Did the Phoenicians Circumnavigate Africa?

The Phoenicians were an ancient Levantine people. Their original homeland was mostly located in what is now Lebanon and they spoke a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. They were known in antiquity for their expert sailors, who conducted extensive maritime trade with many different cultures throughout the Mediterranean world. From the ninth century BCE onwards, Phoenician settlers founded many colonies in the western Mediterranean. The most famous Phoenician colony was the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia, which later grew into an empire that rivalled the fledgling Roman Republic. The Phoenicians also invented the very first abjad, which is the direct ancestor to both the Greek alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we still use to write the English language today.

One ancient account suggests that a group of Phoenician sailors may have circumnavigated the African continent sometime around 600 BCE—over two thousand years before the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The ancient Greek historian and traveler Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 4.42 that Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt (ruled 610 – 595 BCE) sponsored a group of Phoenician sailors who managed to successfully complete a clockwise circumnavigation of Africa by sailing south from the Red Sea and returning to Egypt through the Strait of Gibraltar between two and three years later.

The communis opinio among classicists, ancient historians, and online history buffs alike is that, although we cannot be 100% certain, the Phoenician voyage around Africa most likely really took place as Herodotos describes. Some skeptics, however, have raised what I think are serious objections to the story. In this article, I will review the arguments both in favor and against Herodotos’s story and come to a conclusion of what I think really happened.

A brief note concerning the nature of ancient historical evidence

Before we discuss the historicity of the Phoenician voyage around Africa, I think it is important to make a note about the general nature of ancient historical evidence. Quite simply, the majority of people in ancient times were illiterate and written records were, in general, much scarcer than they are today, so historical events were not always written down to begin with. On top of this, nearly all the written records that were made in ancient times have not survived to the present day.

In popular culture, the loss of ancient texts is usually blamed on the supposed “destruction” of the Great Library of Alexandria, but, as I address in great depth in this article I wrote in July 2019, this article I wrote in February 2020, and this article I wrote in April 2020, this is a misconception. For one thing, the Great Library of Alexandria’s collection functionally mostly consisted of Greek literary texts, which made up only a small portion of the total writing that existed in the ancient world, and its decline and eventual disappearance was a much more complicated and gradual process than popular culture usually portrays it.

Even leaving that aside, the loss of ancient texts has less to do with the fate of one library (which was far from the only library in the ancient Mediterranean world) and far more to with the fact that all manuscripts inevitably deteriorate over time due to entropy. People in the ancient Mediterranean world did not have the printing press. Because of this, the majority of ancient texts that have survived survive only through much later copies, which all had to be copied from earlier copies by hand—a process that was extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming, and often expensive.

As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2020, most of the ancient texts written in the Greek language that have survived to the present day have survived because scribes living in the predominantly Greek-language-speaking eastern part of the Roman Empire copied them repeatedly throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages so that Greek-speaking people could read and study them. Most of the texts that they copied were primarily used as school texts for students. Texts that did not suit their interests have, for the most part, not survived.

Unfortunately, as a result of the combination of all these factors, there are major ancient historical events for which the only record is a single, brief, offhand mention by some ancient author writing a century or more later.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Codex Amiatinus dating to c. 700 CE depicting an early medieval bookshelf containing around ten codices

Herodotos’s account of the voyage

In a noteworthy example of the phenomenon I have just described, Herodotos’s Histories 4.42 is the only surviving independent source for the alleged Phoenician voyage around Africa. Although later Greek authors reference the story, they clearly only knew it from reading about it in Herodotos. Herodotos’s account is extremely brief and it is most likely at least third- or fourth-hand. He most likely heard the story through oral reports while he was traveling in Egypt. Here is Herodotos’s full account of the voyage, as translated by A. D. Godley in 1920 for the Loeb Classical Library:

“I wonder, then, at those who have mapped out and divided the world into Libya, Asia, and Europe; for the difference between them is great, seeing that in length Europe stretches along both the others together, and it appears to me to be wider beyond all comparison. For Libya shows clearly that it is bounded by the sea, except where it borders on Asia.”

“Nekos [i.e., Necho II] king of Egypt first discovered this and made it known. When he had finished digging the canal which leads from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, he sent Phoenicians in ships, instructing them to sail on their return voyage past the Pillars of Herakles [i.e., the Strait of Gibraltar] until they came into the northern sea and so to Egypt.”

