronze noses. Carport and equipped outside rook over the waters, for many paddlers, having covered rowers deck not only from the side, but and top. and they were on board eighteen oars in two rows on the top and sat on two rowers, and the lower - one, a hundred and eight rowers were. And twelve rowers aft worked on three steering oars. And blocked Our Majesty ship inside three partitions (bulkheads) so as not to drown it by ramming the wicked, and the sailors had time to repair the hole. And Our Majesty arranged four towers for archers - two behind, and two on the nose and one above the other small - on the mast with narrow loopholes. they are covered with bronze in the fifth finger (3.2mm), as well as a canopy roof and its rowers. and they have (carried) on the nose three assault heavy crossbow arrows so they lit resin or oil with a salt of Seth (probably nitrate) tore a special blend and punched (?) lead ball with a lot of holes (?), and one of the same at the stern. and long ship seventy five cubits (41m), and the breadth sixteen, and in battle can go three-quarters of iteru per hour (about 6.5 knots)..." The text of the tomb of Amenhotep I (KV39). When Thutmose III achieved warships displacement up to 360 tons and carried up to ten new heavy and light to seventeen catapults based bronze springs, called "siege crossbow" - more precisely, siege bows. Still appeared giant catamarans that are heavy warships and times of Ramesses III used even when the Ptolemaic dynasty.[13]

The world according to Herodotus, 440 BC
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Necho II sent out an expedition of Phoenicians, which in three years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa to the mouth of the Nile. At some point between 610 and before 594 BC, Necho reputedly commissioned an expedition of Phoenicians, who it is said in three years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa back to the mouth of the Nile. Some Egyptologists dispute that an Egyptian Pharaoh would authorize such an expedition,[14] except for the reason of trade in the ancient maritime routes.
The belief in Herodotus' account, handed down to him by oral tradition,[15] is primarily because he stated with disbelief that the Phoenicians "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right - to northward of them" (The Histories 4.42) -- in Herodotus' time it was not generally known that Africa was surrounded by an ocean (with the southern part of Africa being thought connected to Asia[16]). So fantastic an assertion is this of a typical example of some seafarers' story and Herodotus therefore may never have mentioned it, at all, had it not been based on facts and made with the according insistence.[17]

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