Navigating the Red Sea: A spatiotemporal approach to investigating 18th-19th century CE indigenous seafaring

Abstract

This study investigates the nature of indigenous maritime navigation in the 18th-19th century CE Red Sea. The intangible nature of traditional indigenous maritime navigation and the paucity of archaeological evidence concerning it in the Red Sea makes such an investigation difficult and challenging. Consequently, this study along with environmental and ethno-experimental sources, endeavours to study navigation of the Red Sea through an investigation of the 18th and 19th century CE’s textual sources, particularly travelogues such as ship logs, journals, and travel diaries, as primary sources of evidence. By examining aforementioned sources, this study aims to answer its main research question, that is how local sailors of the Red Sea navigated and constructed maritime space? The travelogues written by western explorers, who voyaged in ships navigated by local sailors, contain spatiotemporal information on the movement of the ship, the places and anchorages sailors put into, and their daily activities. Such micro-scale spatial and temporal data is extracted from textual sources and processed using a geo-spatial mapping in Google Earth and a spatio-temporal mapping in the ‘Space-Time Aquarium’ (STA). A STA is a conceptual visualisation tool that documents the movement of individuals and their activities in a geographic spatiotemporal context. This heuristic tool allows for the mapping of voyage trajectories, the different activities of sailors, and other unique variables, that influenced navigation at sea. In turn, this enables the reconstruction of rich biographies of individual voyages that can be examined by qualitative descriptive, comparative and semi-quantitative analyses.

The results of this analyses provides a more detailed reading of maritime space, that presents a very complex picture of the local maritime navigation in the Red Sea. It reveals that traditional indigenous navigation in the 18th-19th century CE Red Sea was not just an art or a science of taking watercraft safely from one place to another, as previously thought, but a complex activity influenced by a series of human and non-human variables. Furthermore, it has revealed the knowledge and skills required to perform the navigation task, such as knowledge of different forms of navigation techniques, sailing strategy considering coastal configuration, choosing sailing manoeuvres according to shifting wind patterns, and maintaining a course in relation to landmarks or celestial bodies at sea. The aforementioned tasks, in which local sailors constantly engaged, were routinely performed during voyages thereby setting a daily rhythm to maritime navigation. Such tasks of sailors, in relation to the movement within maritime space, suggest that maritime navigation is an activity materialised within the ‘encultured’ and lived maritime space through working and sailing at sea, doing and knowing the things at sea, dwelling on a ship at sea and feeling and being at sea. It is within this lived maritime space that sailors negotiated and constructed their space by making several choices and facing different navigational constraints that were determined by both human and non-human factors within a given spatio-temporal geographic context. The results of this study also have implications for ancient Red Sea navigation studies. The study has found that the northwest winds did not necessarily affect those sailing towards the north as acutely as previously believed. By assessing, a wide range of archaeological, environmental, ethno-experimental, and textual sources this thesis has made a convincing argument for rethinking the issues concerning maritime navigation of the Red Sea and beyond.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Zeeshan, Alli Shaikh: orcid.org/0000-0002-1316-3381

ORCID for Rosemary Farr: orcid.org/0000-0002-7922-9179

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