“So the Phoenicians set out from the Red Sea and sailed the southern sea; whenever autumn came they would put in and plant the land in whatever part of Libya they had reached, and there await the harvest; then, having gathered the crop, they sailed on, so that after two years had passed, it was in the third that they rounded the Pillars of Herakles and came to Egypt. There they said (what some may believe, though I do not) that in sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right hand.”

This is all the information that has survived about the supposed Phoenician voyage around Africa.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original

The communis opinio

Despite the paucity of the evidence, it is now widely accepted among classicists and ancient historians that the Phoenician voyage around Africa probably really took place, as Herodotos describes. This is because Herodotos’s account includes several details, particularly the detail about the sun that he dismisses, that modern scholars have generally seen as compelling evidence for the historicity of the voyage.

A. D. Godley’s 1920 translation of Herodotos’s Histories for the Loeb Classical Library, which I have just quoted, includes a footnote on the passage about the Phoenician voyage, which reads:

“The detail which Herodotus does not believe incidentally confirms the story; as the ship sailed west round the Cape of Good Hope, the sun of the southern hemisphere would be on its right. Most authorities now accept the story of the circumnavigation.”

Now, even a century after Godley wrote this footnote, the same opinion remains dominant. The website Bad Ancient is run by a motley crew of classicists, ancient historians, and archaeologists. The site regularly publishes articles written by expert specialists fact-checking claims that people have made about the ancient world. On 5 March 2021, the website posted an article titled “Did the Phoenicians circumnavigate Africa?” The article rates the claim as “Mostly true” and concludes:

“Herodotus’ story has had its critics from the ancient world right through to the modern day. His story is so short and lacks any real detail. That being said, his observation about the position of the sun, combined with other reports from the ancient world about other possible journeys around Africa, does make for compelling evidence.”

Online history buffs generally agree with this consensus as well. The historical education YouTuber Andrew Rakich posted a video on his YouTube channel Atun-Shei Films titled “Did the Ancient Egyptians Circumnavigate Africa?” on 7 December 2019, in which he examines the question and ultimately comes to the conclusion that the Phoenician voyage sponsored by Pharaoh Necho II probably really did circumnavigate Africa.

Rakich’s video is, in general, both well-researched and entertaining. He does, however, make a few errors that are worth pointing out. For one thing, he mispronounces the word Phoenicians (but points out his own error through video editing). He also incorrectly states that Herodotos believed that the Indian Ocean was an inland sea. This was, in fact, the view of many later Greek authors, including Klaudios Ptolemaios (lived c. 100 – c. 170 CE), but certainly not the view of Herodotos, who explicitly says in his Histories 4.42—right before telling the story of the Phoenician sailors’ voyage around Africa—that Libya (i.e., his name for Africa) is “περίρρυτος, πλὴν ὅσον αὐτῆς πρὸς τὴν Ἀσίην οὐρίζει” (“surrounded by sea, except where it borders against Asia”).

ABOVE: Screenshot of Andrew Rakich’s video “Did Ancient Egyptians Circumnavigate Africa?” for his YouTube channel Atun-Shei Films, which is a well-researched and entertaining treatment, despite containing a few noteworthy errors

Arguments in favor of Herodotos’s account

There are essentially three main arguments in favor of Herodotos’s account, one of which I have already mentioned. Alan B. Lloyd, a now-retired Egyptologist who was a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Swansea for many decades and is probably the foremost expert in the past century on Herodotos’s account of the Egyptians, summarizes these arguments in his 1977 paper “Necho and the Red Sea: Some Considerations,” originally published in 1977 in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, volume 63, pages 142–155. If you have access to JSTOR, you read the paper itself here.

The first argument summarized by Lloyd is that Herodotos records that the Phoenician voyage took between two and three years. This is approximately the right amount of time that such a voyage would have most likely taken. Lloyd notes that Africa has a circumference of approximately 15,000 miles (i.e., about 24,140 kilometers). The average speed of sailing for ancient ships under good conditions was about five knots.

