ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. By Tim Queeney. St. Martin's Press. 336 pages. $27.
Counter-intuitive as it seems, a knot makes a length of rope weaker, not stronger. This is not news to avid sailors or practitioners of complex nautical rigging.
Yet knots are as indispensable to rope's millennia-old role in civilization as rope itself. Indeed, the definitive 20th-century maritime guide, "The Ashley Book of Knots," harbors a dizzying array of more than 3,800 knots, lashings and decorative bonds.
Tim Queeney surveys the history of rope, the surprisingly varied materials from which it has been made, its manifest uses, its symbolic significance to varied cultures and its vital role in innumerable technologies and entertainments: from the building of the pyramids and the Age of Sail to the pulling of a stage curtain. Not to mention the key part played in mountaineering, space exploration, and many a prosaic but no less vital function in world cultures, like hunting and fishing.
His conclusion: No rope, no civilization.
"The knowledge to do this -- to make string, cordage, and rope -- had a profound effect on humans' ability to manipulate the world," writes Queeney, a Maine-based author of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Longtime editor and columnist for Ocean Navigator, he has taught celestial, coastal and radar navigation. His survey of rope in human history thrums with taut, concise, sometimes cheeky storytelling.
Scholars say the word "rope" derives from Proto-Indo-European word roypnos, itself taken from reyp -- to peel off, tear, border, edge or strip. Originally composed of plant or animal fibers as early as the Stone Age, when spears tipped with flint were lashed to a wooden shaft, today rope is made of almost anything. The evolution of rope was all about creating cordage as strong as it was durable, eventually leading to rope-making as an industrial enterprise. This ingenuity and invention is ongoing.
Queeney braids several complementary arguments on how rope was central to the lifting of civilization, while describing the physical factors that make twisted strands work as rope, that hold them in tension together. He also sees a length of a rope as a metaphor for linear thinking, and for timelines. Quoting archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber, who calls rope humanity's secret weapon, he says "it opened the door to an enormous array of new ways to save labor and improve our odds of survival."
Thus, Queeney's chronicle of rope is something more: a history of the coils of whole peoples.
"Rope stands as both a tool and a symbol of humans working together to achieve the greatest things," says Queeney. "While many short lengths of rope helped countless individuals through the centuries, rope also was a tool of human innovation writ large through collective action. Just as many small strands come together to form a rope, so, too, did many people gather to perform the biggest of tasks."
Also explored is how rope was integral to the earliest record-keeping and measurements, to navigation, and early boat building as a binding and stabilizing device. Queeney covers its history of widespread uses in surveying, engineering, agriculture and many other aspects of life, as well as rope's prominent role in Greek myth, among numerous other topics.
Shifting to the knot, he reveals it as an important symbol in the religions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, referencing the ultimate unity of all things.
Queeney does not ignore the sinister side to rope, given its uses in torture and execution, and superstitious beliefs tied to it.
But it is rope in the Age of Sail, from the mid-15th to the mid-19th centuries, that most fascinates.
"The sailing ship rig was the skyscraper of the 1500s," Queeney writes. "And controlling all those sails and holding up those masts were miles and miles of natural fiber rope. ... Hence the pressure for newcomers to 'learn the ropes.'"
Knots and rope are interdependent, of course. Without rope, there are no knots, and rope without knots is nearly useless, since there is no way to control the rope or adjust its length for the particular job at hand.
But Queeney does not dwell overmuch on his passion for maritime history. His book also brims with absorbing asides, some only tangentially connected to the title subject.
His theme, however, remains.
"Rope is the coming together of many strands to make something far greater than what the small fibers could have been on their own. In this way, it is an apt metaphor for living things composed of their many parts."