The earliest navigation of the Red Sea (passing by the prehistorical Phoenicians) is mentioned by Herod^ otus. '■ Scsostris ( liameses II) was the first who, passing the Arabian Gulf in a fleet of long vessels, reduced under his authority the inhabitants of the coast bordering the Erythraean Sea. Proceeding still farther, he came to a sea which, from the great number of its shoals, was not navigable;" and after another war against Ethiopia he set up a stela on the promontory of Dira, near the strait of the Arabian Gulf. Three centuries later, Solomon's navy was built " in Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom" (1 Kings ix, 26). In the description of the Gulf of el- ' Akabah, it will be seen that this narrow sea is almost without any safe anchorage, except at the island of Graia near the Akabah, and about lift}' miles southward the har- bor of ed-Dhahab. It is supposed by some that the sea has retired here as at Suez, and that Eziongeber is now dry land. See Elatii ; Eziongkbek. Solomon's navy was evidently constructed by Phoenician workmen of Hiram, for he " sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon." This was the navy that sailed to Ophir. We may con- clude that it was necessary to transport wood as well as men to build and man these ships on the shores of the Gulf of the Akabah, which from their natural formation cannot be supposed to have much altered, and which were, besides, part of the Wilderness of the Wandering; and the Edomites were pastoral Arabs, unlike the sea- faring Himyerites. Jehoshaphat also "made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold ; but they went not, for the ships were broken at Eziongeber" (1 Kings xxii, 48). The scene of this wreck has been supposed to be ed-Dhahab, where is a reef of rocks like a " giant's back- bone" ( = Eziongeber) (Wellsted, ii, 153), and this may strengthen an identification with that place. These ships of Jehoshaphat were manned by "his servants," who, from their ignorance of the sea, may have caused the wreck. Pharaoh -necho constructed a number of ships in the Arabian Gulf, and the remains of his works existed in the time of Herodotus (p. 159), who also tells us that these ships were manned by Phoenician sailors.
The fashion of the ancient ships of the Red Sea, or of the Phoenician ships of Solomon, is unknown. From Pliny we learn that the ships were of papyrus and like the boats of the Nile; and this statement was no doubt in some measure correct. But the coasting craft must have been very different from those employed in the Indian trade. More precise and curious is El-Makrizi's description, written in the first half of the 15th century, of the ships that sailed from Eidhab on the Egyptian coast to Jiddah : "Their ' jelebehs' (P. Lobo, ap. Quatre- mere, Memoires, ii. 164, calls them 'gelves'), which carry the pilgrims on the coast, have not a nail used in them, but their planks are sewed together with fibre which is taken from the cocoanut-tree, and they calk them with the fibres of the wood of the date-palm; then they 'pay' them with butter or the oil of the Palma Christi, or with the fat of the kirsh (Squalus carcharias; Forskal, Descr. Animalivm, p. viii, No. 19). . . . The sails of these jele- behs are of mats made of the dom palm" (the Khitat, "Desert of Eidhab"). The crews of the latter, when
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in it exceptionally Phoenicians, as were Solomon's and Pharaoh -necho's, were without doubt generally Ara- bians rather than Egyptians those Himyerite Arabs whose ships carried all the wealth of the East either to tlic Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. The people of 'Oman,
the south-easl provint f Arabia, were ai g the fore-
mosl of these navigators | El-Mes'udi's Golden Meadows, MS., and Thi \ccounUofTwo Mohammedan Travellers of tki 9lk Century'). It was customary, probably to avoid tin- dangers and delays of t lie narrow seas, for the ships engaged in the Indian trade to transship their car- he Strail of Bab el-Mandeb to Egyptian and other vessels of the Red Sea (Agath. § 103, p. L90; anon. Peripl. § 26, p. -~~, ed. Muller). The fleets appear to have sailed about the autumnal equinox, and returned in I December or the middle of January i Pliny, //. N. vi, c. xxiii. § 26; comp. Peripl. passim I. Jerome says that the navigation was extremely tedious. At the present day the voyages are periodical and guided by the sea- sons; bul the old skill of the seamen has nearly depart- ed, and they are extremely timid, rarely venturing far from the coast.
The lied Sea, as it possessed for many centuries the most important sea-trade of the East, contained ports oi celebrity. Of these, Elath and Eziongeber alone ap- pear to he mentioned in the Bible. The Herobpolitic Gulf is of the chief interest — it was mar to Goshen; it
was the see if the passage of the Red Sea; it was
also the seat of the Egyptian trade in this sea and to tli.' Indian < >eean. Heroopolis is doubtless the same as Hero, and its site has Been probably identified with the modern Abu-Kesheid, at the head of the old gulf. By tli- consent of the classics, it stood on or near the head of the gulf, and was sixty-eight mile's (according to the Itim in 1 1 1 of Antoninus) from Clysma. by the Arabs called el-Kulzum, near the modern Sue/, which is close to the present head. Suez is a poor town, and has only an unsafe anchorage with very shoal water. On the shore of the Herobpolitic Gulf was also Arsinoe, founded by Ptolemy Philadelphia; its site has not been settled. Berenice, founded by the same, on the southern frontier of Egypt, rose to importance under the Ptolemies and the Romans; it is now of no note. On the western coast was also the anchorage of Myos Hormos, a little north of the modem town el-Kuseir. which now forms the point of communication with the old route in ( loptos. ()n the Arabian coast the principal ports an' Mu'eileh, Yembo' (the port of el-Medineh), Jiddah (the port of Mekkeh), and Mukha. by us commonly written Mocha. The Red Sea in most parts affords anchorage for country vessels well acquainted with its intricacies, and able to creep along the coast among the reefs, and islands that girl the shore. Numerous creeks on the Arabian shore (called "shurum," sing, "sharm") indent the land. Of these the anchorage called cs-Sharm, at the southern extremity of i he peninsula of Sinai, is much frequented.