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1: The deepwater reed ship
2: Harvesting berdi reed in the marshes of southern Iraq
1: From Iraq
to Oman: On
the Shatt-al-Arab Waterway
2: Bahrain,
Dilmun, and the Persian Gulf
1: Across the Indian Ocean: To the
center of Indus Valley
civilization
2: From Indus Valley
to the outskirts of ancient Egyptian civilization
Route of the reed ship Tigris
through the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean
(after Johanssen, 1999).
The reed ship Tigris (photo courtesy
).
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Section 1: Thor
Heyerdahl and the Mesopotamian reed ship
1: The deepwater reed ship
In the years following the Ra
expeditions, Thor Heyerdahl continued to study the
reed boat construction methods of traditional peoples. His focus shifted from Egypt to Mesopotamia, the cradle of
civilization. In the British Museum, he saw a wall relief removed
from the famous archaeological site and ancient city of Nineveh, across the Tigris River from present-day Mosul in Iraq. The relief apparently depicted a sea battle
between two reed ships thousands of years ago. Yet modern scholarship barely mentioned
reed ships in ancient Mesopotamia. Heyerdahl
noticed a jar in the museum as well, one that seemed to indicate that ancient
reed boats were fitted with keels or centerboards. If true, it was an apparent indication that
this vital technological artifact was not exclusive to Asia and Ecuador as scholars had long
presumed.
Heyerdahl recognized at once that
if Sumerian or Assyrian cultures in fact used reed ships for naval battles,
and for more than river travel, they must have known how to sail them, not
simply drift on board them. If Heyerdahl wanted to retrace an ancient sea route down the
Tigris-Euphrates Valley, then beyond the Persian Gulf and into the Indian Ocean, he would not have ocean
currents at his disposal. For the
first time in his career as history’s foremost archaeological experimenter,
he would have to reinvent a way of sailing that had not been used in
thousands of year.
2: Harvesting berdi reed in the marshes of
southern Iraq
In Iraq, Heyerdahl
gathered evidence for the ancient use of maritime vessels made from a tall
freshwater reed called berdi. There was more information, as well, on
coatings the ancients may have used to protect these reeds against water
absorption. Asphalt in some kind of
mixture with pitch and oil was mentioned.
Much more importantly, Heyerdahl learned
from the marsh Arabs of Iraq a vital piece of data on the performance of berdi that
would influence the entire outcome of his planned experiment. Berdi, they said, must be cut in August, and only in
August, or it absorbs water quickly and sinks. The berdi cut in August was dried for two or three weeks and
then used for the reed houses in which the Arabs dwelled. Estimations of the buoyancy of properly
harvested berdi
ranged to upwards of a year. This was
a new, seasonal aspect of reed boat construction that no one had considered
before.
As with Ra II, Heyerdahl brought Aymara
Indians from Lake Titicaca to construct his new reed ship in Iraq in September 1977. When American navigator Norman Baker
arrived to join the expedition, he was impressed with model tests of the
raft. Unlike the previous reed boat
expeditions, the Tigris would be subjected to
severe tests of both river and coastwise navigation. But the crew was supremely confident as the
construction progressed. As Norman
Baker recalled, by the time of the Tigris expedition, Heyerdahl had unlocked the secret to reed boat
construction that he had been searching for for
fifteen years.
“These boats could be made
indefinitely buoyant if the reeds were harvested at the right time, in the
month of August, when the sap was in the entire stalk—a stalk which grows
more than fifteen feet high. It’s only
when the blossom blooms at the top of the reed, that it is filled with
sap. After that bloom is over, the sap
retreats back down the reed stalk to the roots. We had harvested these reeds with their
capillary tubes completely empty, in December, on Ra I and Ra II. The reeds for Tigris were not only harvested at the right time of year, the boat
itself was fitted with a centerboard, as Thor had seen on the jar in the British Museum” (Norman Baker, personal
interview, July 8, 2000).
These two improvements led to the most seaworthy reed ship ever
constructed in the modern age. When
completed, this new reed ship, christened Tigris, was sixty-feet long, nearly twice the length of Ra II.
To handle the bigger craft there were eleven crewmembers instead of
the previous eight.
Section 2: From
Iraq to Oman
1: On the Shatt-al-Arab
Waterway
On November 11th, the Tigris was ready to slide into the waters of the Shatt-al-Arab
waterway, the gateway to the Persian Gulf. But when the massive
reed ship was maneuvered toward the river, the bow tilted into the water as
the stern stuck in the mud. It was a
near-disaster, especially since Heyerdahl’s Aymaras had already returned to South American, and if
the ship were badly damaged there were no expert reed boat builders on hand
to repair the vessel. A passing
Russian truck later supplied the necessary shove to get the Tigris afloat, and the next day snorkelers reported to Heyerdahl
that no serious damage had been done.
