This edited article about seafaring originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 263 published on 28 January 1967.

Queen Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt with inset diagram showing details of the boat construction

How did seafaring begin? Who first made a raft, a dug-out, a bark canoe? We haven’t much idea, any more than we can find out now who first thought up the idea of making a wheel.

But it is pretty sure that the same materials available to men over much of the earth led to the development of the same sort of floating ‘vehicles’ – so much so, indeed, that many exceedingly primitive craft are still with us. After all, logs, burned-out hollow trees, curled bits of bark, rafts and even lashed-up reeds will float anywhere. So will blown-up animal skins and big baskets, woven and caulked with bitumen or tar, or just trampled-down grass held together with any gooey stuff that happens to be to hand, like resin out of trees.

Rock drawings; scratchings on stone; stylised decorations on ancient vases scarcely identifiable as any sort of vessel, actual models of very old Egyptian river-craft; all these still exist and we can make what we want of them. So do the vessels themselves on which the drawings and models were based, in surprising profusion: reed boats on Lake Titicaca in South America, for example, which are nothing but bundles of bulrushes in which a fisherman may sit and control a small sail of light woven reeds set from a bipod mast of sticks; basket-boats woven from bamboos and caulked with a mixture of cow-dung and coconut oil in Vietnam; the one-man rafts of small balsa logs lashed together which are used for fishing inshore along the coasts of Peru and Brazil; and dug-outs with or without outriggers; twin-hulled or single, large and small, still abound in parts of the South Sea Islands, and around the coasts of India, Ceylon, Burma, East and West Africa.

With one exception, none of these craft would ever grow into any sort of seagoing ship. Even the primitive Australian aborigines made a raft of mangrove poles, but they got no farther. Rafts, reeds and baskets did all that was needed.

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This edited article about Primitive Man originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 252 published on 12 November 1966.

In Britain 4,000 tears ago by Angus McBride

The two boys had been working all day in the flint mine, hacking away with their antler-horn picks and wedges to release the great nodules of flint which lay embedded in the chalk under the South Downs.

At last came a welcome, distant cry, echoing through the maze of crooked, underground passages. The sun was setting and the day’s work over. They crawled back along the eerily silent gallery, dragging their flint in large wicker baskets, till they came to a large, circular chamber, dimly lit from the narrow shaft in the roof, which reached up to the ground fifty feet above them. Other galleries led into the chamber and more miners were coming in, with their baskets of flint nodules.

Round the top of the mine shaft were scattered the small stone huts of some of the miners and flint workers, for they worked the flint themselves, on the spot, into the axes and adzes, hammers, spear heads and scrapers which the farmers needed in order to cut down the forest trees and clear their land for crops. But the boys’ family were farming people and their home lay a mile or two distant from the mine.

They hurried over the grassy downland and soon the settlement came into view, its earthen ramparts black against the setting sun. Surrounding, it were fields of barley and wheat, which had been carefully tended throughout the summer with flint hoes, digging sticks and antler picks.

The boys had helped to build the settlement themselves. It consisted of a large, circular ditch, with the earth from the ditch thrown up on the inner side to make a high bank, on the top of which was built a wooden stockade. At regular intervals digging had been stopped, leaving causeways of virgin earth which served as entrances.

At night time and during the winter, the herds of cattle and goats, sheep and pigs were kept in the innermost ring of the settlement, safe from robbers and marauding wild animals; and in the shelter of the ramparts the farmers had built their primitive shelters, of stone or wood, roofed with animal skins.

These people lived in Britain some four to five thousand years ago, practising some of the New Stone Age arts which had been discovered in the Near East hundreds of years earlier. Man had existed in Britain for fifty thousand years, but for the last twenty thousand years of the Old Stone Age he had advanced hardly at all. With the arrival of these newcomers there came a profound change, and from this time onwards development was steady and swift.

