Page 382 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
near to that forbidden coast, and we must manoeuvre with utmost
caution not to get within sight of Cape Guardafui, the projecting tip
of the Horn of Africa, where the cast coast turns abruptly west-
southwest into the Gulf of Aden.
‘I think we should stay south of centre of the Gulf of Aden,’ said
Norman, ‘and one thing we’ll have to do is be very accurate. We
have only a fifteen mile gap between the continents of Asia and
Africa, and we’ve got to hit that slot.’
The first political breakthrough came. Djibouti, a tiny new
African republic in the innermost corner of the Gulf of Aden, just at
the entrance to the Red Sea, had given permission for our landing.
That little nation, not much more than a good port surrounded by a
small piece of desert, was neutral.
We sailed past the cape of Punt far out of sight. In there, behind
the horizon, the most developed nations of our civilisation were
unloading the latest inventions for butchering people. Queen Hat-
shepsut’s Egyptian fleet had come here three and a half thousand
years ago to fetch living myrrh trees for planting at Thebes.
On a reed-ship sailing between the continents there is plenty of
time to meditate. Except for human character, much has changed
on all continents during the last five thousand years. Today the
environmental changes accelerate around us. The road ahead is as
unknown as is most of the road behind us, and the more we
understand of the past the better we can predict the future. With a
pedigree recently pushed back to over two million years we have
much to learn from future excavations. The greatest discovery of
recent years is how incredibly little we yet know of man’s past, of
the beginning. In the first decades after Darwin and the discovery of
the unknown Sumerian civilisation, we thought we had all the
answers: the jungle gave birth to man and two large and fertile river
valleys gave birth to twin civilisations. Egypt and Mesopotamia.
That made sense.
That two amazing civilisations suddenly arose side by side in the
Middle East about 3000 bc was not surprising. The Garden of Eden
was there, and Adam and Eve were born only a few millennia
earlier. Then came the discoveries in the Indus Valley. First the well-
preserved twin cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. But then fiel
archaeologists found the ruins of the first civilised city builders here
too, which dated roughly from 3000 bc as well. These three great
civilisations surrounding the Arabian peninsula appeared as rea y
developed, organised dynasties at the same astonishingly high eve
and all three remarkably alike. The definite impression is as 1

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