The sail
Wind replaces muscle, and heavy cargo can move long distances for almost nothing.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2.2 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
The earliest depictions of sailing boats come from painted pottery in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, and boat models from Kuwait suggest reed vessels working the Persian Gulf. Sail transforms the economics of bulk transport: moving grain or stone by water costs a fraction of moving it by land, which is why nearly every early civilisation forms along a navigable river or coast.