Ballast from the past: How did Bronze Age boats sail the open seas?

What did the boats that connected the earliest civilisations look like? In an attempt to look further back, researchers in Abu Dhabi recently turned to an ancient Sumerian clay tablet discovered in Iraq and now housed at the British Museum. I was surprised by how this big boat… moved so smoothly on the sea,” Marwan Abdullah Al-Marzouqi, a sailing champion from Abu Dhabi who co-captained the vessel, said in a statement. The experimental archaeology project was a collaboration between Abu Dhabi’s Zayed National Museum, New York University Abu Dhabi and Zayed University, and saw archaeologists, anthropologists and engineers from around the world work together to decode what the ship should look like, how it should be built and steered, and how it could be expected to ply. The life-sized, ocean-tested model is now back on land, and will be a key exhibit at Zayed National Museum, when the institute opens next year, offering visitors a look at just what it took to travel the high seas in the Bronze Age.