Page 20 - The Tigris Expedition

In Search of the Beginnings
lower the maddened mainsail, we heard a sharp report overhead,
followed by a terrible crash. The vessel leaned over; everything to
cling to leaned over, as I looked up and tried with my feeble
flashlight to discern what had happened up there.
In fact, the solid topmast had broken into splinters. The main
piece dangled upside down in front of the mainsail with the sharp
clawlike end of the fracture threatening to rip the canvas which
fluttered and battered like a huge kite above our heads, pulling
the vessel ever further over on to its starboard side. A chasing
wave caught at the edge of the sail and refused to let go. Everybody
with a free hand gathered to try to drag the drowning canvas
back to the ship. We feared the worst. Any normal vessel
would have been in the utmost peril of capsizing or springing
a leak.
But this was not a normal vessel in the eyes of a modern sailor.
This was a kind of ship once used by the earliest Sumerians, a kind
of ship regarded by modern scholars as a mere river boat. As wave
upon wave thundered aboard the uncontrolled vessel while the
ocean held the corner of our mainsail in its grip, it seemed for a
while that anything could happen. Whatever did happen would
give the answer to one of the questions that had led to the experi­
ment: how seaworthy was such a pre-European vessel. It was for a
lesson like this that we had come on board. To know the Sumerian
hardships and pleasures, and to feel on our own skins their practical
problems at sea.
I thought of the warm, dry ground between the firm date palms
in the Garden of Eden. Would I have started this if I had known that
a moment like this was awaiting us? I believe so. I believe we all
realised that one cannot go to sea in an unfamiliar kind of ship
without at some point running into hardship and trouble.
This was my third ocean voyage on board a reed-ship, but it was
the first in which we did not simply drift with the elements. This
time there was no marine conveyor belt to carry us to our destina­
tion. Yet our previous experience of the Egyptian-type papyrus
ships gave us great advantages, for in ship design the earliest
Sumerians and the earliest Egyptians have a common heritage.
Scholars had even pointed out that the oldest hieroglyphic sign for
‘ship’ in Sumer was the same as the one for ‘marine’ in the earliest
hieroglyphic script of Egypt.1 It depicted a sickle-shaped reed-boat
with crosswise lashings around the vessel and reeds spreading at
bow and stern. Could this mean that the earliest scribes in these two
countries had inherited the idea of a script from a now lost common
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