A light breeze rose as 14 men hoisted the heavy brown sail. The ship’s 60-foot hull was blackened with tarry bitumen, its reed body curved proudly at stern and prow, and its square sail carried the distinct whiff of goat hair. The likes of such a ship had not sailed the warm seas of the Persian Gulf for millennia. But early one March morning, it billowed past Abu Dhabi’s glittering modern high-rises and coastal palaces, cutting through shallow turquoise lagoons before venturing to open waters.
The vessel is the Magan Boat, a reconstruction of a Bronze Age ship that sailed 4,100 years ago. The craft, built from over 16 tons of reeds on a Turkish pine frame, recently sailed for 50 nautical miles off Abu Dhabi’s coast and will be exhibited at the city’s Zayed National Museum when it opens, sometime in 2025. Beautiful as she was, the boat was, above all else, a great experiment.
The “black ships of Magan” were once a symbol of a civilization that spanned modern-day Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) about 4,000 years ago. They ferried untold wealth across the Gulf and connected civilizations across the Indian Ocean. Traders carried copper from Magan to Mesopotamia and carnelian from the Indus Valley, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and black rock from the Hajar mountains. As critical and common as these ships were, their construction is a mystery.
Archaeologists know how they looked from ancient glyptic carvings and have an idea of construction materials, but the question remains: How did it all fit together? The twist is this: The reeds they were built out of are ephemeral. While many historical reconstructions use evidence from recovered wrecks, reed boats leave few clues. A team of archaeologists and linguists, shipwrights and scholars has been puzzling it out.
“Good archaeology is always about trying to understand the people who use the objects rather than just the objects,” says Eric Staples, an associate professor at Zayed University in the UAE and the project’s design and construction director. “From an archaeological perspective, you’re looking at the material evidence and I’ve always been struck by how much better you understand that evidence after these projects.”
Staples is one of a handful of scholars and shipwrights dedicated to unraveling Indian Ocean history with ship reconstructions.
Maritime re-creations have long captivated people, from Canada to Japan. Most famous was the Kon-Tiki Expedition of 1947, when Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia with five men and a green parrot on a log raft to prove that such a journey was possible in ancient times. Just down the road from where I live in southwest Ireland, a small Irish currach rowboat proved that the fifth-century St. Brendan could have crossed the Atlantic with 12 companions and faith in God.
And five men aboard the Magan Boat had sailed together from Muscat to Singapore in 2010 aboard the Jewel of Muscat, a reconstruction of a ninth-century Arabian dhow. The Jewel was modeled from the remains of what is commonly known as the Belitung shipwreck — the circa 830 CE sinking of an Arabian dhow off the Indonesian coast. It was built without nails, its planks sewn together with coconut fibers. Several of the Magan Boat’s shipwrights and archaeologists have worked closely together since the Jewel to build about 12 historic boats of varying sizes, including sewn-plank dhows and ancient reed boats.
Alessandro Ghidoni, a maritime archaeologist who worked on the Magan Boat’s design and construction, calls these experimental ships “floating hypotheses.”
“You have a lot of fun building boats based on all the evidence and then you have to test it,” says Ghidoni, who spoke to me by video call from Italy. “It’s the most crucial part of the research. It’s important to study the texts and archaeological evidence but when you try to replicate it, it gives you something invaluable and forces you to put your head into the subject. You go back in time just thinking about how ancient sailors felt when they undertook such voyages. To replicate an object, you really have to understand it.”
Staples and Ghidoni speak from experience. Both sailed on the Jewel of Muscat. Staples grew up in Saudi Arabia, studied medieval Islamic navigation and has lived on and off wooden sailing ships since he was 6 months old. But he credits his interest in ancient shipbuilding to maritime archaeologist and renowned shipbuilder Tom Vosmer. So does Ghidoni, who learned to sail as a teenager off the Adriatic coast before researching maritime archaeology in Oman and the Arabian Gulf.
Vosmer led three Magan boat reconstructions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, based on bitumen slabs unearthed at a Bronze Age site in southeast Oman. Each chunk was imprinted with rope, barnacles, lashed reeds and other flotsam from ancient reed boats, each chunk an archaeological clue.
