Page 321 - The Tigris Expedition

In the Indus Valley in Search of Meluhha
their verdict: ‘The boat from the seal is without doubt a papyrus
boat’,6 and ‘This is a splendid seal . . . there is an echo of prehistoric
Egypt----- ’7
Did the ancient Indus people actually have access to papyrus?
African plant. The early ships of Egypt were indeed
Papyrus was an
made from papyrus. At that time papyrus grew in abundance all
along the Nile and in wide areas of adjacent Africa. It spread to t e
Mediterranean side of Asia Minor, where rare patches of papyrus
plants have survived into modern times, where reed-ships are
incised on walls of ancient caves in Israel and on Hittite seals at
Gaziantep, and where the Prophet Isaiah (18. ii) speaks of reed-ships
arriving with messengers from Egypt. Papyrus must have been
known in Corfu at one time, where fishermen made bulrush-boats
until recently and called them papyrella. It has survived since
antiquity on the island of Sicily, while reed-boats (but no papyrus)
have survived on nearby Sardinia. It was brought by early seafarers
beyond Gibraltar and planted on the Canary Islands, where
Romans to their surprise found papyrus growing in the rivers.8
Who brought root-stocks of this difficult fresh-water plant to those
far Atlantic islands is not known, but the Phoenicians were there.
They left reed-ship designs on one of their most beautiful vases
recently found on the ocean floor off their former Atlantic port of
Cadiz in Spain, but no papyrus. At the former Phoenician port of
Lixus, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, the Berbers built reed-
boats until recently, but of an inferior river-grass through local lack
of papyrus. Papyrus on the Canary Islands has long since disap­
peared, and when the medieval Portuguese rediscovered the
islands a couple of millennia after the Phoenicians, the blond
guanche islanders did not know how to build watercraft of any
material whatever, though they made plank coffins for their
mummies and practised cranial trepanation and other arts that
clearly revealed their former contact with sailors from the far corner
of the Mediterranean. And together with fragments of tripod vases
of Phoenician origin, archaeologists have found terra-cotta seals
indistinguishable in type and decor from specific Mesopotamian
seals; they are on exhibition in the Gran Canaria Museum, together
with a selection of typical Mexican terra-cotta seals to show their
striking similarity.
Clearly papyrus was a most useful river plant to ancient deep-sea
navigators, and attempts to plant the tubers might have been made
with varying success in areas where there is no papyrus today. The
marshes surrounding the oldest Mexican pyramid, at La Venta on
267