Malaysian Professor Claims Romans Learned Shipbuilding from Malay Peoples

​Professors at the International Islamic University Malaysia are urging the school’s administrators to investigate associate professor Solehah Yaacob, claiming the lecturer in Arabic brought the school into disrepute by claiming that the Romans learned the art of shipbuilding from the ancient Malays in a social media video originally shot in 2022 but which went viral last month. “The credibility of our institution depends on the integrity, accountability and professionalism of its academic staff,” faculty wrote in a social media post last week.

​“My hypothesis, grounded in classical Arabic sources, proposes that the Romans acquired aspects of the art of shipbuilding from the peoples of the Malay Archipelago,” Yaacob said in a statement posted to Facebook this week, repeating a claim she first made in a lecture at Gombak Setia Mosque on December 31, 2022.
 
Yaacob described the negative reaction from news organizations and online commentators as a “media lynching,” writing that “I have been ridiculed on social media, in tabloids, and by official news outlets” and doubling down on her assertion that her ideas are rooted in solid literary evidence.
 
However, the evidence proffered in English-language news accounts seems less that compelling. Yaacob claimed his proof could be found in Pierre-Yves Manguin’s 1980 article “The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and Richard L. Smith’s 2008 book Premodern Trade in World History. Manguin concluded that Southeast Asian oceangoing vessels emerged in “the first few centuries of the first millennium A.D.,” which would be long after the Romans were sailing the Mediterranean. The oldest evidence he cites is from the third century CE, from a Chinese text.
 
Smith is the better choice. He devotes significant space to Malay sailing and notes that the Malay people may have been the first to discover how to sail across the ocean, which he places “sometime in the first millennium BCE.” He also describes the Malay establishing trade relationships and settlements in East Africa, Madagascar, and possibly on the southwest side of the Arabian Peninsula opposite Africa. However, he cautions that these cannot be dated securely and estimates vary greatly. He adds that the Malay only began to sail “a full half ocean” in the first century CE.
 
The evidence Yaacob found in Smith is a bit of a leap though. Smith cites Pliny (Natural History 6.83) describing the star-based open-water navigation techniques of sailors from Ceylon. Unfortunately for Yaacob, in the very next sentence (6.84) Pliny states that the information was not provided directly to the Romans but instead he extracted it from old Greek accounts from Megasthenes and Eratosthenes.
 
I suppose one might argue diffusion from Malay to India to the Mediterranean, but that’s probably less easy to prove than Yaacob thinks. It doesn’t help that some of her “evidence” is simply old newspaper reports—which are notoriously unreliable, especially for ancient history:
 
“Historical newspaper reports even record the striking statement: ‘The first man to sail around the world was a Malay’,” she added.
 
That’s a bit deceptive. The quotation refers to a story about Enrique of Malacca, a Malay slave of Ferdinand Magellan, who completed the trip around the world that Magellan himself did not. This has nothing to do with prehistoric navigation.
 
But here’s the kicker: Those “classical Arabic” sources Yaacob was talking about are the real backbone of her claim, and the pseudoscience has nothing to do with actual scientific evidence for Malay ocean navigation. Instead, it’s a bizarre religious argument about shipbuilding in the time of Noah’s Ark, as Yaacob explained in an interview published in Malay.
 
Yaacob said that her 2022 lecture was about the genealogy of human descent from Adam to the Prophet Muhammad, and how the prophetic lineage sparked world civilizations.
 
“My research findings show that the first major maritime voyage in human history occurred during the time of Prophet Noah, involving a very large area of the world,” she told a Malay-language news outlet. Yaacob cited a long-ago British theologian, Thomas Brightwell (the Victorian one, not the more famous medieval one), who in Notes on the Pentateuch (1840) traced the Malay to the Ishmaelites and thus back to one of the sons of Noah.
 
Along the way, Yaacob argued that the Romans had no major maritime activities before 31 BCE, the date of the sea-based Battle of Actium, and thus acquired their skills at the time of Malay maritime expansion (which somehow waited more than a thousand years after Noah!). This is obviously untrue. The Romans had boasted a massive fleet since 264 BCE, when they constructed warships to attack Carthage. It is true, though, that the Romans did not sail beyond the Mediterranean in any major way before the last decades of the first century BCE.
 
Yaacob said that based on medieval Arabic histories, such as those of al-Biruni and al-Kindi, which placed the origin of iron smelting in the land of what the news report called “Qal’a al-Rūmī or al-Sharbuqān” on the Malay peninsula, we should therefore conclude that the Romans got their iron from the Malay peninsula and picked up the art of shipbuilding from their trips there. She did not explain how the Romans got to the Malay peninsula without ships. The overland route would be a rather long way to go for iron, especially if one did not already know it was there.
 
Either Yaacob or the news report got the facts jumbled up; in his study of iron, al-Biruni uses sharbuqān to mean a type of hard iron, not a place name. He gives the place name as Kalah, and the swords as Qala after it. Al-Kindi does use “Qalai” (Kalah) as a place name, but not to refer to prehistoric iron smelting. He says it is one of three places where fine-quality iron swords were made in the tenth century CE. (Unmentioned by Yaacob, the traveler Misar ibn Muhalil also reported the same in mid-tenth century CE.) Archaeologically speaking, the iron industry in what is now Kedah (ancient Kalah) can possibly be traced back to the sixth century BCE, which is long after the Greeks and Romans had iron. (The sources, primarily by Malay scholars, are often poorly translated and give conflicting dates, some c. 535 BCE and others 60 CE, due to a lack of physical evidence until quite recently; the latest scholarship, which is disputed, dates smelting to the sixth century BCE and the iron trade to sometime before the first century CE.)
 
Comparing herself to Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake, Yaacob said she was a martyr for academic freedom, enduring untold pain and suffering because her ideas have been ridiculed on social media. “My hypothesis concerning the achievements of the Malays and the borrowings of the Romans may be right or wrong. However, in both our academic and Islamic traditions, we are taught to respect differing opinions.”

That seems reasonable, but Yaacob also stated on the Gabungan Nasionalis podcast that the ancient Malay people could fly and shared their secret flying powers with the Chinese.