The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String | Hakai Magazine
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Humans never could have taken to the oceans without rope: no string, no mariners. Photo by Stephen Barnes/Transport/Alamy Stock Photo
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The void opened suddenly—a negative space where there had once been sand. Kathryn Bard stuck her hand straight through the gap and felt nothing but air. It just kept going. She considered her surroundings: a slope of windblown sand near a terrace of fossilized coral 700 meters inland from the modern-day Egyptian coast. The recess in front of her, Bard realized, was probably not a result of geological processes; it was too deep. This was something else, something deliberate. Perhaps a tomb. Or a gateway.
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.”
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
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. A string can cut, choke, and trip; it can also link, bandage, and reel. String makes it possible to sew, to shoot an arrow, to strum a chord. It’s difficult to think of an aspect of human culture that is not laced through with some form of string or rope; it has helped us develop shelter, clothing, agriculture, weaponry, art, mathematics, and oral hygiene. Without string, our ancestors could not have domesticated horses and cattle or efficiently plowed the earth to grow crops. If not for rope, the great stone monuments of the world—Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza, the moai of Easter Island—would still be recumbent. In a fiberless world, the age of naval exploration would never have happened; early light bulbs would have lacked suitable filaments; the pendulum would never have inspired advances in physics and timekeeping; and there would be no Golden Gate Bridge, no tennis shoes, no Beethoven’s fifth symphony.
“Everybody knows about fire and the wheel, but string is one of the most powerful tools and really the most overlooked,” says Saskia Wolsak, an ethnobotanist at the University of British Columbia who recently began a PhD on the cultural history of string. “It’s relatively invisible until you start looking for it. Then you see it everywhere.”
Precisely when people began to twine, loop, and knot is unknowable, but we can say with reasonable confidence that string and rope are some of the most ancient materials used by humankind. At first, our ancestors likely harvested nature’s ready-made threads and cordage, such as vines, reeds, grass, and roots. If traditional medicine and existing Indigenous cultures are any clue, early humans may have even used spider silk to catch fish and bandage wounds. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago, people realized they could extract fibers from the hair and tissues of animals, as well as from the husks, leaves, and innards of certain sinewy, pulpy, or pliant plants, such as agave, cannabis, coconut, cotton, and jute. By...