When the first man-made rope-sewn wooden sail boats laid anchor along the coast of Malabar, the scene that must have met the eyes of those early explorers would have been breathtaking: Gray waves lapping against golden sand that disappeared under dense green foliage; the air teeming with the calls of wild birds and beasts; enormous blue mountains brooding over the coast, cloaked in thick jungles, their peaks disappearing into clouds and their feet into water-logged marshes, an arm of the mountain range straining to the very edge of the surf as foamy waves lashed against granite cliffs formed during an ancient age when all land had been one enormous supercontinent.
Who were these first men who saw this wild land? Were they prospectors? for the Egyptian pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2500 BCE) are known to have sent such men out west into the desert and south into Nubia to search for minerals and other resources that could be used in building royal statues and monuments. Or were they, like the mariner in the ancient Egyptian folktale The Shipwrecked Sailor, bewildered, disoriented sailors who had lost their way on the great ocean? Whoever they were, they must have returned from whence they came, taking home tidings of the newly discovered land bursting with incense, ebony, and spices, because, as I have shown in numerous articles, Kerala’s culture and tradition are testimony that Egyptian settlers came in their wake and colonized the land.
A vast ocean separates the Nile delta from Kerala, a total distance of more than 3000 nautical miles. Although the distance seems enormous, human history is replete with evidence that such expanses were no hindrance to trans-oceanic voyages even in ancient times. Besides, Egyptians had mastered river navigation long before they set out to sea. Thus, when they decided to venture out into the ocean, they used the same river-boat technology to make their seagoing ships, modified to enable easy assembly and disassembly at the ports. The ships were built by tying together planks of wood, like the odam ‘sewn-hull boats’ of Lakshadweep.
The sailing ships were sophisticated structures, with ropes and copper fasteners that, together with mortise-and-tenon joints, cleverly tied together large planks of wood carved expertly to fit like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle into a robust, reliable, seaworthy sailing vessel. Each ship was a masterpiece of carpentry, ropemaking, and sail-making skills, the culmination of months of labor by hundreds of skilled artisans. The ropes were made of plied wires of grass and palm fibers, twisted together into various thicknesses for use as standard sail rigging and also to tie down the hogging truss that gave structural cohesion to seagoing ships. The sails were made of heavy linen and cotton fibers in a coarse weave, cut and sewed to size. An experimental ship named Min of the Desert reconstructed in modern times by Dr. Cheryl Ward and her team according to available archeological evidence proved beyond any doubt that ancient Egyptian ships were fully capable of long-haul sea voyages.
While the description of planks lashed together with ropes evokes the modern English interpretation of ‘catamaran,’ like the make-shift raft of Tom Hank’s Castaway, the ancient Egyptian sailing ships were anything but. Indeed, the English word ‘catamaran’ evolved from kett-maram ‘build-timber’ in Malayalam, which likely derived from qd-mr in Egyptian, also meaning ‘build-timber.’ Some scholars believe the Egyptian mr is ‘cedar,’ while some others translate it as ‘pine,’ but everyone wholly agrees that irrespective of the type of wood, mr was used particularly for shipbuilding as attested by epigraphic evidence from around 2500 BCE.
The ships of ancient times were initially built in the Nile valley, then carried across the desert in pieces and reassembled at the harbors for maritime navigation. Upon return from their oceanic voyages, they were dismantled and stored in underground caves near the harbors for the next expedition. Archeological evidence at the ancient Egyptian seaports of Ayn Soukhna, Wadi al-Jarf, Mersa Gawasis, and Tell Ras Budran on the Red Sea coast suggests this practice was followed for more than a millennium, from around 2570 BCE to 1400 BCE, and possibly even later.