According to Lloyd, if the Phoenicians really made this voyage, they are highly unlikely to have sailed at night, meaning that they probably would have sailed for about twelve hours a day on average, which means they probably would have sailed about seventy miles on an average day. They probably would have stopped frequently for water and other necessities. Herodotos claims that they also stopped to farm each autumn, which would have taken more time. Based on this information, the voyage probably would have taken between two and three years, just as Herodotos claims.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Assyrian relief carving from Nineveh dating to c. 700 BCE, depicting Phoenician sailors in a many-oared ship, now held in the British Museum in London

The second argument is that the conditions for a clockwise, east-west circumnavigation of Africa, starting in the Red Sea and returning through the Strait of Gibraltar, are highly favorable—much more favorable than the conditions for a counter-clockwise, west-east circumnavigation starting at the Strait of Gibraltar. The Phoenician sailors could have made the entire voyage without ever losing sight of land for more than a day or two, with favorable winds and ocean currents for most of the trip.

Lloyd notes that winds in the Red Sea generally blow from the north. Additionally, the Phoenician sailors probably would have known the east coast of Africa as far south as the Horn quite well. From there, the Phoenicians could have easily caught the north-east monsoon, which would have carried them southward along the East African coast. After passing through the strait between Mozambique and Madagascar, the Aghulas Current would have carried them around the southern tip of Africa.

From there, the south-east trade winds and the Benguela Current would have carried them north along the western coast of southern Africa. The Phoenicians would have encountered difficulties in the windless doldrums off the coast of West Africa, but, by this point, the Phoenicians would have no choice but to continue north and, although the conditions off the coast of West Africa are difficult, Lloyd notes that they are still “perfectly manageable, even for ancient ships.”

Considering that the Phoenician sailors on this voyage were almost certainly highly skilled and experienced maritime experts, there is every possibility that they could have pulled it off. As further proof of this, from 2008 to 2010, the Phoenician Ship Expedition, led by the British sailor Philip Beale successfully circumnavigated Africa in a replica Phoenician ship using solely period-accurate equipment, following the same route that Herodotos says the Phoenician sailors sponsored by Pharaoh Necho II took.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing world ocean currents. Note that the currents tend to carry ships traveling south from the Red Sea east-west around Africa until off the coast of West Africa.

The third and final argument in favor of Herodotos’s account is the one I have already mentioned in the preceding section, which is that Herodotos records that the Phoenician sailors claimed that, when they were sailing around Africa, they had the sun on their right side. This means that, as they were sailing west around the southern end of Africa, the path of the sun was in the north, as it really would be for someone sailing south of the Tropic of Capricorn around the southern end of Africa.

The Greeks of Herodotos’s time already understood the positions of the sun and they knew quite well that its position during a particular season depends on a person’s geographic location. Greek intellectuals actually predicted the existence of the Tropic of Capricorn, which they called αἱ χειμεριναὶ τροπαὶ, which means “the wintery turnings” or “the wintery tropics.” (For more information on this, the Roman antiquarian Aulus Gellius summarizes general ancient Greek knowledge of solar positions and the tropics in his Attic Nights 2.22.)

What Herodotos finds so incredible about the story he attributes to the Phoenicians is not the existence of a clime in the far south where the path of the sun is in the north. On the contrary, the existence of such a clime would not have been surprising to Herodotos or any Greek intellectual of his time; it would have been quite expected. Instead, what Herodotos finds so incredible is the idea that the African continent extends so far south that the southern end of it is south of the wintery tropics.

Supporters of Herodotos’s story generally argue that someone of Herodotos’s time who had not genuinely traveled around Africa would be unlikely to have guessed that Africa extended so far south and that the fact that the Phoenicians are said to have reported that the sun was in the north therefore strongly indicates that their voyage really happened.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing that the southern tip of Africa lies south of the Tropic of Capricorn, meaning that the path of the sun would be in the north for a person going around the southern tip

Lloyd’s response to the arguments in favor of Herodotos’s account

So far, I have presented the arguments in favor of Herodotos’s account of the supposed Phoenician voyage around Africa. Lloyd, however, thinks that this account is totally implausible. In his paper, after summarizing the usual arguments that are made in favor of the story, he seeks to refute them in numbered order.

Lloyd contends that, although three years is indeed about the right amount of time that it would have most likely taken for the Phoenicians to have circumnavigated Africa, three, like seven, is also a standard “formulistic” number of both ancient Egyptian and Greek cultures. Thus, if someone made the story up, they would have been more likely to say that the Phoenicians returned in the third year simply because three was a conventional number.