As early as 6,000 B.C., farming communities had become established in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. Gradually these people spread westwards into Europe, bringing their new arts with them and, in the course of the long centuries, small groups, who had inherited the knowledge of the eastern New Stone Age, crossed to Britain with their flocks and herds and their grains of wheat and barley. One of the most interesting settlements is at Windmill Hill in Wiltshire and they are known as the Windmill Hill people. They were the first British farmers.

This edited article about Cleopatra’s Needle originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 248 published on 15 October 1966.

A picture history of Cleopatra's Needle by Pat Nicolle

The bearded seaman wiped the spray off his face with a soaking wet jacket, then hung on grimly to the deckhouse as another giant sea came sweeping down towards what must have been the craziest ship ever to sail into the Atlantic.

“Sir,” he said, “can’t we abandon her?”

But all he got from Captain Carter was a grim shake of the head.

The Captain was staring at the steel hawser from the bows leading away through the boiling sea to the little steamer Olga, which was towing them northwards along the Portuguese coast. Abandon ship? Never! He had sworn to bring the ‘Cleopatra’ safely to Britain, and he was not a man who cared to be beaten.

The trouble was – the ‘Cleopatra’ was not really a ship at all. She was simply a great iron cylinder, 92 feet long, tapering at each end, and with nothing on her sloping deck except the cramped deckhouse for Captain Carter and his crew of seven. Inside the cylinder, packed with ballast to make it float on an even keel, was the great stone obelisk, 68 feet long, known as Cleopatra’s Needle.

For nearly 3,500 years the obelisk had stood in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis. Weighing nearly 190 tons, it had been quarried from a single huge stone by Egyptian slaves, at the orders of Pharaoh Thothmes III. Now, after being presented to Britain by the Egyptian government, it was being brought on its incredible sea journey – incredible, because the year was 1877, when steamships were still small and lacking in power, and this was the most daring ‘tow’ ever undertaken.

Too daring! As Captain Carter sheltered his eyes from the bitter wind and anxiously watched the towline, a heavy sea crashed into the ‘Cleopatra’s’ flank, flinging her on her beam ends. Metal screamed in protest as the flimsy deckhouse nearly tore from its mountings. And aboard the Olga a signalman on the bridge spelt out with his semaphore flags: Am heaving to and heading into wind.

It was the only action possible. Steaming into the teeth of the gale, the Olga herself would be safe, and the ‘Cleopatra’ would be less likely to snap the towing hawser.

But darkness was falling. No sooner had the Olga completed her turn, than Captain Carter saw, to his horror, a gigantic wave bearing straight down on the ‘Cleopatra’. In the gloom he could not tell how it would strike, and the ‘Cleopatra’ was still swinging slowly – too slowly – to face the gale.

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This edited article about the Bible originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 245 published on 24 September 1966.

Compiling and editing the canon of Scripture from ancient documents and records by William Hole

Some thirty years ago there were headlines in every British newspapers about the proposal to purchase an ancient manuscript of the Bible and to place it in the British Museum. The price was £100,000; the seller was the government of Soviet Russia, and the British Government agreed to find half the cost if the other half could be raised by public subscription. The sum was quickly collected, and since 1933 the manuscript has been one of our national treasures.

Its history is a strange one. It was written in Greek, on 148 leaves of fine vellum, early in the 4th century A.D., probably by an Egyptian scribe. For centuries it lay in the library of St. Catherine, at the foot of Mount Sinai. One of the oldest Biblical manuscripts in existence, it was rediscovered in 1844 by a Russian called Tischendorf – just as it was about to be put on a bonfire! It was sent as a present to the Czar of Russia, and was eventually sold to Britain, as already mentioned.

This was the most important of the many discoveries made in the past century which have helped us to gain greater knowledge of the original Hebrew and Greek Books of the Bible, from which one English version is translated, and it is interesting to know that it is in our keeping.

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This edited article about Crete originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 238 published on 6 August 1966.

A reconstruction of the Palace of Knossos by Harry Green

The island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea, is barely 160 miles long by 35 miles wide. But it has an importance in history out of all proportion to its size, for it acted as a kind of stepping-stone between three continents – Africa, Asia, and Europe.

