Darius I and the Sabaeans: Ancient Partners in Red Sea Navigation

Abstract

1 Unlike the modern Suez Canal, the ancient waterway discussed here did not link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, but only provided access to the Red Sea from the Nile by connecting various lakes in the Eastern Delta: G. Posener, “Le Canal du Nil a la mer Rouge,” CdE 13 (1938): 259–73; C. A. Redmount, “The Wadi Tumilat and the ‘Canal of the Pharaohs’,” JNES 54 (1995): 127–35; C. Thiers, Ptolemee Philadelphe et les pretres d’Atoum de Tjekou: nouvelle edition commentee de la stele de Pithom (CGC 22183), Orientalia Monspeliensa 17 (Montpellier, 2007), 107–17; J. P. Cooper, “Egypt’s Nile-Red Sea Canals: Chronology, Location, Seasonality and Function,” in Connected Hinterlands: Proceedings of the Red Sea Project IV, held at the University of Southampton, September 2008, ed. L. Blue et al. BAR International Series 2052 (Oxford, 2009), 195–209 (this reference kindly provided by Henry P. Colburn); D. Agut-Labordere, “Creer la route: le canal des pharaons entre la Mer rouge et la Mediterranee de Nechao II a Darius Ier,” Egypte, Afrique & Orient 75 (Jan. 2015): 61–66. 2 For the canal stelae in general, see recently R. B. Gozzoli, The Writing of History in Ancient Egypt during the First Millennium BC (ca. 1070–180 BC): Trends and Perspectives, Golden House Publications, Egyptology 5 (London, 2009), 116–21, and G. Vittmann, “Agypten zur Zeit der Perserherrschaft,” in Herodot und das Persische Weltreich. Akten des 3. Internationalen Kolloquiums zum Thema “Vorderasien im Spannungsfeld klassischer und altorientalischer Uberlieferungen,” ed. R. Rollinger, B. Truschnegg, and only a fraction of the hieroglyphic inscriptions survive, and much of the remaining fragments preserve banal expressions typical of the Egyptian Konigsnovelle genre:3 extended royal epithets of Darius, standard obsequies by courtiers, and highly formal discourse between the Great King and his advisers. Valuable historical and geographical details specific to the Suez canal endeavor, meanwhile, have mostly disappeared in the lacunae. In the only critical edition of the available hieroglyphic texts, Georges Posener accomplished an exemplary job sorting out fragments, consulting earlier squeezes or archival copies, and suggesting conservative restorations wherever possible.4 Yet the bulk of his