Hanno

Carthaginian explorer

• Born: c. 520-510 b.c.e.
• Died: Unknown

Hanno founded the first trading colonies along the western African coast and then pushed on to explore the coast at least as far as modern Sierra Leone. His account of his journey provided the only reasonably accurate account of Africa until the time of Prince Henry the Navigator.

Early Life

Hanno (HAN-oh) belongs to that lamentably large class of ancients whose names have survived the centuries for a single history-shaping deed but about whom little else is known. Apart from scattered, confused references to his voyage in a few ancient works, the main source of information on Hanno is his text known as the Periplus (The Voyage of Hanno, 1797; best known as Periplus). Consisting of just under 650 words of Greek, it purports to be a translation of the public inscription Hanno erected in the temple of Kronos at Carthage to commemorate his voyage.

The introduction to the Periplus calls Hanno a king. The Carthaginian constitution had no kings but placed supreme power in two suffetes. In any case, Hanno was surely of the ruling nobility of Carthage. The dating of his life depends on the dating of his voyage. Pliny the Elder asserts twice that the voyage was undertaken when the power of Carthage was at its peak; modern scholars have suggested a date just prior to 480 b.c.e. Before this time, Carthage enjoyed a period of prosperity and expansion in the western Mediterranean region. Just at the time the Persians were losing their war with the Greeks at Thermopylae and Salamis, so did the Carthaginians, led by Hamilcar Barca, fall decisively to Gelon of Syracuse at the Battle of Himera. Subsequently, it took several decades for Carthage to regain its former strength and influence. This fact, together with philological evidence dating the Greek text to the fifth century, makes it seem best to place Hanno’s exploits prior to the Carthaginian defeat at Himera.

There are two men named Hanno known from this period, one the father and the other the son of the Hamilcar who died at Himera. The birth dates given above result from adding the probable age of a magistrate and state-sponsored explorer (between thirty and forty) to the upper limit of the date of the voyage (480). With this date, evidence seems to lean toward the younger Hanno, but there is ample room for doubt.

One can easily understand what may have inspired Hanno’s career. As a member of the ruling class, he viewed at first hand the cosmopolitan activity of the trading town of Carthage. A young man could have been readily lured by the possibility of travel and exploration as he walked along the busy docks and through the hectic markets of Carthage, which traded with Etruria, Phoenicia, and countless Greek city-states and African nations. It can be assumed that Hanno received the best Punic education of his day. His inscription, translated though it is, remains the longest bit of Punic literature available to modern scholars.

Life’s Work

The Periplus begins by stating that the Carthaginians instructed Hanno to sail “beyond the Pillars of Heracles” (the Straits of Gibraltar) to found Lybyophoenician cities. Modern scholars suggest plausibly that these cities were to serve as bases for trade with inner Africa, perhaps in precious metals.

The narrative claims that Hanno left with thirty thousand colonists and sixty oared ships. As such ships were small fighting craft, they must have served as a convoy for the colonists in transports. Two days beyond Gibraltar, Hanno founded his first city; five others followed in rapid succession. He then pushed along the western coast of Africa, stopping at Lixus River (now Wad Dra) to recruit interpreters before sailing along the coast of the Sahara Desert. He thereupon came to an island, which he named Kerne and on which he founded his seventh colony.

From there, his colonizing done, Hanno became an explorer. The Periplus tells of two excursions south from Kerne. On the first, Hanno encountered wild, skin-clad savages who pelted his crew with rocks. He discovered a river, filled with crocodiles and hippopotamuses, which he called the Chretes. On the second, apparently longer exploration, he eventually came to forests from which his crew heard the sounds of pipes, cymbals, and shouting. Terrified, they fled until they came to a burning country, filled with fragrant odors and from which burning streams flowed to the sea. In the midst of it stood a towering, blazing mountain that Hanno called the Chariot of the Gods, from whose summit fire shot up almost to the stars. Three days later, he reached an island inhabited by small, hairy “wild men” who threw rocks at the Carthaginians. The nimble males escaped, but Hanno’s crew managed to capture three scratching, biting females, who were promptly skinned. According to Pliny the Elder, two of these skins were on display in the temple of Juno at Carthage until its destruction by the Romans in 146 b.c.e. Hanno’s interpreters informed him that these creatures were called “gorillae.” Following the account of this incident, the Periplus notes rather abruptly that Hanno ran out of supplies and returned home.

There is no persuasive reason to believe that the Periplus is either a forgery or a literary exercise. It is exactly what it purports to be—a public version, probably abridged, of an actual voyage. Its few sentences, however, have caused rivers of ink (and no small amount of vitriol) to flow, all in an attempt to determine where Hanno went. Nineteenth century investigators tended to shorten the voyage too much, even claiming that Hanno never got beyond the Atlantic border of Morocco. A confused Pliny the Elder went to the other extreme, stating that Hanno sailed from Cádiz to the borders of Arabia. Somewhere in between lies the truth.

The solution to this problem hinges on the identification of several key places mentioned in the text, and one must first be aware of its limitations. It is at best a translation of an abridgment, and in spots the text is in question. There are no consistent indications of distance from one point to another; where measurements are given, they are in days. How many hours a day were spent in sailing? Were the explorers under sail or oars? Were they against or with the wind and currents?

Despite all these problems, a consensus seems to exist among many scholars on some matters. It is generally accepted that Hanno’s first six colonies dotted the northwest Atlantic coast of Africa, all fairly close to the Pillars of Heracles. The location of the seventh colony, Kerne, reached in two days after the Lixus River, is as difficult as it is crucial. When “two” is emended to “nine,” as it often is, it suggests a small island named Herne, lying opposite the Río de Oro off Western Sahara. Another candidate for Kerne is the Island of Arguin, farther still to the south.