During the 19th century, discoveries on the Greek mainland led men to believe that somewhere in the islands of the Aegean Sea lay the key to the early history of Greece. Gradually attention centred upon Crete, and excavations began at various points on the island.

In 1900, Arthur Evans, a young British scholar, began digging in the ruins on a hill some three miles outside the town of Heraklion, on the north coast. He expected that the site would be cleared in a year or so . . .

Twenty-five years later he was still working there, for beneath the hill lay one of the greatest palaces of the world – Knossos, home of the legendary King Minos.

It swiftly became apparent to Evans that his spade was laying bare not merely a palace, but an entire civilisation, extending from approximately 3600 B.C. to 1200 B.C. It was as though some future archaeologist, digging in England, were to find a single site containing the ruins of Stonehenge and a 20th century nuclear power station, together with remains of all the centuries between!

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This edited article about Troy originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 237 published on 30 July 1966.

A Trojan warrior returns at the end of the day to his wife and child at home within the walled city of Troy by Ron Embleton

The story of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which Homer described in his epic poem, the Iliad, was as far removed from him in time as we are from Elizabethan England. The Greek poet Homer lived about 900 B.C. and the war took place at least 300 years earlier. It ended with the Greeks utterly destroying the city of Troy. Any Trojans who survived the war were enslaved or became fugitives.

But did Troy ever really exist, or was it simply born of Homer’s imagination? This question was argued for centuries, and those who claimed that there had once been a real city called Troy pointed to a particular spot in Turkey, about three miles from the coast. Here a low mound rises about 120 feet above the plain. The Turks called it Hissarlik, which means “castle”, for there were fort-like ruins upon its summit, and from the very earliest days tradition asserted that this was the true site of Troy.

Xerxes, Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, Julius Caesar – all visited the spot and paid homage to the mighty dead of the war. Nevertheless, scholars mocked at the idea that Troy was buried within the mound. Homer could not be used as a guide, they said, for he was a poet, not an historian, and he was writing centuries after the events he described.

In any case Troy, according to Homer, had been situated on beetling cliffs – a description which hardly applied to the unimpressive hillock of Hissarlik. The most likely spot was the steep cliffs near a place called Bunarbashi, 36 miles from the coast.

No one troubled to do anything practical about the problem, however, until 1873, when a German, Heinrich Schliemann, confounded the scholars by the simple method of actually digging.

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This edited article about the Hittites originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 236 published on 23 July 1966.

Hattusas, the mountain stronghold of the warlike Hittites by Ron Embleton

A mountain-top in Turkey seems a more fitting site for the castle of a robber chieftain than the capital of a great empire. But it was here that archaeologists discovered the ruins of the chief city of the Hittites, a powerful race which the Bible mentions several times as the rulers of an empire somewhere in Asia.

The discovery of the heart of this lost empire of the Hittites had no one dramatic moment. Instead the work was carried on by experts over many years.

Scholars concerned with records of ancient Egypt had found many references to a warlike people called Hatti, with whom even the mighty Pharaohs dealt carefully. These people used chariots in war, were able to put thousands of soldiers in the field, and had built up a complex series of alliances with neighbouring kings. In a great battle in 1288 B.C., they and the Egyptians fought to a standstill and thereafter treated each other with respect.

Meanwhile, other scholars in Turkey and the Middle East discovered that statues, ruins and inscriptions of an unknown race were to be found over a wide area. Certain links seemed to connect the Hatti of the Egyptian annals and the Hittites of the Bible with this mysterious race.

The information picked up in Egypt and Turkey was assembled together in Europe by other experts, until gradually a picture was built up of a people who had ruled their empire from the mountains of Turkey. Expeditions were sent out to try to locate the nerve-centre of this empire.

In 1906, systematic excavations began among strange ruins on a mountain-top near the Turkish village of Boghazkoy, and it was here that the archaeologists found what they were looking for. The ruins at Boghazkoy turned out to be the remains of Hattusas, the long-sought Hittite capital.

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This edited article about the Mayas originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 235 published on 16 July 1966.

