The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String | Hakai Magazine
▻https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-long-knotty-world-spanning-story-of-string
Well-preserved rope was discovered at an archaeological site in Egypt dating to almost 4,000 years ago.
Photo courtesy of the Joint Expedition to Mersa/Wadi Gawasis of the Università “L’Orientale,” Naples and Boston University
Throughout the winter of 2004, Bard, an archaeologist at Boston University, and a team of excavators kept digging through the sand, eventually revealing a cave intentionally carved from fossil coral. Over the next seven years, Bard and an international team of researchers unearthed seven more caves, part of an ancient harbor called Saww, known as Wadi Gawasis today. The ancient Egyptians probably used the caves as shelters and workshops between 2000 and 1750 BCE. Some of the caves contained limestone anchors, timber, steering oars, a bowl, and charred barley seeds. In Cave 5, the researchers discovered a set of particularly stunning artifacts. Not a fleet of intact ships, or protocompasses, or chests of gold and jewels; something much more ordinary, yet indispensable for any seafaring nation—for any civilization.
Bard remembers when she first saw them. She squeezed through a small opening and shuffled sideways through a long narrow passageway to the very back of the cave. There they were: more than 20 thick papyrus ropes, neatly coiled and, by all appearances, so exquisitely preserved it seemed a sailor might come along and scoop them up at any moment. “It was a scene frozen in time,” Bard says. “They hadn’t been disturbed for close to 4,000 years.”
[…]
In his 1956 book The Marlinspike Sailor, marine illustrator Hervey Garrett Smith wrote that rope is “probably the most remarkable product known to mankind.” On its own, a stray thread cannot accomplish much. But when several fibers are twisted into yarn, and yarn into strands, and strands into string or rope, a once feeble thing becomes both strong and flexible—a hybrid material of limitless possibility.