Lloyd further points out that the fact that conditions for an east-west clockwise circumnavigation of Africa are favorable only proves that a voyage by that route was possible—not that such a voyage actually took place.

Finally, he argues that an educated Greek person of Herodotos’s time could have easily guessed that the African continent extends far enough south that the path of the sun would be in the north for a person sailing around the southern end of the continent, making the fact that Herodotos reports this nowhere near as definitive as it is often made out to be.

ABOVE: Diagram from Alan B. Lloyd’s paper “Necho and the Red Sea: Some Considerations,” showing how an ancient Greek person might have guessed that the southern tip of Africa extended south of the wintery tropics

Lloyd’s arguments that Herodotos’s account is implausible

Having presented these objections, Lloyd presents three arguments of his own that Herodotos’s narrative is completely historically implausible. His first objection is that the behavior Herodotos attributes to Necho II is completely out-of-character for any Egyptian pharaoh. He writes (on page 151):

“It is extremely unlikely that an Egyptian king would, or could, have acted as Necho is depicted as doing. Here we have an Egyptian ruler presented to us, like some philosopher-king, forming the notion of circumnavigating the continent of Africa and setting up an expedition for that purpose. This would surely have been a psychological impossibility for any Pharaoh, however able, for the simple reason that it would have involved a radical departure from basic Egyptian thought-processes—a contingency all the more unlikely since the Saites were distinctly prone to following well-worn paths.”

“If an Egyptian king, at any period, organized and dispatched an expedition, he did so for practical ends to meet specific practical needs. Disinterested inquiry or plain curiosity were always amongst the least evident of Egyptian habits of mind. What possible end could an Egyptian king have thought an enterprise of this sort might have served? To anyone familiar with Pharaonic ways of doing things the reply immediately prompted is an emphatic ‘None at all!’.”

Next, Lloyd argues that, even if, for some reason, Necho II did sponsor such an expedition, sailors in antiquity were, for good reasons, always extremely cautious about exploring new lands and never traveled far beyond lands that were already known to them. Consequently, progress in exploration was always made in tiny increments, with sailors exploring just beyond the lands they knew, gradually expanding the known world little-by-little.

Lloyd therefore maintains that it would have been completely insane and out of character for the Phoenicians to embark on a 15,000-mile journey into the unknown. He writes (on page 151):

“Mariners in sail were, with good reason, a conservative breed. Consequently, in ancient and modern times maritime exploration proceeded in a relatively slow and hesitating fashion.”

[. . .]

“The pattern here, and in many parallel cases, is absolutely clear and indicates that, if a circumnavigation had taken place, it would have been the result of a long process of inching forward and gradual psychological readjustment to each new situation. Against this background, a spectacular leap of 15,000 miles seems absolutely incredible.”

Finally, Lloyd argues that Herodotos’s claim that the Phoenicians sustained themselves by going on land to farm every autumn is absolutely ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. He writes (on pages 151–152):

“We are seriously asked to credit the spectacle of a band of sailors faring forth into unknown waters along unknown shores and calmly establishing themselves each autumn on suitable agricultural land on coasts which they could have had no good reason to regard as friendly, sowing their seed, waiting for the crops, harvesting them, and then taking themselves off!”

“It would surely be impossible to find in the entire annals of maritime exploration in ancient or modern times more foolhardy behaviour. Why run such risks? A considerable quantity of supplies could have been taken with them and these could have been supplemented by fishing, commerce, or raiding as the need and opportunity arose.”

Lloyd points out in a footnote that, at least in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, long-distance trading vessels that traveled from the vicinity of the Mediterranean to China seem to have had enough cargo capacity to store provisions for three years and long-distance Phoenician trading vessels in the time of Necho II may have had similar capacities.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Kyrenia Liberty, a replica of the Kyrenia ship, a relatively small fourth-century BCE Greek merchant ship discovered off the coast of Kyrenia on the island of Kypros

Lloyd’s arguments for how the story could have been made up

Having made his case that Herodotos’s story is not plausible, Lloyd offers two possible explanations for how the story could have been made up. First, he notes that, right after Herodotos tells the story of the Phoenician voyage, he immediately goes on (in his Histories 4.43) to describe the failed later attempt of the Persian man Sataspes to circumnavigate Africa under the orders of the Achaemenid king Xerxes I.

