Reported Phoenician and Punic Atlantic Voyages: Hanno, Himilco and Necho II

Three ancient reports describe Atlantic voyages in different political settings. Hanno led a Carthaginian expedition south along Africa; Himilco was sent to explore Europe’s outer coast; and Phoenician sailors, serving Egypt’s king Necho II, reportedly sailed around Africa. Their accounts reached readers through Greek and Roman writers, each preserving a different kind of evidence.

The Atlantic navigation article discusses ships and sailing practice. Here, the question is what the surviving texts say about destinations and purposes. Carthaginian voyages belonged to the western Phoenician world: “Punic” is the usual term for its western communities and traditions.

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Hanno’s expedition in the surviving Greek account

A periplus is an account of a coastal voyage. The text attributed to Hanno says Carthage ordered him to sail beyond the Pillars of Heracles, the ancient name for the Strait of Gibraltar, and establish settlements along the African coast. It gives a fleet of sixty ships, each with fifty oars, and 30,000 people. The number comes from the account itself; no independent record confirms its count.

The narrative marks stages by days of sailing and by rivers, capes and islands. After passing the strait, the expedition founded settlements, then sailed on to the Lixus River. Hanno’s party took Lixitae, people from that area, aboard as interpreters. Farther south, the account says, they could no longer understand the people they encountered. This detail presents language and local knowledge as practical parts of the voyage.

At the island called Cerne or Kerne in the Greek text, the expedition established another settlement and explored farther south. It described a river, a lake, a fiery mountain and, at the narrative’s end, beings called Gorillai. The text says three captives were killed and their skins taken back. It does not identify these beings in terms that establish a modern species. The account breaks off when provisions ran short; it gives no return itinerary.

The Greek text presents itself as a dedication of Hanno’s report at a sanctuary of Baal in Carthage. The Punic original, if there was one, has not survived. The Greek work is preserved through a Byzantine manuscript, and its surviving form may be an adaptation or abridgement. A recent linguistic study argues that the Greek as we have it cannot be earlier than the fourth century BCE, later than the voyage is often placed. That argument concerns the text’s form, not a newly fixed date for Hanno’s expedition. The first printed edition appeared in Basel in 1533.

How far south did Hanno go?

After the Lixus, the place-names become difficult to match with modern geography. Proposals for Cerne include sites on Morocco’s Atlantic shore, especially Mogador, now Essaouira. Archaeologists have documented a Phoenician trading and cultic presence at Mogador from the mid-seventh century BCE. This establishes early Phoenician contact on that coast, but it does not identify Mogador as Hanno’s island or prove that his expedition visited it.

Reconstructions of the later route range much farther. Some stop on the Moroccan coast; others place the endpoint around Senegal or the Gambia, or extend proposals toward Sierra Leone and beyond. One study argues for a later fourth- to third-century BCE context and for coastal trading posts amid competition with Gadir, the Phoenician city at modern Cádiz. These are interpretations of the text and its political setting. The account itself supplies no securely locatable final point, and archaeological contacts along the coast do not by themselves identify a particular voyage.

Himilco and the outer coast of Europe

Himilco’s own report is lost. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder says he was sent at the same time as Hanno to investigate Europe’s outer shores. That brief notice supplies no sequence of ports or complete route.

A much later Latin poem by Avienus, written in the fourth century CE, preserves a longer account and says it drew on old Punic records. It names the Oestrymnides, islands associated with tin and lead, and describes an ocean route toward places called the Sacred Island and Albion. Ancient and modern readers have connected these names with Ireland, Britain and the tin-producing regions of western Europe, but the names do not establish a precise itinerary.

Avienus also describes long periods with little wind, shallow water, seaweed that impeded ships, fog and dangerous sea creatures. These details belong to a late poem’s presentation of Himilco’s voyage, rather than a surviving logbook in Himilco’s own words. Tin gives a plausible setting for interest in the northwestern Atlantic: bronze-making required tin as well as copper, and older trading networks connected the Mediterranean with Atlantic-facing regions.

Necho II’s Phoenician sailors

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, tells a separate story about Necho II, an Egyptian king of the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE. Necho sent Phoenician sailors from the Red Sea to sail around Libya, the Greek term for Africa in this account, and return through the Strait of Gibraltar. These were sailors working for an Egyptian ruler, not a Carthaginian expedition.

Herodotus says they sailed south through the Red Sea, then followed the coast and stopped each autumn to sow grain and wait for the crop. They resumed their journey and reached Egypt in the third year. They reported that the sun had been on their right, a claim Herodotus says he did not believe. If the sailors were moving west around southern Africa, that direction is geographically plausible: when a vessel heads west, north is to its right, and near the Cape of Good Hope the midday sun appears in the northern sky. This fits a possible westward leg without specifying the route of the whole voyage.

Herodotus mentions Necho’s canal project in the preceding passage, but he does not state that the voyage was commissioned to test a route or serve a particular commercial plan. His account gives a striking duration and sequence of seasonal stops, while leaving no itinerary or contemporary Egyptian record of the voyage. Hanno’s text instead presents settlement and exploration before ending without a return; Himilco’s route survives only in later summaries and poetry. Keeping those textual histories distinct makes clear what each report actually contributes.