Hanno the Navigator: 60 Ships, a Fiery Volcano and the First Gorillas

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Hanno the Navigator was a fifth century BC Carthaginian, probably of the powerful Magonid family and possibly a son of Hamilcar I, described by Roman writers as a general and by the Greek text as a basileus. His Periplus says he sailed past the Pillars of Hercules with 60 ships and 30,000 people to found colonies on the Atlantic coast of Africa, starting with Thymiaterion in modern Morocco; modern scholars think around 5,000 is more plausible. The motive was likely gold, bypassing Saharan middlemen. The account was inscribed in a temple of Kronos, probably Baal Hammon, but survives only as a 101-line Greek abridgment in two manuscripts from the 9th and 14th centuries.

Past the colonies the geography blurs, perhaps through deliberate state censorship. With Lixitae interpreters the fleet passed coastlines ablaze at night and a fire-spewing peak called the Chariot of the Gods, then reached an island whose hairy inhabitants were called Gorillae. Three females were captured, killed and flayed, and their skins hung in a Carthaginian temple until Rome destroyed the city in 146 BC. The text ends abruptly when provisions run out, and scholars still argue whether Hanno reached southern Morocco, Guinea or Gabon.

• Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman borrowed the name gorilla from the Periplus in 1847.
• Candidates for the Chariot of the Gods include Mount Cameroon and the much smaller Mount Kakoulima in Guinea.
• Raymond Mauny argued in 1955 that ancient square-rigged ships could not have sailed back north against the winds and currents off Cape Bojador.
• L.N. Oikonomides proposed that the original return journey was simply lost from the manuscript.
• Pliny the Elder claimed Hanno sailed around Africa to Arabia, a claim scholars reject.