The evidence from the ports of Ayn Soukhna and Wadi al-Jarf also include accounting documents drawn up around 2500 BCE for tracking supplies to the team working on these boat building activities and the long-haul trans-oceanic voyages they enabled; supplies that included a variety of food such as cereals, dates, fruit, meat, and beer. Drawn up in neat tables formatted like modern-day spreadsheets, the accounts show regular food deliveries from various areas in the Nile delta, suggesting rations for long journeys across the sea. This enterprise was an Egyptian funded venture during the period in Egyptian history when the Great Pyramids at Giza were being constructed. Ayn Soukhna and Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast were the hubs for these Red Sea voyages, both short-distance to the Sinai coasts, and long-distance to some unknown location in the Indian Ocean from where exotic luxury products were harvested and brought back. The crews of these expeditionary forces traveled with their goods and stayed together as a group until the final destination, enjoying rewards and titles for the tremendous risks they were willing to take in service of their king and country.
Back in those ancient days when geo-positioning satellite-based navigation was unknown, sailors used celestial navigation to determine their location, speed, and course on the water. They primarily used two techniques: dead reckoning — calculating the ship’s north-south orientation by gauging the angle of the sun or polestar against the horizon — and finger-width calculations — using star charts and the sun’s position to determine the speed and course of the ship. With mental math and handy calculating tricks honed over years of maritime experience, they could pinpoint their latitude and longitude fairly accurately. Navigation was also based on the measurement, description, and mapping of the surface waters of the earth, including landmarks visible from the water, the color of the sea and identification of many marine life-forms that inhabited shallower waters near the coasts.
The ships followed the monsoon winds on the Indian Ocean, which were essentially southwest from May to September and northeast from November to March. The west coast of India was unnavigable for sailing ships between roughly June and September. The Red Sea too had its own seasonal currents. The prevailing wind in the Red Sea’s northern sector (north of Jiddah in Saudi Arabia) is northerly throughout the year, making it easy to sail south at any time but very difficult to return. However, the Egyptian ocean-going ships were rigged out with oarsmen in addition to sails, so they could row against the wind, making the trip up the northern part of the Red Sea feasible. In the Red Sea’s southern half (south of Jiddah), the prevailing wind from April to September also blows from the north, but from October to March there are reliable southerlies. Sailors in ancient times established the times for sailing the Red Sea by these wind systems in combination with the monsoon pattern on the Indian Ocean with which the winds were linked.
During the heydays of Indian Ocean trade during the fifteenth century CE, vessels left for India during April and May with a northerly wind on the Red Sea to pick up the first period of southwest monsoon winds on the Indian Ocean, arriving at Kozhikode in Kerala between August and November. They returned with the northeast monsoon, heading out from India after October, and arriving in Egypt before March. The sailors of more ancient times, subject as they were to identical weather patterns, would have likely followed the same schedule.
Although a round trip from Egypt to Kerala and back could be completed in the course of one year, over time, it must have become evident that in order to sustain the fledgling venture and maintain reliable transport of goods from Kerala, a permanent colony — a diaspora similar to the trading diaspora I wrote about in Syrian Merchants — must be established on the Malabar coast that could not only protect and maintain working camps but also support sailors during lulls in travel. Keralolpatthi says of this initial situation: “The earliest people to be brought from foreign lands did not settle down. They all went each their way … So, to prevent the venture from failing, people from sixty-four villages in the north were brought to the Malabar coast,” and a permanent colony was established. As I wrote in Draining the Swamp, these sixty-four villages must have been in the Nile delta, in the north of Egypt, for the people in the delta had working knowledge of transforming marshy lands into viable fields.
Thus, in light of this Egyptian connection, Kerala’s founding myth can be interpreted anew. Clearly, the Parasurama myth was rewritten during Brahmanization; but filter away the obvious self-serving lies about the brahmins, and the story immediately runs clear. No longer is it a fantastical tale of unbelievable proportions, but the true story of a people who sacrificed much in the name of love for country and their gods. It is the chronicle of a diaspora far from their homeland, who, despite being forgotten by those who had sent them to the wild marshes of the Malabar coast, continued to revere for thousands of years the ancient ways of their native land in every aspect of their daily lives.
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