[smooth music]
NARRATOR: There are more miles of coastline in Greece
than in the entire United States.
And in the ancient world, it would
have taken months for traders and armies to travel by land.
So as shipbuilding technologies developed,
as kings and emperors became richer,
the ships of the ancient world grew in sophistication and size
to a truly unbelievable scale.
Floating battle stations larger than a football stadium
and carrying 7,000 troops cruised
their way across the high seas.
Cargo tankers twice that size carried
hundreds of tons of goods from one end of the known world
to another.
Protected by high-speed attack destroyers
with a devastating concealed weapon,
these were monster crafts that pushed naval technology
to the ultimate limit.
But what technologies and advances in ship design
enabled the ancients to build these extraordinary vessels
and create the age of the super ship?
The story of innovative ship technology
begins nearly 5,000 years ago.
There was only one effective way to travel
round ancient Egypt, the water.
The main means of transport in ancient Egypt
was water, especially the Nile.
You can start from Aswan.
Just throw a piece of wood.
It will go all the way to the Mediterranean.
Without the River Nile, Egypt would not exist.
Not only did it provide, uh, an adequate flow of water,
but it was the-- the main highway of the country.
NARRATOR: One enormous problem the Egyptians faced
was how to transport the massive blocks
needed to construct the colossal monuments that
stand still today.
Some of the largest wooden boats ever made
were made to transport stone, notably
obelisks, from Aswan in the South of Egypt, um,
to the North of Egypt.
NARRATOR: Here at Karnak, the Hatshepsut Obelisk
still stands at 97 feet tall.
It is the tallest surviving obelisk in Egypt.
But this single 350-ton monolith was
quarried some 300 miles away at Aswan
and brought to Karnak by a massive cargo ship.
These boats are hundreds of feet long.
They are colossal structures.
They are mega structures.
They are some of the biggest moving objects
that mankind has ever created.
NARRATOR: It is estimated that this obelisk
barge may have been over 311 feet long
and over 100 feet wide.
[smooth music]
Over 2,000 tons of stone would have to have its weight
distributed over the ship.
These boats would have been made out of cedar.
When loaded, the obelisk barge would have had a displacement
of an amazing 7,300 tons.
To provide extra strength, the vessel
was built with several decks, with the ends of the deck
beams protruding through the hull.
ROBERT PARTRIDGE: These Egyptian obelisk barges were
the supertankers of their day.
Just imagine a fully loaded obelisk barge being towed
maybe by 20 or 30 boats, fully loaded
with one, maybe two obelisks.
These are colossal structures.
The people watching from the river banks
would have seen nothing like this ever before.
NARRATOR: Along with its fleet that transported obelisks,
the Egyptians carried cargo throughout the ancient world.
Reliefs on the walls of a funerary temple at Deir
el-Bahari show scenes of a large trading expedition
to the land of Punt, modern Somalia, hundreds of miles
away along the Red Sea.
Over 3,000 years later, we can still make out
evidence of massive stone cargos transported
right across the large and unpredictable Mediterranean
Sea.
But there are even more amazing discoveries
that have come out of ancient Egyptian shipbuilding.
On the Giza Plateau, site of the Great Pyramids,
a ship has been discovered that has made us rewrite the history
books on ship construction.
It is a fantastic example of how advanced shipbuilding
techniques had become in the ancient world.
[smooth music]
It was discovered accidentally during a clearance excavation
at the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1954.
ALI GABALA: Nobody even thought of-- that they're
going to find a boat there.
And then, one day, they found 81 blocks
of stones just put like that.
So obviously, there was something buried there.
Impatiently, they went and dug a hole and they peeled through
and they saw.
NARRATOR: 81 blocks of stone were found
buried near the Great Pyramid.
As archaeologists began to dig, they
found something incredible, a complete dismantled ship,
superbly preserved in its airtight tomb.
They found about 651 main pieces.
NARRATOR: The ship had been taken apart
to be buried with the pharaoh, Khufu, Pharaoh of Egypt
and builder of the famous Great Pyramid at Giza.
It is no surprise that a pharaoh who
built such a spectacular monument to himself
would require the pinnacle in Egyptian building technology
to carry his spirit into the next world.
ALI GABALA: If the Great Pyramid was
a miracle in stone construction, the ship
is a miracle in shipbuilding.
NARRATOR: The Khufu ship is 200 feet long and made entirely
of carved wood held together in a surprisingly
innovative fashion.
