Articles

Did the Ancient Egyptians of the Old, Middle and New Kingdom ever reach Malta and the Central Mediterranean?

Did the Ancient Egyptians of the Old, Middle and New Kingdom ever reach Malta and the Central
Mediterranean?

Anton Mifsud and Marta Farrugia

Ancient Egypt, Vol vi, no 5, April/May 2006: 38-44

Abstract

The pharaoh of the 12 th Dynasty, Senuseret I, writes thus to his exiled servant Sinuhe,“ Think of the day of your burial – your passing over into the perfect state. You will not die in a foreign land!”. The ancient Egyptians were extremely reluctant to leave the shores of their beloved Egypt in order to live and possibly die hundreds of milesaway, and thus to be deprived from the prerequisites for a successful afterlife. Nevertheless war was occasionally necessary outside the frontiers of Egypt, such asby Tuthmosis III, Seti I and Rameses II, in order to minimise military threats from powerful neighbours, and to create buffer states in between them. A lucrative seatrade with the Eastern Mediterranean nations was started from the end of the Old Kingdom and lasted well till the end of pharaonic history. However it was not the Egyptian boats which sailed across the ‘Great Green Sea’. Foreign produce reached Egypt via the successful European seafarers – Minoans and Mycenaeans, later knownas the Greeks.



The Egyptians did sail the seas however these were coast hugging voyages. Queen Hatchepsut organized one substantial seafaring expedition to the faraway land of Punt. She was by no means the first, neither the last pharaoh who send her/his shipstrading down the eastern African coast. Why would the ancient Egyptians be interested in an extremely small archipelago inthe central Mediterranean with a surface area that does not exceed 320 squarekilometres? The Maltese islands possessed no valuable natural resources, grain isinsufficient and water supplies low, and their only value lies in their strategic positionin the Sicilian straits, situated centrally between the eastern and western basins of the Mediterranean.

Click here to read this article from Ancient Egypt

Sponsored Content