Fast-forward to 2019, and Staples was teaching a history class at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi when students piped up: They wanted to build a re-creation too. They began with a 26-foot Magan boat and teamed up with students from New York University Abu Dhabi. Then Zayed National Museum caught wind of the project and commissioned an experimental 60-foot vessel, roughly the length of a bowling lane.
Construction relied on a small fragment of history: a clay tablet, buried for nearly 4,100 years in modern-day Iraq. It lists materials delivered to a shipyard, neatly imprinted in cuneiform writing, and translated from Sumerian.
Once it was translated, two riddles remained. The first was deciphering measurements and materials. How much is a gur of bitumen or 48 minas of goat hair? The second was putting it together. The tablet, slightly smaller than a smartphone, is more akin to a shopping list than a recipe. Furthermore, it is not a given that all materials were for one ship, that the list included everything needed or that quantities were precise.
But for Staples, the list beautifully illustrates the transition from Neolithic boats built entirely from reeds to wooden ships. At a time when wood was a limited resource, builders lashed reeds together in lieu of timber planks and saved wood for the keel to strengthen ships for ocean crossings.
Staples’ students dived into experimentation, testing ropes for strength, checking reed water absorption and trying out lashing methods. They left crafting to professional shipwrights who worked with Staples and Ghidoni in Oman and India. The south Indian shipwrights carried intimate knowledge of traditional tools and materials, and helped the team experiment with ropes and bitumen, patiently transforming archaeologists’ theories into a seaworthy vessel.
“Without them, we couldn’t understand half of this information,” Ghidoni says. “I would trust them with anything.”
Among them is Babu Sankaran, who has worked on historic re-creations since 1979, when he went to Oman from the southern Indian state of Kerala at age 16 to work on the Sohar, a ninth-century sewn-plank ship re-creation. On the project, the young Sankara met Vosmer and later worked closely with him on the early Magan boats and the Jewel of Muscat.
“The construction of these ships will always be a great challenge and I feel unspeakable joy when each stage is finished,” he says. “At the last stage, I walk around the ship, look at it from a distance, and, with a small smile in my heart, I say to myself, ‘I finished the ship exactly like the drawing, full of grace.’”
After 14 months of labor, launch day arrived for the Magan Boat.
The fragile 21-ton boat was placed into a metal cradle and transported to the sea, where a crane lowered it gingerly into the water. All watched with bated breath, fearful the delicate bitumen coating would crack.
“It’s like putting an artwork in the water,” says Emma Thompson, acquisitions and commissions unit head for Zayed National Museum and led this project from the museum’s side. “The boat took on a personality; you were imagining what it was feeling touching the water for the first time.”
It leaked.
The ship was back in the sea the very next morning, her keel recaulked, her hold filled with a ballast of stone and her 280-pound sail rigged. And then, she waited for the weather. A few days later, the goat-hair sail caught a gentle wind of 8 to 10 knots. The following day, she cut through the water at 5.6 knots. In all, the sea trials covered 50 nautical miles.
“When you see how stable it is and how well it can transport goods, you start to appreciate and respect the minds of the ancient world a lot more,” Staples says. “We often have this linear idea of progress, that back in the Stone Age they were quite primitive and we’re quite sophisticated, whereas there is usually a fair amount of intelligence going into the design of most things.”
Questions remain about long-distance voyages, trade routes and cargo.
“How far can it actually sail?” Staples asks. “How long does a goat hair sail last in a sea environment? Does it disintegrate relatively quickly once it gets wet? What are the first things to break when you are sailing?”
And things do break. Vosmer succeeded with the first two Magan experiments. The third, a 12-meter boat, had a reed frame modeled on the style of “mudhif” houses in southern Iraq. It was to sail from Oman to India, on routes that connected Mesopotamia, Magan and the Indus Valley.
“Unfortunately, we sank,” says Ghidoni, who was on board when the ship went down a few hours north of Ras Al Hadd. “We learned something about this kind of boat. We also realized that there was still a lot to learn.
All survived, but the boat was lost.
“Unfortunately, we only have hypotheses about what happened because we lost the ship,” Ghidoni added. “I don’t see that as a failure. It’s just that could have been an amazing opportunity to know what went wrong because that can give a lot of information about technology and technique.”
As the adage goes, there’s no substitute for experience.