Lloyd also notes that Herodotos reports many stories in his Histories that are probably of Egyptian origin and have a pro-Egyptian propagandistic bent, seeking to portray Egyptian pharaohs as superior to the Achaemenid Persian rulers who came after them. For instance, he records wildly exaggerated stories about the supposed conquests of the Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris, who is identified with the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret III (ruled 1878 – 1839 BCE) of the Twelfth Dynasty. These inflated legends portray him as conquering lands that even the mighty Persian king Dareios I could not conquer.

Lloyd therefore argues that someone may have invented the story of Necho II sponsoring the Phoenician voyage around Africa as pro-Egyptian propaganda in direct response to the story of Sataspes’s failed attempts to circumnavigate Africa, in order to portray an Egyptian pharaoh as more successful in ordering voyages of exploration than the Achaemenid king.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of three different statues of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret III, the pharaoh whose exploits Herodotos portrays as surpassing those of even Dareios I, on display in the British Museum

Alternatively, Lloyd notes that Herodotos himself cites the story of Necho II sponsoring the voyage of the Phoenician sailors in the context of a digression about world geography in order to demonstrate that Africa is bounded on all sides by the sea.

He notes that there are two other instances in The Histories in which Herodotos describes an Egyptian pharaoh as conducting an investigation to resolve a major scientific problem: the first occurs in Histories 2.2 to answer the question of which nation was the oldest and the second occurs in Histories 2.28 to answer the question of what was the source of the Nile. Both of these stories are clearly legends, not real historical events, and both were clearly made up to resolve Greek scientific questions about the world.

In both of the stories I have just referenced, the pharaoh in question is Psammetichos I, or Psamtik I. According to Lloyd, it is easy to see why whoever made up these stories picked Psamtik I as the one who conducted the supposed investigations. The Greeks generally regarded the Egyptians as an extremely wise and ancient people and they associated great kings with wisdom, so they naturally regarded great Egyptian kings as some of the wisest men ever to have lived.

Psamtik I stood out to the Greeks as an especially important Egyptian king because he was the first to hire Greek mercenaries and he encouraged the founding of the Greek colony of Naukratis in Egypt. Thus, the Greeks choose to feature him prominently in their stories.

Lloyd argues that some Greek person might have invented story of the Phoenician voyage in order to address the same question that Herodotos uses it to answer, about whether the African continent was bounded by water or connected to some other landmass. Then they may have chosen Necho II as the pharaoh who supposedly commissioned the voyage because they knew that Necho II was an ambitious pharaoh who was interested in expanding maritime trade via the Red Sea (more on this later).

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the known world as Herodotos describes it in his Histories

Objections to Lloyd’s arguments

Lloyd’s arguments are well-researched and, for the most part, well-reasoned. I think that he makes a compelling case that the usual arguments in favor of the circumnavigation are not nearly so strong as they might initially seem, but I don’t think he totally dispatches with them and I think he fails to make a compelling case against the story of the circumnavigation.

Regarding Pharaoh Necho II, Lloyd is certainly right that Egyptian pharaohs in general were characteristically not interested in maritime exploration, let alone sponsoring expeditions to circumnavigate whole continents. Nonetheless, Lloyd’s argument that this means that Necho II couldn’t have possibly sponsored the Phoenician voyage Herodotos describes is essentially an argument based on a stereotype. There is no reason why Necho II could not have been an exception to the general rule.

As a parallel, it is worth noting that Chinese emperors in general were characteristically not interested in maritime exploration. Indeed, for most of late medieval and early modern history, Chinese emperors pursued the isolationist policy of 海禁 (Hăijìn), which severely restricted even private sea voyaging.

The nearly sole exception to this trend was the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the Yongle Emperor (ruled 1402 – 1424 CE), who famously ordered the creation of the massive Ming treasure fleet in 1403, which went on six wide-ranging voyages under the leadership of the admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1422 to enforce Ming naval hegemony, trade, and explore distant lands.

The Yongle Emperor’s son and successor, the Hongxi Emperor (ruled 1424 – 1425), considered such voyages a waste of money and immediately ended all voyages of exploration as soon as he became emperor. His son and successor, the Xuande Emperor (ruled 1425 – 1435) sponsored one last treasure voyage, which lasted from 1431 to 1433. No Chinese emperor after him ever sponsored a major voyage of maritime exploration. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Ming had outright banned all seafaring vessels with more than two masts.

