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Some Red Sea Ports in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

1911; Wiley; Volume: 37; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1778279

1475-4959

J. W. Crowfoot,

Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

ANGLO-EGYPTIAN STJDAN. it is enough for us to register the fact that the supply of frankincense and myrrh for the divine service and other needs must have occupied traflickers long before the days of Queen Hatshepsut, perhaps even before the time of the First Dynasty.*The great journey blazoned on the walls of Deir el Bahri, and the other journeys mentioned on hieroglyphic inscriptions of vanous dates, represent only the ofEcial Egyptian side of this trade, and the Egyptians were but interlopers in a trafiic which had existed for long centuries, and which then, as in later days, was oftenest in the hands of the dwellers in Southern Arabia.In this sea-borne trafiic watering-stations were as indispensable as coaling-stations are to-day, and at convenient intervals along the shores of the Red sea the merchantmen of Himyar and Saba must have had their ports of call in which to replenish their stock of drinking-water and escape from ugly weather.But for the position and character of the ports we can argue only from the analogy of later days.On the Eed sea, as in the island of Meroe, the Greeks are the first articulate interpreters of the country, and two writers in particular, Agatharchides and Artemidorus, have a special elaim to be remembered.Neither of the two was an explorer describing what he had seen with his own eyes, but both had access to the reports and commentaries of the travellers sent out by the earlier Ptolemies, and their works, which have reached us only in quotations preserved by Strabo, Diodorus, and Photius, enable us to get a clear idea of the character of voyages then made down the Eed sea.Agatharchides writes like a rhetorician interested in the sentimentai, or rather the sensational, side of human affairs, ever ready to draw moral conclusions pointed by picturesque description.The quota? tions which are directly attributed to Artemidorus are more businesslike : his book seems to have been simply a work of reference of the nature of a pilot's guide.A third Ptolemaic writer who deserves mention is the great geographer and mathematician Eratosthenes: according to Pliny, he established a station at Ptolemais in the Eed sea from which to take scientific observations in his attempt to lay the true foundations of geography, and although Pliny's statement is probably inaccurate in detail, it is to the scientific methods of Eratosthenes and his school that we owe such certainties as we have.This early Ptolemaic age reminds us curiously in many ways of the great European age of discoveries.We can feel, in the writings that have come down, that the Ptolemaic adventurers conceived themselves to be pioneers bursting into a new world of untold riches : they came upon traces of earlier adventurers, Egyptians and Sabaeans, but these had left no clear record, and the scanty signs and legends of their passing only added new glamour to the quest.In their intercourse with the natives, the best and the worst features of the later European planters might be paralleled.The very objects of their enterprises carry our thoughts * Compare Breasted, ' A History of Egypt,' p. 127, etc.