By Roxani Margariti.
Many years ago, as an archaeology student in the early 1990s, I had the amazing luck and privilege of participating in a project entitled Traditional Boats of Oman Project and headed by Indian Ocean boatbuilding specialist Tom Vosmer. Of the many remarkable things I witnessed during the two seasons of working for Tom in Oman was the strange and intriguing stem and stern decorations of traditional wooden fishing boats at Kumzar. When I mentioned this to Dimitra, she brought up stem ornamentation in the Aegean. It seemed apt to do short posts on the topic of boat ornaments in our respective areas of expertise and see where this line of inquiry takes us!
Kumzar, a small but densely populated fishing village and regional hub, is neatly tucked onto the shore of a homonymous gulf of the Musandam peninsula. The Musandam’s dramatic landscape of deep bays and rugged, mountainous shores has been aptly described as the Arabian counterpart of the Nordic fjords—and even as the Norway of Arabia!
As Vosmer and others have noted, in Kumzar, traditional wooden hulls still survive. They remain in use alongside modern fiberglass vessels. Among the traditional types recorded are the battil and the related but smaller zarooqa types. Fast and sleek, the battil of old were reportedly used in commerce, slave trading, and smuggling, but also in pearling. Today’s survivals, however, are smaller fishing battil, and have caught the eye of observers for two reasons: their vestigial “sewn construction” elements—sewn plank construction being a pervasive mode of ship-construction in the Indian Ocean in premodern times—and their intriguing decoration of stem (the front or bow end of the boat) and stern post (the timber at the back end of the boat).
Tom Vosmer’s studies of traditional vessel structures have clarified the morphological and functional differences and similarities between different types. His work has also helped us better understand the evolution of Arabian traditional boatbuilding across time and space.
In the examples of decorated battil, the stempost extends diagonally forward and is clad in goat skins. In some cases, slung around these skin-clad stems or hanging from their tips, are necklaces or bunch-like pendants of cowrie shells. These vessels also feature a double horn-like timber placed perpendicularly to the gunnels just aft of the stem that resembles a cleat and is suggestively called kalb (dog). Although initially speculation was that this may have functioned to secure anchor lines at the bow, Vosmer’s investigation showed that the kalb is too weakly attached to hold weight and tension and thus remains purely decorative.
The battils also feature very distinctive sternposts, planked and tall; these have a special name in Arabic, fashin. In profile, the shape of the most distinctive fashin resembles the outline of a dog’s head (hence the term “dog-head fashin”). The seagoing classic battil of old featured this dog-head fashin. Today, not all battil fashin are dog-shaped; some are rectangular for most of their length ending in a roughly triangular top. The shape of the sternpost marks the different types of battil as well as related types of vessels.
The battil sternposts are also decorated with cowrie shells. The variation of decorative schemes is fascinating and delightful! Cowrie shells sewn onto strips of colored cloth or leather, strung together in chains, or hung as pendants with other shells and ornaments ranging from silver medallions to colorful plastic eggs create a truly festive effect.
Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003), the British traveler who documented traditional ways of life in Arabia at a time when major transformations were afoot, is as far as I know, the first to photograph these decorations. These images and the ornamented hulls they picture appear like vestiges of a vanishing past. In 1994, however, Tom Vosmer and distinguished photographer Roger Garwood produced a new record of these ornaments, attesting to their survival and the resilience of maritime culture at Kumzar.
Leading the Traditional Boats of Oman project, Vosmer also documented the survival of the battil in several academic articles and made note of the decorations. Arabist and scholar of maritime heritage Dionisius Agius, who collaborated with Vosmer in the late 1990s, reports that in an interview a local fisherman explained that the cowrie shell decorations were connected to the celebration of weddings. A similar explanation was given to Vosmer for the plastic egg-shaped and other ornaments. Since cowrie ornaments are permanently affixed on the boats, and since these vessels are still mainly used for fishing, the question of symbolism remains complex and intriguing, and it is likely that the beautiful materials and patterns on the battils carried more than one meaning for their builders and users.
Cowries are the shells of a group of sea snails (gastropods) of the Cypridae family, including several species with wide distribution around the world’s oceans. Their smooth and shiny surface reminds one of precious porcelain, which in fact was named after the Latin term for the shells, porcella! This quality and, in the case of some cowrie species such as the tiger cowries, their speckled and brilliant coloring make them natural jewels. Their characteristic linear opening with its perpendicular parallel striations resonates with images of vulvae thereby connecting cowries with fertility symbolism; it is this fertility connection that gives them their general species name “cypraea”, “the Cyprian,” an epithet of the Greek fertility goddess Aphrodite, born in Cyprus. As symbols of fertility, cowries fit well in the material culture of weddings and marital life; the report conveyed by Agius that this was precisely the context of their appearance on the Musandam battil thus makes good sense.
In addition to ornamental and symbolic functions, however, it is remarkable that cowries, collected in vast quantities primarily from the Maldives, have also functioned as money—hence, in fact, the particular species names given to them Cypraea moneta and Monetaria moneta! That cowries harvested in the Indian Ocean island complex have ended up in regular monetary use in West Africa is a remarkable function of the multiple networks implicated in the slave trade.
The monetary dimension of cowries adds interpretation possibilities regarding their use on the Musandam battil. Are cowrie shell decorations a vestige of an original connection between the older, trading and smuggling battil and the cowrie money trade of the past? Are they connected to the fertility symbolism of the cowrie form? Are they purely decorative? These do not need to be mutually exclusive explanations and it is likely that semantic shifts have taken place. It would be interesting to look for archaeological and/or textual evidence of cowrie use on battil or other vessels before the 20th century. For now, Agius’s and Vosmer’s ethnographic research has shown that present-day users connect battil cowrie shell ornaments to marriage symbolism. Additionally, Vosmer records a flat and often decorated timber that connects the cap rails near the bow, the name of which, ‘arusa (the Arabic word for bride), seems to suggest an additional association between ships and the feminine.
In closing, we cannot overlook the function and symbolism of the goat hides and horn-like kalb on some of the Musandam battils. The presence of hides and horns on a boat reminds us of the complementarity of land and sea economy, as goat-herding is an important sustainer of livelihoods in the Musandam. But what did the boatbuilders have in mind? Vosmer intriguingly conveys the sense that the ornamentation and materials are said to have been “inspired by events in the village where the boat is based.” Agius reports communal rituals and feasts marking the launching of a boat at Kumzar and elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula. The feast includes the sharing of food, including the meat of an animal, sheep or goat, specially slaughtered for the occasion. The goatskins, then, may be related to that “sacrifice” and the rituals for an auspicious start in the vessel’s life. Another, more momentous but also regularly annual occasion of ritual slaughtering of animals in the life of an Islamic community comes to mind as well: the Feast of the Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) that marks the end of the holy month of Dhu’l-Hijja, the month of the major Muslim pilgrimage. Could there be a meaningful connection between the skins used on the boats and this major feast in the religious life of Kumzar? Might the skins serve as a reminder of the community’s piety and thus act as a talisman protecting the boat’s adventures?
The battil decorations, the animal skins, the horns, the dog-shaped timbers and canine terminology, and last but not least the cowries and the more modern plastic ornaments appear to be the material expression of a deep deposit of ideas and practices that were adopted and adapted and acquired new meanings along the way. Those ornaments thus remain today as palimpsests of that rich past and invite us to speculate and research. In our next post, Dimitra will explore similar questions about the stem ornaments of much older boats: she will be transporting us to the Aegean Bronze Age of the third millennium BCE!