Beyond Tiki, Bilge, and Test / Bilge / Thor Heyerdahl sets sail in Ra II, 17 May, 1970
Post #159555 by freddiefreelance on Tue, May 17, 2005 8:24 AM
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Tue, May 17, 2005 8:24 AM
Thor Heyerdahl's first attempt to prove the ancient Egyptians could cross the Atlantic in a Papyrus reed boat, in the Ra, failed, but it's successor, Ra II, didn't. Intrigued by the strong resemblance between various aspects of ancient Egyptian and pre-Columbian culture, Thor Heyerdahl set out to demonstrate that the sources of New World technology and belief could have come from across the Atlantic. Noting the similarities between the designs of the reed boats found on tomb walls in Egypt with those found on Lake Chad, the Andean Lake Titicaca, and Easter Island, Thor set out to show that ancient civilizations could have had contact in not only Pre-Columbian times, but Pre-Dynasic Egypt times. Thor's failure with the Ra was written off as a failure of the design based on more modern Egyptian reed river boats, and he decided to base the Ra II on a design synthesized from boats still used on Lake Titicaca in the Andes and boats still used in Morocco. To fascillitate the building of this new boat Thor brought 4 Master boat builders from Bolivia to work with his Moroccan boat building crew, and collected his Papyrus reeds from Lake Tana at the head of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. Thor & his internationaly representational crew: Yuri Alexandrovich Senkevich (Soviet Union), Norman Baker (United States), Carlo Mauri (Italy), Santiago Genoves (Mexico), Madanni Ait Ouhanni (Morocco), Kei Ohara (Japan) and Georges Sourial (Egypt), set sail from Safi, Morocco, on this day in 1970, reaching Barbados in just 57 days with the boat still intact. In 1977 Thor created another reed boat of similar design, the Tigris, which he sailed from Iraq through the Persian Gulf, into the Indian Ocean to Pakistan, and then back across to the Red Sea, but that's for another day. Other Historical Highlights for Today:
Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Freelance, Ph.D., D.F.S [ Edited by: freddiefreelance on 2005-05-17 08:25 ] |