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Wine-Dark Sails THE RA EXPEDITIONS by Thor Heyerdahl. 341 pages. Doubleday...
Following the design of old Egyptian murals, Heyerdahl built a papyrus-reed boat, or kaday, 50 ft. long, 15 ft. wide, and named it Ra, for the sun-god-cultural coincidence!-of Egypt, Easter Island and Polynesia. The Ra was loaded with over a ton of fresh water in authentic Egyptian jars and almost twice that weight in food. Menu samples: sheep cheese in olive oil and sello (ground almonds, honey, butter, flour and dates). Coops enclosed live chickens and a duck named Sinbad. There was also a pet monkey named Safi. With Heyerdahl sailed an oddly assorted crew...
Total Recall. Heyerdahl takes an awfully long time putting out to sea. But once he gets launched, his account of the Ra voyage is persuasively faithful to the cresting good cheer and alternately sinking heart of all travelers in the tradition of Odysseus. On one page he can call his ship a golden paper swan, and on another, a floating haystack. Steering oars snapped with annoying regularity, and two days out a squall cracked the yard, carrying the 26-ft.-high wine-colored sail with a rust-red sun painted on it: the symbol of Ra. When the whole structure...
Putting this third-millennium Humpty Dumpty together again was an impressive feat of memory and scholarship. In 1970, Dr. Bothmer found a granite carving in the National Museum of Lebanon in Beirut that he was able to identify as an effigy of Ny-user-ra. Checking archives for other monuments of the obscure King, he turned up a reference to the lower half of the broken Cairo statue, which had its left arm hanging by its side but no trace of a right arm. The Rochester bust, he remembered, was close in style to the statue of Ny-user-ra...
...that point," says Bothmer, "it clicked. If the broken statue of Ny-user-ra in Cairo had no arm on its right hip, the arm must have been raised. That described the Rochester fragment." At Bothmer's request, Cairo made a plaster cast of its piece and shipped it to New York. When Bothmer placed the Rochester bust on Ny-user-ra's legs, it fitted exactly. The completed statue is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum -and the Pharaoh looks a lot more pharaonic in one piece than...