The next challenge was to get the cumbersome craft downriver to
the sea. But the river currents
waffled the ship from shore to shore, as a chase boat scurried along
behind. The massive steering oars dug
into the river bottom, threatening to snap.
Then the river smoothed out, and the crew began to gain in their
ability to control the vessel’s movements.
They spent their first night on board more confident in both the Tigris and themselves.
During the days that followed, the Tigris moved slowly down the heavily polluted Shatt-al-Arab
waterway, with cakes of white chemical broth seeping along the edges of the berdi
reeds. From the air, it looked like
the reed ship was sailing through the ice floes of the Arctic Ocean. Extracting the reed ship from the Gulf
turned into an even greater challenge.
Contrary winds and currents, looming oil platforms and supertankers,
and a lack of knowledge of how to turn the great ship into the wind, forced Tigris into dangerous shallows, from where Heyerdahl
was forced to pay ransom for a tow by a pirate dhow. Later, a Russian ship towed Tigris toward safer waters near Bahrain, but not before ripping
large chunks of the berdi
reeds from the bow of the ship.
2: Bahrain, Dilmun, and the Persian Gulf
Landing at Bahrain, Heyerdahl
searched for the legendary site of Dilmun. It was this legendary ‘place in the east’
from which Sumerian mariners claimed their origins, and to which they
apparently returned to gather raw materials from local mines. Heyerdahl and
Norman Baker studied dock areas where ancient mariners loaded blocks of stone
onto shallow draft vessels more than 4,000 years ago, and speculated how this
could have been accomplished with a reed boat like the Tigris.
Once safely outside the Straits of Hormuz,
Baker and the crew began to gain control of Tigris. The reed ship now
responded well to the tiller and, following the curve of the Arabian peninsula, the whole of the Indian Ocean lay before the crew. First, Tigris called at Oman, where a Mesopotamian
ziggurat-style pyramid—the first located outside the Tigris-Euphrates valley
itself—had just been discovered. Here,
Heyerdahl once again searched for the fabled site
of Dilmun.
Section 3:
Across the Indian Ocean
1: To the center of Indus Valley civilization
As 1977 turned to 1978, Heyerdahl set
course for Pakistan, and the ancient culture
center of the Indus valley. On January 26th, 1978, the crew of Tigris picked up the island of Astola off Pakistan. Heyerdahl had
demonstrated that a primitive reed boat could link Mesopotamia with the Asian
sub-continent civilization of the Indus Valley. If the experiment had ended here it would
have been considered an enormous success, but Heyerdahl
wanted to go even farther. As he
wrote: “We were learning from people with centuries of experience, and were
at any rate doing far better than during the first fumbling experiment with Ra” (Heyerdahl
1980, 261).
2: From Indus Valley to the outskirts of ancient Egyptian civilization
With the reeds floating higher after three months than Ra II did after three weeks, the crew
agreed to cross the Indian Ocean once again, and try to reach the edge of the Egyptian realm near
present-day Somalia. Heyerdahl thought
they might even sail down the coast of Africa and cross the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere, and demonstrate
the global reach of the reed ship.
With finances dwindling, the crew instead set sail for Somalia, in an attempt to link
the three great culture areas of the Old World.
Two months later, on March
28th, the Tigris raised the African
coast. But there was nowhere to land
safely. All of the small nations
around Djibouti seemed to be at war with
each other. Baker and several of the
crew were in favor of sailing Tigris up into the Red Sea, but neither nation on
its shores responded to Heyerdahl’s request. Military operations filled the waters and
the skies. It was easy to conclude
that humanity had made little progress since the last reed boat arrived from Mesopotamia 4,000 years ago. Frustrated, Heyerdahl
called the crew together, where they drafted an appeal to the United Nations,
protesting “against the inhuman elements in the world of 1978 to which we
have come back as we reach land from the open sea” (ibid, 336). The crew decided to burn Tigris rather than leave it to rot.
Miserably, they watched their primitive home of five months go up
in flames. Yet Heyerdahl
and the three of his Tigris crew who had also been
with him on Ra I and Ra II had little reason for remorse. They had now sailed more than 10,000 miles
on board reed boats, a total that put together would amount to a drift
halfway around the world. These three
ships—two of papyrus and one of berdi—had been constructed from materials which, only a
decade before, every expert had felt certain could not last more than two
weeks on the open ocean. Like a
dramatic maritime funeral of a Viking chief, the burning of Tigris was a fitting conclusion to Thor Heyerdahl’s
career as the greatest transoceanic raft expedition leader in history.
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