 he world's oldest known boat, built
an estimated 7,000 years ago out of tarry, bitumen-covered slabs, has been found,
of all places, stored in a Kuwaiti desert warehouse.
If the assessment of British and Kuwaiti archaeologists is correct, the slabs, found covered on one side with barnacles and warehoused in a stone building at a site called
As-Sabiyah, would push back the date for the oldest known boat by more than 2,000 years.
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The wooden
plank sample on the left shows parallel reed impressions, and a row of small holes, perhaps from pegs. The
sample on the right has barnacles, which indicates that the
wooden slabs had been exposed to sea water for some length of
time before storage.
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According to an upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies and a paper published in the June 7 issue of the journal Science, the current oldest boat record-holder is a vessel found in an Egyptian tomb dating to 3,000 B.C. Evidence for log canoes, thought to be more like rafts than boats, goes back much further, to 8,000 B.C.
The age of the entire As-Sabiyah site, including the boat remains, has been carbon-14 dated to 5,511-5,324 B.C.
Robert Carter, an archaeologist at University College London and the expedition's field director, believes that the slabs belonged to a boat because they have reed impressions on one side and barnacles on the other.
Carter said bitumen, which is still crushed with fish oil and coral and used today by some Middle Eastern boat builders, likely formed a waterproof seal around vessels constructed out of reed bundles tied together with ropes and string.
He also believes that the bitumen-covered reed boats were used to carry people and goods between Mesopotamia, As-Sabiyah (which he thinks was then a peninsula within the
Tigris-Euphrates River area), and the Central Gulf region.
If the theory is correct, it could explain why ancient Mesopotamian pottery often turns up many miles to the south on the Persian Gulf's western shores, according to the
report. It is not known yet if the race of the people were trading at As-Sabiyah.
It is believed that people living on the Arabian Peninsula were
involved in trade at this time, along with people from Mesopotamia.
An indication of what goods were traded are based on archeological finds at the site.
Items unearthed include pierced pearls, most likely used for jewelry, pottery, shells, spindle whorls, bead necklaces, mother of pearl buttons, and flint and obsidian stones.
Evidence indicates that possibly livestock and fish were also were traded.
Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, professor of archaeology at Harvard University, questions whether the boat was used for trade, due to its apparently small size, and suggests that it was just a fishing boat for locals. He also hints that remains of even older vessels may be found in future due to evidence for ancient boating, such as clay boat models. Lamberg-Karlovsky
concludes, "Although the Kuwaiti find might be the earliest evidence for a boat, it is very important to point out that people were seafaring far earlier than this."
If only they built an affordable boat today that would last
1/7000 as long as this find did.
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