Ballast from the past: How did Bronze Age boats sail the open seas?

Using an ancient recipe – with no nails, screws or metal – researchers in Abu Dhabi have created a Magan boat similar to those that sailed 4,000 years ago.

What did the boats that connected the earliest civilisations look like?

(Photo courtesy Emily Harris / Zayed National Museum)

The oldest wreck ever recovered is from about 1300 BCE. In an attempt to look further back, researchers in Abu Dhabi recently turned to an ancient Sumerian clay tablet discovered in Iraq and now housed (where else) at the British Museum.

The tablet, which has been dated to 2100 BCE, is one of the earliest forms of dockyard invoice ever discovered, and it lists an intriguing array of items as those required for shipbuilding: palm reeds, leather, goat hair, animal fat, bitumen (the viscous, black constituent of petroleum).

Notably missing, despite this being the Bronze Age, are nails, screws or any kind of metal.

How could these ships, bearing people, ideas and goods (including copper, fabrics and semi-precious stones), have sailed across the Arabian Sea and into the Indian Ocean, 4,000 years ago? Was the list of items even complete?

The researchers decided to answer these questions by simply following the recipe, building the boat, and seeing how far it would take them. That was in 2021.

By March this year, they had painstakingly assembled the Magan boat (named for an ancient trading and shipbuilding region that covered parts of present-day UAE and Oman).

A strong but flexible base was made by lashing wooden planks together with date-palm-fibre rope. The frame above this, as instructed, was made with wood from pine, palm and tamarisk trees. It was covered with a layer of native reeds, to form the hull. The reeds were first soaked, stripped, crushed, and then tied into long bundles using the same date-palm-fibre rope. (It took 15 tonnes of reeds to build the 59-ft-long hull.)

The whole was then waterproofed with a coating of bitumen, giving the ship an almost eerie black colour.

Above it all, a massive goat-hair sail weighing 127 kg was raised.

Could this vessel really make it on the open seas? On-ground tests showed that it could and, in March, it did.

The Magan boat set off from the coast of Abu Dhabi on a two-day voyage that ended up covering 92.6 km. It moved slowly but smoothly, reaching maximum speeds of only about 5.6 knots (a typical container ship, much larger and heavier, averages about 16-20 knots).

“When we first towed the boat out from the jetty, we were very careful... I was afraid of damaging her. But as we got underway, I soon realised that this was a strong boat. I was surprised by how this big boat… moved so smoothly on the sea,” Marwan Abdullah Al-Marzouqi, a sailing champion from Abu Dhabi who co-captained the vessel, said in a statement.

In an interesting twist, a team of shipwrights from Kerala lent their expertise to the process — because traditional methods are still practised and celebrated here, in a region (the Malabar coast) that, for millennia, used local timber and coconut fibre to build dhows for merchants across the Arab world.

The experimental archaeology project was a collaboration between Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum, New York University Abu Dhabi and Zayed University, and saw archaeologists, anthropologists and engineers from around the world work together to decode what the ship should look like, how it should be built and steered, and how it could be expected to ply.

The life-sized, ocean-tested model is now back on land, and will be a key exhibit at Zayed National Museum, when the institute opens next year, offering visitors a look at just what it took to travel the high seas in the Bronze Age.