> References in Greek texts from the 4th century BC are IMO suggestive of early voyages to the coast of West Africa, the nearest navigable mangrove forests (unless shipworm managed to somehow get carried across the Sinai isthmus) Simon Winchester discusses how Cape Bojador [1] was impassible until 1443 (in his book Atlantic [2]) so it is unlikely that early voyages reached any further south along the coast of West Af…
Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa, Greeks knew about that. https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2018/11/the-egyptian-phoen...
> As it can be appreciated, that voyage followed the opposite direction to those that the Portuguese would do centuries later: instead of sail south the Atlantic Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope to the east, they had to sail from Egypt in summer, cross the Red Sea (the Arabian Gulf which Herodotus says) taking advantage of the north wind and leaving behind the Horn of Africa.
So it is possible/likely that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in a clockwise direction while the Portuguese solved the harder problem of circumnavigating Africa counter-clockwise.
Back to the original question: how did shipworms get to ancient Greece? Both narratives support the idea that shipworms were most likely carried from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. The question is how early the Canal of the Pharaohs was operational. The shipworms may actual help set this date.
I wonder if a Phoenician equivalent of the Roman/Byzantine Periplus of the Erythraean Sea existed in Carthage and was lost after the Third Punic War.