ABSTRACT
Around 1130 BCE, an Egyptian priest named Wenamon made a voyage from Thebes to Lebanon, to purchase for his temple a consignment of cedar wood. The trip was a disaster: Wenamon was robbed, chased by pirates and at one point almost killed, when he himself was mistaken for a pirate. Yet it did have one important outcome. Wenamon subsequently wrote a report on his misadventures, and that report has survived, albeit in a fragmentary condition; it constitutes, according to the historian Lionel Casson, ‘the earliest detailed account of a voyage in existence’ (1974: 39).
