About 130 miles south of the extreme tip of the Sinai peninsula, on the western shore of the Red Sea, lies the Egyptian port of Qesir. It is backed by the harsh, often snow-capped Red Sea mountains, the home of eagles, ibex, and gazelle, which yield only a bare existence to their nomadic inhabitants. The mountains are cut with wadis, ancient dried-up water courses, the paths of rivers which have long since ceased to flow but which still when the early summer comes, rush with water from the snow-laden heights. It is a strange and, even for Egypt, a paradoxical region, in a land crackling with paradox.
One of the largest of these dead river beds is the Wadi Hammamat which runs through the mountains due west of Qesir. Throughout Egypt’s history the wadi was a great trading route with the caravans moving to and from the sea coast and the Nile Valley cities, strung out along the river which here makes an enormous bend and runs, first eastwards and then turns back westwards, ultimately to resume its flow to the Mediterranean.
The mountains are rich in many prized stones including schist, which from the earliest times was used for making the cosmetic palettes which were a feature of early Egyptian ways of life and death. Gold is also found here, that metal which the Egyptians used with such abundance and delight.
The Wadi Hammamat forms a natural corridor through the eastern desert which links the river and the sea, with little more than a hundred miles between them. It is significant that all the principal archaeological evidence which indicates contact with Mesopotamia and western Asia is found in the predynastic and Early Dynastic sites which are concentrated along this stretch of the Nile. From Hierakonpolis in the south to El Badari in the north is a distance of only about 130 miles. On many artefacts of the late predynastic period, such as the hilts of ceremonial knives, on ceremonial maces, palettes and painted pottery, boats of an apparently Mesopotamian type with notably high prows and sterns have been identified; they are abundantly included in the carvings and drawings incised on the rock walls of the wadi. Clearly the boat was an important and even perhaps a sacred object to the people who inscribed so many representations of it on the walls of the wadi. If some travellers at least made the long haul from the Arabian Gulf, far away to the east, to Egypt they may well have thought the fact worth recording, the more so if the boat itself was invested with some sort of sacred character. Several of the representations show a large black ship with a huge sail, which seems to have been especially significant to those who recorded it.
From the headlands in the north, where the lagoons, canals, and rivers of what is now southern Iraq made movement by boat the natural means of transport for the early settlers in southern Mesopotamia, the Sumerians set out in search of trade. Hugging the western (Arabian) coast they would have landed at the several islands which were the most important components of the economy of the ancient Arabian Gulf. From these island Bahrain, though largely unpopulated in the early third millennium, was fertile with plentiful supplies of fresh water Tarut and, further south Umm an-Nar, they would have been able to take on water and provisions; the prevailing winds would have sped them on their journey. Then for six months of the year the voyage westwards from the mouth of the Gulf, beyond the Straits of Hormuz, would have been facilitated by currents which would have driven sailing craft rapidly along the south Arabian coast.
In the context of possible contacts with Egypt by the Sumerians and Elamites it is important to remember that the culture which flourished in the Arabian Gulf, even in its earliest manifestations in the Ubaid period, was a mercantile, seagoing culture, its people avid for trade. It is entirely possible that their enthusiasm for profit took them all the way across (or around) Arabia to the Valley. It may be argued that so substantial a voyage, around the Arabian peninsula, in extent amounting to some four thousand nautical miles, would have been far beyond the capacity or the confidence of early seamen. However, man has not changed so much since the end of the Neolithic period that the people of that time would not have found it as impossible to resist the challenge of pushing on beyond each day’s horizon as their successors would today.
World History
