Phoenician sailors circled Africa on Pharaoh Necho II’s orders, Herodotus wrote

When the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488, Europe regarded it as a new discovery. But the Greek historian Herodotus had written about such a voyage two thousand years earlier. In his account, sailors left the Red Sea, went all the way round Africa and returned to Egypt through the Mediterranean. The sailors were Phoenicians, sent by the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II. The most interesting part of the voyage is the one Herodotus himself could not believe.

Background: Pharaoh Necho and his canal

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Necho II was a king of Egypt’s 26th dynasty who ruled from 610 to 595 BC. It was a time when the Assyrian empire was collapsing and the power of Babylon was rising. Necho sent armies into Syria, but in 605 BC the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar defeated his army in the great battle of Carchemish.

In the second book of his "Histories", Herodotus writes that Necho was the first king to try to dig a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. It was later completed by the Persian king Darius. But an oracle warned that he was doing the work for foreigners, and Necho abandoned the digging halfway. He then had warships built, some for the northern sea, the Mediterranean, and some for the Arabian Gulf, the Red Sea. Herodotus says the docks for these ships could still be seen in his own time.

The Phoenicians came from the cities of the eastern Mediterranean coast, such as Tyre and Sidon, which are in present-day Lebanon. Jona Lendering, editor of the history website Livius, writes that they were the best sailors of their age and had founded many settlements in the west, such as Carthage.

The voyage: three years and two harvests

In Book Four, while discussing the continents of the world, Herodotus writes that Libya (that is, Africa) is surrounded by sea on all sides except the part joined to Asia. He says Necho, king of Egypt, was the first, as far as he knew, to show this. After stopping the canal, Necho sent Phoenicians in ships. He ordered them to sail round Africa, enter the northern sea through the "Pillars of Hercules" (the Strait of Gibraltar) and so return to Egypt.

The Phoenicians left the Red Sea and kept sailing in the southern sea. According to Herodotus, when autumn came, they would land on whatever part of the African coast they had reached, sow seed in the ground and wait for the harvest. After reaping the grain, they set sail again. Two years passed in this way. In the third year they passed through the Pillars of Hercules and reached Egypt.

The sun on the right hand

Herodotus then writes the sentence that became the heart of the story: "They told something which I do not believe, though another man may, that as they sailed round Libya they had the sun on their right hand."

For a Mediterranean sailor, the midday sun is always in the south, on the left hand when heading west. Lendering explains that for a ship south of the equator, sailing west round the southern tip of Africa, the sun would be in the north, on the right hand. Herodotus did not know that the earth is round, so he could not accept this. Britannica makes the same argument. It writes that the sailors apparently achieved the feat, because they said that for part of the voyage the sun was on their right hand.

A failed attempt: Sataspes

At the same point Herodotus also tells the story of a Persian nobleman, Sataspes, who was a nephew of Darius. As punishment for a crime, King Xerxes ordered him to be impaled. But on the intercession of his mother, the sentence was changed. He was to sail round Africa and reach the Arabian Gulf. Sataspes went in the opposite direction, leaving through Gibraltar, and sailed south for many months. On his return he said that on the farthest coast he had seen small people who wore clothes made of palm leaves, and that his ship could not go any further and stopped. Xerxes did not accept his account and carried out the original sentence. The story shows how difficult this voyage was thought to be in ancient times.

Did the voyage really happen?

Herodotus is the only ancient source for the voyage. Whether the Phoenicians really sailed round the whole of Africa is still debated by scholars. Many regard the "sun on the right hand" as strong evidence for it. Others think a single source is not enough for so large a claim. According to Lendering, the Greek geographer Ptolemy later declared a voyage round Africa impossible, after which the story was generally treated as doubtful. In 1488 Dias’s voyage showed that the sea round Africa was indeed open.

In 2008 Philip Beale, a former British naval officer, set out from Syria in a wooden ship called "Phoenicia", built on ancient Phoenician methods and designs. According to Motor Boat & Yachting, the ship sailed about 17,000 miles in two stages. It went through the Red Sea, past the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and through Gibraltar, and returned in 2010 to the Syrian port of Arwad. The experiment showed that such a ship could make the voyage. It is not proof of what Necho’s sailors actually did.

Significance

If Herodotus’s account is correct, this was the first known sea voyage round Africa, nearly two thousand years before Dias and Vasco da Gama. Even if it is not, the story for centuries made people think about how large Africa is and how far the sea around it extends. According to Herodotus, at the same place, the northern end of the Red Sea, another sailor arrived some time later after travelling down the Indus. He will be covered in the next instalment.

Next instalment: Scylax: Darius’s sailor, from the Indus to the Red Sea.