A Carthaginian periplus still argues how far Africa went
Hanno the Navigator, a fifth-century BC Carthaginian—sometimes called king, sometimes commander—sailed West Africa’s coast and left a periplus that survives only in a Greek abridgment of about 101 lines. Scholars still feud over whether he reached Gabon or stopped near southern Morocco.
Plenty of Carthaginians were called Hanno, and ancient writers give few clues to this one’s identity: some call him king, while Latin authors use dux or imperator. Most scholars date him to the fifth century BC and count him among the Magonids, an aristocratic clan; R.C.C. Law makes him a son of Hamilcar I. His own report, probably written in Punic, is lost. A Greek abridgment survives in two manuscripts from the 9th and 14th centuries, and Conrad Gessner printed the first Latin version at Zurich in 1559.
The periplus opens with a dedication in the temple of Kronos and describes 60 ships carrying 30,000 people to found towns beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Hanno passed Gibraltar and founded or resettled seven colonies on what is now the Moroccan coast before pressing south. Securing a route to West African gold, a pillar of Carthage’s wealth, may have been the real motive, and the Carthaginians may have deliberately blurred the account to guard their trade.
Efforts to match the reported distances and bearings to real places have mostly failed. Estimates of the voyage run from under 1,100 kilometres to at least 4,800. Donald Harden reports agreement that the fleet got at least to Senegal, and some think Gambia; in 1955 Raymond Mauny argued no ancient sailor went much past Cape Bojador in Western Sahara. The translator Al. N. Oikonomides thinks the abrupt ending means the source manuscript was itself incomplete.
The narrative closes on an island of hairy, savage people; three captured women were killed and their skins hung in a Carthaginian temple. Interpreters called these people Gorillai, and the ape named in 1847 borrowed the word, though its describers did not claim they were the same creatures. Pliny’s later tale of a voyage round Africa to Arabia is now judged unrealistic.
Source: Hanno the Navigator
