And let’s face it, as long as the raw material was growing wild in local swamps, boats would be cheap and easy to build, and God help the man who didn’t have one. From before 7000 BC until the First Millennium, for at least eight thousand years, the Nile provided the great highway and papyrus provided the common material, one of the means by which the country could develop as a nation.
This dependency on boats persisted throughout all of recorded history. Boats were equated with life, an attitude that must be expected when one lives in a floodplain that is inundated for almost a third of the year. It is not surprising that papyrus boats go so far back in history models of papyrus boats from 5400–4000 BC are among the earliest datable evidence of boats themselves.
Papyrus reed boats serial#
Since reed boats have no keel, the long bundles of reeds would buckle unless kept under compression by the serial stays, so the stays served in place of a keel.Īll of this meant that boatbuilding required a great deal of rope, which in turn drove the need for rope production made from papyrus.
On a reed boat the stays serve a different purpose. On a modern sailboat the fore and aft stays are important: they keep the mast centered. If they had used a single stay, as in modern sailboats, the mast would have snapped or the stern of these ancient reed craft would have worked loose from the rest of the boat.
Papyrus reed boats series#
These consisted of a parallel series of six lines on either side of the bipod or A-frame mast, with all twelve lines (i.e., stays) anchored to the gunwales aft of mid-ships. This arrangement provided flexibility to the stern section of a reed boat and allowed the hull to follow the motion of the sea. Thus, many reed boats were probably equipped with an A-frame, a light frame made of wooden poles that had two feet held in place by a complicated set of lines called “serial stays.” These early vessels could not support a stepped mast typically made from a single heavy pole because with time it would work its way through the reed bundles. Reed boats sit high in the water and will not sink unless they are broken apart or become waterlogged, which happens if they are left for a year or two in water without being periodically dried out. The tighter the binding the better the buoyancy, much like the effect created by flotation tanks of modern times, another innovation that made for greater safety on the water. In building a reed boat, the trick is to tie the bundles in several places in order to trap air inside the reeds. And that was as true in prehistoric times as it is in the 21st century. Since boats made of wood were costly, everyday vessels-the thousands, even millions of small craft that were the work boats of ordinary souls-had to be made of cheap, reliable stuff. Today from satellite images, arable land in the Nile Valley is seen as a long green swath running the length of Egypt, with a bright blue river running down its center reminding everyone that if they intended to travel from one end of the country to the other, the message was clear: use a boat. From 5000 BC, well before the first wooden boats, it probably occurred to most Egyptians that travel by water was a must. Butzer, during late Paleolithic times the great bulk of early settlements were concentrated in the floodplains on the levees and the immediate riverbanks of the Nile. No other place on Earth has been in continuous cultivation for so long.”Īccording to Dr.
“Fundamentally … the system sustained an advanced civilization through numerous political upheavals and other destabilizing events over some 5,000 years. Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Policy Project, said that overall, Egypt’s system of basin irrigation proved inherently more stable from an ecological, political, social, and institutional perspective than that of any other irrigation-based society in human history, including the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia where a fallow year had to be interposed to rest the land between harvests on land that was also subject to salinization, something that did not happen along the Nile. This they did using a system that was the envy of all. It was the everyday business of the ancient Egyptians to produce food. By any standard the scale of achievement was enormous, but through it all, it seems clear that the economy remained rooted in agriculture. Excerpted from “Papyrus: The Plant That Changed the World: From Ancient Egypt to Today's Water Wars”
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