Zheng He’s treasure voyages are well documented. We know for certain that they really happened. Nonetheless, if someone were to assess the likelihood of such voyages occurring based solely on knowledge of the general attitudes and policies of Chinese emperors toward sea voyaging, they would surely conclude that the Yongle Emperor could never have sponsored such voyages. And yet we know that he did.

ABOVE: Portrait on a hanging scroll of the Yongle Emperor wearing the yellow robe of the emperor, seated on the Dragon Throne, now held in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan

Furthermore, Lloyd interprets Herodotos as saying that Necho II sponsored the expedition as a “philosopher king” solely out of disinterested curiosity, but this is an interpolative caricature; Herodotos does not explicitly say anything of this sort. In fact, there are compelling practical motives for why Necho II might have sent out an expedition of this nature.

We know that Necho II established a fleet of triremes and stationed them in the Red Sea. He also began (but probably never finished) building a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. He almost certainly undertook both these endeavors at least partly to increase Egyptian profits from trade.

Lloyd himself argues at length in his paper that Necho II was interested in reestablishing trade relations with the land of Punt, which was most likely located in the Horn of Africa. The Egyptians viewed Punt as an important source of luxury trade goods, including gold, ivory, resins, ebony, blackwood, and exotic animals.

If Necho II was interested in expanding Egyptian trade further into Africa, it is easy to see how the primary purpose of the Phoenician expedition may have been to find lands for Egypt to trade with.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Brooklyn Museum website of a kneeling Egyptian bronze statue of either Necho I or Necho II

Lloyd’s second argument can also be addressed. The Phoenician sailors probably did not realize when they first set out how far or how long their voyage would take them. Phoenicians had sailed and settled all along the coast of North Africa and may have believed that sailing around the southern end of Africa would be a similar sort of journey, one much shorter than it ended up actually being.

Then, once the Phoenician sailors reached a certain point in their journey where they were far from where they had set out, they may have believed that it would be easier for them to return by completing their voyage than by turning back the way they came. They may have felt that they had little choice but to press forward.

Lloyd’s final argument is, in my opinion, his strongest. The image of Phoenician sailors, who had probably lived for most of their lives through commerce and piracy, settling down seasonally to farm for food while faring far from home in completely strange and seemingly hostile lands with unknown soils and unknown climates is genuinely very strange. They could have much more easily and sensibly taken a large supply of provisions to begin with and acquired more provisions through fishing, commerce, sending parties ashore to hunt and gather any edible plants they might find, and raiding any settlements they might come across.

Nonetheless, the sailors stopping to farm at various points in their journey, while it may seem very strange and unlikely, is not totally impossible. The Phoenicians were, after all, known for establishing colonies. It is possible that the sailors, running out of supplies and despairing at the prospect of ever completing their voyage, might have stopped someplace to settle. There, they may have planted and harvested crops. Then, they may have found the land unfit for permanent settlement for some reason, either because it was too strange, not agriculturally productive enough, or inhabited by hostile natives, and therefore seen fit to leave and continue their voyage, taking the provisions they had harvested with them.

We must also remember that Herodotos’s account is probably third- or fourth-hand at best and the story may have mutated in the course of reaching him. It is possible that some landlubber who was accustomed to farming heard a version of the story that did not explain how the sailors acquired food, so they invented the explanation that seemed likeliest to them: that the sailors stopped in various places to farm along their voyage. This explanation, in turn, may have been passed on to Herodotos for him to record.

ABOVE: Egyptian painting from the tomb of Sennedjem, dating to c. 1200 BCE, depicting a man wearing a white loincloth plowing a field with a pair of horned cattle attached to a yoke

Conclusion

So, did the Phoenicians really circumnavigate Africa? Sadly, both sides have compelling arguments, but neither side really has a definite case.

I personally lean toward the view that Herodotos’s story is correct and that a group of Phoenician sailors did indeed circumnavigate Africa under the sponsorship of Necho II. There is, of course, no definite proof of this, but the story is far from inherently implausible and I still think that the length of the voyage and the report about the sun being in the north do seem to suggest that the voyage really happened.