Phoenicians Circumnavigate Africa

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing roughly a century and a half later, a fleet of Phoenician sailors sailed around Africa in the early sixth century BCE (around 600 BCE) on the orders of the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II. If true, it would be the first known circumnavigation of the continent, achieved some two thousand years before Portuguese navigators rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The story survives only as a report, and its reliability has been debated ever since.

Necho II, who ruled Egypt from about 610 to 595 BCE, was an ambitious king. He campaigned in the Levant and is also credited with starting work on a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea. Egypt had long traded along the Red Sea coast, and the Phoenicians, based in cities such as Tyre and Sidon, were the Mediterranean's most skilled seafarers and shipbuilders. Hiring them for a long-range expedition made sense for a pharaoh who wanted to know the extent of the lands around him and perhaps open new trade routes.

Herodotus says the sailors departed from the Red Sea and entered the southern ocean. When autumn came, they landed, sowed grain, waited for the harvest, and then sailed on. After two years they passed through the Pillars of Heracles, the Strait of Gibraltar, and returned to Egypt in the third year. The voyage would have taken them down the east coast of Africa, around the southern tip, and up the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean.

The most famous detail is one Herodotus himself doubted. The sailors reported that while rounding the continent they had the sun on their right, meaning to the north. To a Greek who knew only the Mediterranean world, this seemed absurd. Yet it is exactly what travelers sailing westward below the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere would observe. Many modern historians see this as the strongest sign the account rests on a real voyage, since the narrators would hardly have invented something they could not have understood.

Still, skeptics note that no Egyptian or Phoenician record of the expedition survives, and the claim comes through secondhand oral tradition. Some scholars question whether the sailors could have managed the contrary currents and winds on the west coast. The voyage appears to have had no lasting commercial effect, and later Greek geographers often remained unconvinced that Africa could be circled at all. Whether fact or embellished legend, the story shows how far ancient peoples were willing to imagine the world extending beyond their shores.