One site of Hanno’s first exploration is accepted without question. The river full of crocodiles and hippopotamuses can only be the Senegal. It is the first river he could have reached with the requisite wildlife, and Pliny the Elder elsewhere remarks that the name of this river was the Bambotum, a name plausibly explained as a corruption of behemoth, the Semitic word for hippopotamus.

In recounting his adventures farther south, Hanno’s reports seem to take on a less believable tone. Nevertheless, his descriptions of aromatic, blazing lands, of the mountain called the Chariot of the Gods, and of the wild, hairy gorillas, once scorned as fictions, can be explained in such a way as to make them plausible.

An early report from the eighteenth century travels of explorer Mungo Park, for example, made clear that the fires Hanno saw sweeping the plains were the natives’ annual burning of the fields to increase their fertility. Hanno’s description of the “fiery streams” rushing to the sea and of the Chariot of the Gods with its fire reaching to the stars has prompted many, ancient and modern, to suppose a volcano is meant. Rather far to the south lies Mount Cameroon, a volcanic peak towering 13,353 feet (4,070 meters) over the plain and quite visible from the coast. The time given in the text for this leg of the trip, however, is clearly insufficient for Hanno to have reached this latitude. Other scholars, therefore, choose to see the Chariot of the Gods in the much closer Mount Kakulima in Guinea (on some maps called Souzos or Sagres). At 3,300 feet (1,005 meters), it is much less spectacular, but ablaze it could perhaps resemble a volcano. There are sound arguments for and against either site, and the choice is significant in determining the southern extent of the voyage. It is safest to say that Hanno reached at least as far as Sierra Leone.

Finally, there are the much-debated gorillas. One of the few things agreed on concerning this segment of the Periplus is that these are surely not gorillas in the modern sense of the word, for these animals are not found in this part of Africa. Most scholars believe that Hanno saw either chimpanzees or baboons, while a few hold to the earlier belief that they were pygmies or dwarfs. “Gorilla” in its modern sense was first used by Thomas Savage, an American missionary who happened to see some gorilla skulls and in 1847 announced to the world a new creature, locally called a pongo. Because this word was already in use scientifically, he recalled Hanno’s hairy creatures and bestowed the name gorilla on his new find. Any attempt to claim that Hanno saw real gorillas—and thus to extend his voyage as far south as Gabon—is undoubtedly incorrect.

Significance

Hanno’s work itself seems not to have been widely acclaimed in antiquity, and his reputation could not have been helped by the fact that he was a Carthaginian. The authors who cited him were often confused, and several seem incredulous. Educated guesses about Hanno’s dates and true identity are all that is possible. Hanno must be judged by his work.

Hanno was not the first to attempt a voyage down the western coast of Africa. Herodotus says that Pharaoh Necho II (early sixth century b.c.e.) engaged Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa from east to west and that they did so in a three-year voyage. Most scholars treat the story with caution, and its lack of any precise geographical details does make it suspect. Herodotus also notes that in the fifth century King Xerxes I of Persia commuted the sentence of death by impalement of a certain Sataspes with the provision that he attempt to circumnavigate Africa from west to east. Sataspes returned a failure and, perhaps to appease the king, told a tale of dwarfish races he had seen. The ploy did not work, and Sataspes was promptly impaled. A third sailor, a Greek from Massalia named Euthymenes, claimed to have sailed south along Africa until he saw a river filled with crocodiles (the Senegal?). His date, however, is merest conjecture. These tales demonstrate at the least that the idea of such a voyage was in circulation before Hanno attempted it. Also, the fact that his charge was to establish settlements along the coast indicates that the Carthaginians knew at least the closer, northwestern shore of Africa.

These facts, however, do not detract from Hanno’s accomplishments. His is the earliest believable and documented voyage of this scope. Moreover, later authors suggest that the colonies, including southern Kerne, continued to engage in trade up to the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146. Furthermore, there are no records of any further voyages of this length along the African coast until the Middle Ages, when ships routinely turned back at the “impassable” Cape Bojador. It was not until the expeditions of Prince Henry the Navigator that ships went farther, and then it took them forty years to get as far as Hanno had done.

Thus, in one summer, Hanno traveled farther than anyone was to do for some two thousand years. Moreover, his written record of his voyages, flawed as it may be, remained the sole source for the geography of western Africa during all the intervening years. Few explorers since have had such an influence.

Bibliography

Bunbury, Edward Herbert. A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans, from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire. 1879. Reprint. Amsterdam: J. Gieben, 1979. Features a reasonable discussion of the Periplus, with a fine map. Identifies Herne as Kerne, Kakulima with the Chariot of the Gods, and chimpanzees as the gorillas.

Carpenter, Rhys. Beyond the Pillars of Heracles. New York: Delacorte Press, 1966. Includes a translation of the Periplus and a lucid discussion of the practical problems of sailing times. Carpenter emends the text to produce a new identification of Herne with Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal. Excellent source.

Cary, Max, and E. H. Warmington. The Ancient Explorers. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1963. Provides treatments of Euthymenes, Hanno, Necho, and Sataspes. A map of northwest Africa, with major landfalls marked, is of great use. Balanced interpretation of the evidence for Hanno’s itinerary.

Church, Alfred J. The Story of Carthage. 1893. Reprint. New York: Biblo-Moser, 1998. This illustrated volume describes the history of the extinct city. Includes maps.

Hyde, Walter Woodburn. Ancient Greek Mariners. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947. Includes an extended discussion of the gorilla question. Good summary of Hanno’s text. The maps, however, are of low quality.

Thomson, J. O. History of Ancient Geography. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965. Good sections on Hanno and his predecessors. Excellent bicolored map shows various theories as to locations of Hanno’s landfalls.