[smooth music]
ALI GABALA: The fantastic thing about this ship
is not only the fact that it was found almost complete,
but it's the way it was constructed.
NARRATOR: But what ingenious technologies did the ancients
develop using only natural material like wood and fiber
to create a watertight hull?
[smooth music]
These boats are constructed in a strange way.
They are-- they are looped together.
They're not nailed or pinned together
as we would make boats today.
NARRATOR: When the wood was swollen by water,
the ropes would tighten and make the boat watertight.
ALI GABALA: So if there was a fracture between the planks
of the wood, you make absolutely sure with no tar, no nothing,
but would be fitted together and the ship wouldn't sink.
ROBERT PARTRIDGE: It meant that the boats were flexible,
could be maintained easily, and could
travel up and down Egypt and beyond and carry huge loads.
NARRATOR: But how effective were the fiber stitches?
Was this ship perfectly watertight?
[cheerful music]
To help solve this mystery, we must journey 2,000
miles North to ancient Britain.
In Dover, England, there is an amazing discovery
that sheds new light on the way the ancients created
super ships like the Khufu boat.
DAMIAN GOODBURN: You really have to come either to the British
Isles or to Egypt to see large plank boats at this time, which
is early in the Bronze Age through into the Middle Bronze
Age.
NARRATOR: The Dover Boat is a 3,000-year-old British boat
that is only partially recovered and predates
the Romans by 1,000 years.
Over 32 feet long and 7 and 1/2 feet wide,
it is a rare and valuable discovery.
There is much we can learn from the Dover Boat
about ancient shipbuilding techniques
that were used throughout the world during the Bronze Age.
DAMIAN GOODBURN: The thing they share
is that they have thick sculpted planks which are tied,
or lashed, or sewn together.
Now, it looks a very unlikely technique to us today,
but it clearly worked.
NARRATOR: Amazingly, like the Khufu ship,
the Dover ship was assembled without any nails,
rivets, or welding.
KEITH PARFITT: The use of stitching
seems to be a very good way of holding timbers together.
It's widely seen across the ancient world.
And it looks as if it's a very good alternative to the nuts
and bolts we might use today.
NARRATOR: A modern ship is constructed
by building a skeleton over which steel plates are fixed.
But how would the ancient shipbuilders
have constructed their hulls without the benefit of
flexible steel and solid ribs?
Experimental archaeologist Damian
Goodburn is a specialist in the technique of boat stitching.
A Bronze Age shipbuilder would start with a half log.
They'd split the log out of a tree, a suitable tree,
using wedges like this replica one here
and a big mallet like this one.
And having got their rough half log,
they'd then use tools like this one, which is a bronze ax
or adds, uh, half to this amount.
And they'd use this for carving the plank to shape,
rather than bending it to shape as we
do in the more recent times.
NARRATOR: With the Khufu and Dover ships, after shipbuilders
shaped the plank and carved them to the right shapes,
they then cut the edges to the joints
and lashed them together with a super strong natural rope.
In the case of the Khufu ship, they've used some kind
of plied vegetable fiber rope.
In Northern Europe, they tended to use twisted branches
of yew or willow.
Once the winding's done, the next stage
is to trim it, clean it, and then soak it at least overnight
to soften the fibers even more.
And then we end up with material we can
use to tie the planks together.
This is the matter that would have
been used on the Dover Boat.
The Khufu ship's a bit different.
In some ways, it's a bit more sophisticated.
The lashings are buried within the thickness of the timber.
They don't go all the way through.
It's a bit more watertight in some ways.
But I think they would also have used some kind of beeswax
in the joint, which doesn't seem to have survived
for the archaeologists to find.
NARRATOR: But how successful was this technique?
Would these ancient ships actually hold together?
I'm standing next to a replica of part of the ship
now, which we built as part of the study of the original ship.
We are amazed at how rigid this system is.
I mean, you can hit the thing quite hard and it hardly moves.
And it's much more rigid than we would have thought.
NARRATOR: The Khufu ship and Dover ship's
construction technique has been proved
to be extremely effective.
The ships of the Bronze Age could travel great distances
and were incredibly robust, with just stitches
holding the planks together.
As underwater surveying and diving techniques become more
advanced and we widen our search into deeper and deeper water,
more wrecks will be discovered, more mysteries will be solved,
and the sea will give up more of her secrets
about the super ships of the ancient world.
[water burbling]