516 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



thyself with Ahaziah, the Lord hath broken thy works. And the ships were broken, 

 that they were not able to go to Tarshish. 



And similarly we read in I Kings xxii, 48, 49 : 



Jehoshaphat made ships of Tharshish to go to Ophir for gold: but they went not; 

 for the ships were broken at Eziongeber. Then said Ahaziah the son of Ahab unto 

 Jehoshaphat, Let my servants go with thy servants in the ships. But Jehoshaphat 

 would not. 



The Bible is silent about the cause of the failure of this first and 

 only attempt of the Jews at independent seafaring, but it is found in 

 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, ix, 1, §4: 



He (Jehoshaphat) also kept friendship with Ahab's son (Ahaziah), King of the 

 Israelites, and entered into an agreement with him to equip ships which should sail 

 to the Pontus and the trading places of Thrace. But aa the vessels were too big and 

 therefore perished, he gave up building other ships. 



Here it is unmistakably stated that the Jews indeed made an 

 attempt at independent shipbuilding, without the assistance of the 

 Phenicians, but — as would naturally be expected — made a complete 

 failure of it. 



Another apparently improbable statement in the Biblical account 

 about Solomon is that his people carried on seafaring independently. 

 Here, too, Josephus doubtless gives the correct statement when he 

 writes that Solomon sent along his own officials with the Tyrian sea- 

 men to Ophir, obviously chiefly as superintendents of the entire 

 rather costly undertaking. For it is evident that the building of 

 ships at Eziongeber must have been very expensive on account of 

 the necessity of transporting the requisite timber from the Lebanon 

 to the Eed Sea. 



Considering these several definite accounts, there can be no doubt 

 that Solomon's officials had really undertaken, on ships built at the 

 Red Sea with the aid of Tyrian craftsmen and manned with Tyrian 

 sailors, one or more for that time very important sea voyages of three 

 years' duration to Ophir-India. How came the Tyrian seafarers to 

 undertake such a distant and perilous voyage to an unknown gold 

 land, from which they were separated not only by many thousands 

 of miles of sea but also by a broad tract of land ? There is no sug- 

 gestion that the ships had been sent out haphazard to an unknown 

 goal, but, on the contrary, as indicating the difficulties of such a 

 voyage, it is stated that it consumed three years, probably the normal 

 duration of such a trip. We may therefore conclude that this sea 

 route was nothing new to the Phenicians, but something they had long 

 known. But it is absurd to assume that the Phenicians inhabiting 

 the Syrian coast had reached the Red Sea overland before the times 

 of David and Solomon, and there at random had built ships with 

 timber brought along by them, and that they set out at haphazard 

 and accidentally discovered India. The statement of Herodotus that 



