From The Natural Navigator:
When trying to understand the role of the sun in ancient journeys, the sources become fewer and the journeys less well known. Herodotus writes about an exploratory voyage commissioned by the ancient Egyptian King Necho II in about 600 BC. Necho II reportedly prdered a Phoenician expedition to sail clockwise around Africa, starting at the Red Sea and returning to the mouth of the Nile.
They were gone for three years. Herotodus writes that the Phoenecians, upon returning from their epic expedition, reported that after sailing sought and then turning west, they found that the sun was on their right, the opposite direction to where they were used to seeing it or expecting it to be.
Contemporary astronomical science was simply not strong enough to fabricate such an accurate, fundamental and yet prosaic detail of where the sun would be after sailing past the Equator and heading into the southern hemisphere. It is is that leads many of today's historians to conclude that the journey must have taken place.
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Heroic journeys of antiquity
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8 comments:
AKH, some of it's a bit waffly, but I'm only a third of the way through.
That yarn has been contentious for centuries. Some people say that in H's time astronomy was good enough to allow fabrication of the story. Others point out that there are stretches of that journey where a boat of that period just could not have made any progress against wind and currents when sailing clockwise around Africa. But, on the other hand, the Phoenicians were fine sailors, and going anticlockwise in the Atlantic had gone further south than the Canaries along the African coast. They stopped short, though, of gold-rich areas because of the impossibility of return journeys by sea. And ditto the Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans later on.
The Portugese managed return journeys from further south much later, but they had better technology and the confidence and navigational knowledge to sail away from the African coast and return home through the mid-Atlantic. The Phoenicians were Mediterranean coast-huggers.
P.S. Try Irwin's "The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific". Superb.
D, the author admits that the story is contested. I'll see if I can track down that book.
Did they encounter any cows?
TFB, what, out at sea?
Sea-cows then.
So they were challenging sacred cows out at sea.
MikeW
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