The Ancient Moonshot

The First Reliably Recorded Circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenicians Pharaoh Necho, the Red Sea, and a Three-Year Voyage around a Continent 1. A Voyage So Bold It Sounds Like a Legend Sometime around the late 7th or early 6th century BCE, an Egyptian pharaoh supposedly ordered one of the most astonishing voyages in ancient history. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt sent Phoenician sailors to sail around Africa. They began from the Red Sea, traveled south along the eastern side of Africa, rounded the far southern end of the continent, came back north through the Atlantic, passed the Pillars of Heracles near the Strait of Gibraltar, and returned to Egypt after three years. That is a huge claim. To understand how huge, imagine being told to sail around a continent when nobody in your world has a complete map of it. There is no GPS, no satellite weather, no engine, no radio, no rescue helicopter, no modern harbor system, and no clear certainty about what lies ahead. The ocean is not a blue highway. It is a giant unknown creature that changes mood every day. Yet the story is not easily dismissed. Herodotus reports a detail that actually supports the possibility of the voyage: the sailors said that while sailing west around the southern part of Africa, the sun was on their right-hand side. Herodotus himself found this unbelievable, but modern readers understand why it matters. In the Southern Hemisphere, when sailing west, the midday sun can appear to the north — that is, on the right side of a westbound ship. This was exactly the kind of observation a Mediterranean writer might not invent, because it sounded wrong to him. That small astronomical clue is one reason many historians take the story seriously, even if they remain cautious. The voyage, if it happened, was not just a sailing adventure. It was a moment when ancient geography suddenly became bigger. Africa was not merely a landmass stretching south from Egypt. It was a continent that could be circled by sea. The sailors may not have understood the full meaning of what they had done. But later generations could look back and say: this may have been the first recorded circumnavigation of Africa. 2. The World Around 600 BCE To appreciate the voyage, we need to step into the world around 600 BCE. This was not a world of isolated villages. The ancient Near East and Mediterranean were highly connected. Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Assyrians, Babylonians, Nubians, Arabs, and others traded, fought, migrated, borrowed technologies, and exchanged stories. Egypt was an ancient civilization with thousands of years of history behind it. It had pyramids older than many later kingdoms. It had temples, scribes, priests, soldiers, farmers, and a powerful river system centered on the Nile. But Egypt was also under pressure. Great empires were rising and falling. Assyria had dominated much of the Near East. Babylon was becoming powerful. Trade routes mattered. Military routes mattered. Access to seas mattered. Meanwhile, the Phoenicians were among the greatest sailors and traders of the ancient world. They lived mainly along the coast of the Levant, in cities such as Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Their ships traveled across the Mediterranean, reaching Cyprus, North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and beyond. Phoenician colonists had founded Carthage, which later became one of Rome’s greatest rivals. The Greeks were also expanding across the Mediterranean and Black Sea. They founded colonies, traded goods, wrote poetry, developed philosophy, and began asking systematic questions about geography and the natural world. This was an age of movement. Ships carried metals, timber, wine, oil, grain, luxury goods, dyes, pottery, stories, gods, alphabets, and rumors. In that world, a pharaoh ordering a daring maritime expedition makes sense. Powerful rulers wanted information. Information meant trade, strategy, prestige, and control. A map was not just a drawing. It was power.