> Another voyage was necessary to vindicate the Phoenician claims. This trip was made in 1488, when Bartolomeus Diaz reached the Cape of Good Hope.
That’s a full 2,000 years between the Egyptian circumnavigation and the European one.
That’s a full 2,000 years between the Egyptian circumnavigation and the European one.
History is fickle and nonlinear. In 1968, Kubrick and Clarke could look at the timeline between the Wright Brothers' first flight and then impending moon landings and conclude -- very reasonably! -- that there would be cities on the moon in 2001. And yet it's just as plausible that the moon landings, like this circumnavigation of Africa, could have simply been a momentary flex of a civilisation at the height of its powers, not to be repeated for thousands of years.
I'd love to see an alternate history which diverges at 600 BC. What if somebody had managed to connect an aeolipile to a drivetrain to a dialkos bogey, and kicked off the industrial revolution in Greece, at the same time as the circumnavigation of Africa had started the era of Phonecio-Egyptian colonialism? How different would the world look today?
These seem predictably rare events to me. There are very fiew individuals that afford to engage in such endeavors and the odds of succeeding are acting both as deterrent and physical limiting factor to any attempt. The fact that happened is an exception. Not until the odds improve and a strong enough incentive changes things. The incentive for Moon landing has been political. Once achieved, it dissipated, and there isn't much sense for it to be repeated until a new motivating factor will appear.
Addition: Diolkos, considering the cost and efficiency of how it could have been operated and maintained back in the antiquity, was clearly an artifact that could work only for short distances, where the gains were significant enough to justify it, and there was little sense for it to be constructed on the scale that rails were later constructed.
Maybe bioengineering is the next big thing. That will probably peak in 100 years too.
Edit: which civilization are you attributing the voyage to? The Phoenicians were past their peak. The Egyptians were at their peak, but they basically were cutting a check.
I read a story of a 16 year old girl sailing around the entire planet - totally solo. Sailing is easy.