The Mayas and their dazzling city by Ron Embleton

The ancient civilization of Central America is one of the most mysterious in the world, for the people who lived there were unknown to the rest of the world until the 16th century.

Even now, no one knows where they came from. Some believe that they migrated via the Arctic circle, or by boat or raft across the oceans. There are even claims that, originally, they came from the legendary lost continent of Atlantis.

All that can be said with certainty is that these people – the Aztecs, Toltecs and Mayas – were related to each other and created a civilization equal to any in the world.

About the year A.D. 300 the Mayas, for some unknown reason, abandoned their cities in the south and moved northward. Their migration lasted for many years, but they came at length to an area now known as Yucatan, a province of Mexico, and there built cities exactly resembling those they had so mysteriously abandoned.

One of the 18 clans into which the Mayas were divided chose a curious area to found their capital, Chichen-itza. Most cities are founded near rivers, but there are none in this arid district of Mexico, although rainfall is heavy. The rainwater simply percolates through the local limestone and collects in pools underground.

The builders of the city knew this and therefore constructed enormous reservoirs, hundreds of feet below ground, where the water remained cool and sweet.

Like the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Mayas depended upon a complex system of irrigation. The land was thus made fertile at places like Chichen-itza and remained so for hundreds of years – until the coming of the Spaniards in the 16th century.

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This edited article about Pompeii originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 234 published on 9 July 1966.

Pompeii by Ron Embleton

On August 24, A.D. 79, Pompeii, a city on the coast near Naples very popular with the wealthier class of Roman, was buried in a few hours by an eruption of the nearby volcano Vesuvius. Destruction was caused not by lava but by volcanic debris hurled through the air by the violence of the explosion.

First came a heavy bombardment of boulders and pebbles, then a thick cloud of fine, white ash. Finally a torrential rain, probably caused by condensing steam, fell to mix with the ash and form a kind of plaster. This plaster was to give a unique but gruesome gift to archaeologists of the future.

The rediscovery of Pompeii occurred in a roundabout fashion. In 1719, builders quarrying marble on the other side of Vesuvius found a treasury of statues. They had stumbled upon Herculaneum, a city destroyed by the same eruption as that which destroyed Pompeii: unlike Pompeii, it had been engulfed in a flow of mud which subsequently turned to a layer of stone 85 feet thick.

The finds were rich, for the people of Herculaneum had been unable to remove their possessions, but the difficulty of working in the solid stone discouraged all but the most dedicated treasure-seekers.

The discovery of Herculaneum reminded men of the existence of Pompeii, however, and search began on the probable site beneath obliterating vines and mulberries growing in the fertile, ashy soil to the south of Vesuvius. It was immediately successful and, because excavating was easier there than at Herculaneum, interest was gradually transferred to Pompeii.

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This edited article about Tutankhamen originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 214 published on 19 February 1966.

Tutankhamen

Peering into the stone-walled room by the light of their torches that morning of February 16, 1923, Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter gasped at the mass of treasures. Their torch beams played over gold-painted couches carved in the shapes of animals. There was a golden throne, and gold-plated chariots; vases, caskets, and a profusion of rich furnishings.

All these were valuables which the Egyptians had buried with a Pharaoh whose reign ended in 1355 B.C.

At the far end of the room, twin statues of the long-dead Pharaoh flanked a door which opened into another room. This was the burial chamber and it was almost filled with a huge gold-sheathed shrine. Within the shrine was the mummy of the Pharaoh, in a case of solid gold set with precious stones.

Opening off the burial chamber was another treasure house of golden shrines, chests, statues of ivory and delicately carved models of all the things the Pharaoh had known and used during his lifetime.

Few archaeological discoveries have so electrified the world as did the finding of the tomb of Tutankhamen. The tombs of greater Pharaohs had been discovered in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, but they had been stripped of their treasures by vandals centuries previously.

For Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, the discovery was the reward for seventeen years of patient work. When they began their search in 1906, in the Valley of Kings, archaeologists thought that nothing more of importance remained to be unearthed.