“The Jewel of Muscat is an excellent example,” Staples says. “I’d read the articles published on the evidence, I’d seen the photos, we had the archaeologists’ notes, we had field notes, drawings, all of this stuff. I thought, rather naively, that I’d truly understood the wreck, the boat, all of it.”
But once construction began, new questions began to accumulate.
“You’re forced to grapple with the evidence, evaluate it, and you realize both its strengths and limitations to a much greater degree,” he says. “And that’s when I fell in love with this experimental reconstruction process.”
For instance, what stitching pattern is needed for a rope that binds a ship’s planks? How do you navigate if the monsoon obscures the Pole Star? Or what do you do if, say, your mast breaks off the Sri Lankan coast? This happened on the Jewel of Muscat.
“We had to spend a month in Sri Lanka, looking in the forest to try and to replace it,” Staples says. “After we broke our mast, I look at historical records and I see just story after story of broken masts. It’s something I would have never noticed before. So with every challenge you start thinking of the ramifications it had.”
On land, large-scale projects can shape the collective consciousness of national histories. Perhaps because our connections dim through time, the civilization of Magan has largely escaped popular memory in the UAE, where historic narratives have instead centered on the country’s rapid development since unification in 1971 or its pearling history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the seaside neighborhood of Ras Al Khaimah where I grew up, historical characters like the rascal 17th-century poet Ibn Dhaher and the great 15th-century navigator Ibn Majid are household names. But the Bronze Age seldom gets a mention.
“I was always obsessed with history, but I’d never heard about Magan,” says Aisha Al Mansoori, a lead student researcher on the project. “In school, they never taught us about it. I have only one memory about seeing ancient civilizations mentioned in the UAE, and that was in a brochure.”
It’s easy to see how ancient local history took a back seat. For decades, government schools overlooked the Gulf’s prehistory and were often staffed by Arab teachers from Egypt or the Levant who were unaware of local history, ancient or modern. After the Arab Spring in 2011, local media and schools strongly pushed a cohesive national narrative about the federation’s union in 1971 and 1972 as well as its subsequent urban development under the leadership of local sheikhs. At the same time, the government promoted sanitized narratives of coastal and desert life to reinforce and define Emirati values. But, until recently, the Bronze Age mostly got a miss.
Al Mansoori remembers studying Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, but it wasn’t until university that she learned that Bronze and Iron Age sites were scattered across her country. Thanks to a curriculum overhaul, her younger sisters studied this in elementary school. Additionally, national events now acknowledge and incorporate pre-Islamic history into celebrations. The Dubai Expo logo, for example, represents an Iron Age ring.
When it opens its doors, the Zayed National Museum will guide visitors through 300,000 years of history and place national history in a regional context.
“What we want is to make the distant past as accessible as the recent past,” Thompson says. “Mesopotamia had all these weapons and decorated their temples with copper but they didn’t have metal, so where did that metal come from? These boats enabled that trade. They connected this broad network from the Indus Valley in India and Pakistan up to Iraq and allowed this exchange to happen.” Museum-goers may admire a cluster of carnelian beads and ask themselves, did it travel on a Magan ship?
Such large reconstructions can revive history with sharp intimacy. For instance, the Jewel of Muscat was waterproofed with a smear of shark oil that gave off a powerful smell well known to sailors, right through to the 1960s.
“People would come on board and gag,” Staples recalls. “But five months on board and you don’t even notice it.” (On the Magan Boat, they opted for sesame oil.)
For sailors, connections are forged through peril. Perhaps those who build and sail such vessels share a mindset, a faith in craft and crew, that transcends millennia.
“The Jewel of Muscat had 37,000 holes in it,” Staples says. “I know because I counted all of them. It’s like, you’re going to sail across the ocean in a boat full of holes like that? Strangely enough, I felt completely confident in that boat.”
Of course, there were setbacks.
“Well, yeah,” says Staples, his enthusiasm undimmed. “We broke the mast on the way to Sri Lanka, sailed through the edge of Cyclone Laila across the Bay of Bengal, and the yard snapped and nearly decapitated someone. Yeah, there were a fair amount of challenges, I would say.”
But the team learned from them.
“It is sort of indescribable. Most of the time you’re just in the moment, thinking I need to fix this or we need to do that. It’s a job like any other and you’re just focused. It’s only later that you sit down and go ‘whew, that was pretty crazy.’”
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