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“The earliest surviving example of a sewn boat, as we shall see, was found beside the great pyramid of Giza, but it is unquestionably a descendant of ancestors that go back to Egypt’s primitive times. Later travelers reported seeing large sewn boats of 40 and 60 tons’ burden and versions of fair size were still plying the waters of East Africa and around Sri Lanka in the early decades of the twentieth century. It keeps well and is not corroded by sea-water but it will not stand well in a storm.” (Marco Polo, Book I, ch xviii, translated by H. He took a dim view of them: “they were twine and with it stitch the planks of the ship together.
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Marco Polo saw sewn boats at Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. A Greek sea captain or merchant who wrote in the first century AD reports the use of small sewn boats off Zanzibar and off the southern coast of Arabia. In the Indian Ocean, it dominated the waters right up to the fifteenth century, when the arrival of the Portuguese opened the area to European methods. Actually, it is a type that has been in wide use in many parts of the world and in some places still is. The idea of a boat made up of planks sewn together seems strange. Stitched boats were made by sewing the hull boards together with fibers, cords or thongs.
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First of all, it’s triangular or lateen sail, and secondly, for it’s stitched construction. The dhow was known for two distinctive features. The word daw is a Swahili name, and not used by the Arabs, although it was popularized by English writers in the incorrect form of dhow. The generic word for ship in Arab is markab and safiinah. Older type vessels are now called buum, zaaruuq, badan, etc., and still have the double-ended hulls that come to a point at both the bow and the stern. The square stern is basically a product of European influence, since Portuguese and other boats visited the Arab gulf since the sixteenth century. Thus, dhows with square sterns have the classifications: gaghalah, ganja, sanbuuq, jihaazi. In the Middle East however, boats are classified according the shape of their hull. Thus, it is typical for Europeans to label all Arab boats as dhows. In Europe, boats names are based on the type of sail rigging the boat has. (Some modern dhow makers now nail their hulls together, and many are now making a square stern rather than a double-ended vessel.) By taking all of these into consideration, we can get an excellent idea of how the ancient dhow was constructed and what its sailing abilities were.ĭespite their historical attachment to Arab traders, dhows are essentially an Indian boat, with much of the wood for their construction coming from the forests of India. It seems that dhow making is considered an art, and this art has been passed down from one generation to another, preserving, at least in part, the dhow’s basic design and use. Along with this we can examine early shipwrecks, and lastly we can learn from modern day construction of dhows. Added to this, we can compare some similar hull constructions used in the later Roman period, after they had opportunity to learn from the Arab sailors. Most of our knowledge of the dhow’s early construction comes to us from the records of Greek and early Roman historians. Unfortunately, there is almost no pictorial evidence of early dhows. The dhow was also markedly different than the ships that sailed on the China Sea. These ships had a characteristic square sail. This made them markedly different than the ships that evolved on the Mediterranean. While there were many different types of dhows, almost all of them used a triangular or lateen sail arrangement. Picture by Marion Kaplan Used with permissionįor many centuries, boats that sailed on the Indian Ocean were called dhows. Text copyright Canbooks Pictures copyright held by their respective owners