The Assyrians were trying to come up with a way that they could increase their trade routes because the Hittites and Hurrians were dominating trade in the area. Assyria’s problem with trade is that it took over 200 miles of travel to transport their goods over land. Assyira also had the disadvantage of being located just off the Tigris River.

The Tigris River was basically a bad ass river that everyone was scared of because the section that was closest to the Assyrians was mostly rapids. Also complicating things was when the snow melted from the Turkish mountains in the spring- the Tigris would flood and people would drown…

Anyway, they had their engineers look at trying to find a way to transport their goods safely on the river. The engineers took a lot of prototype ships to the river, but all failed because the river was too rough for traditional wood-plank ships that were used in ancient Assyria.

The engineers finally came up with a raft to float the goods down the river. They used freshly cut wood to make a more flexible platform, tied them together with rope made with reeds, and attached them to animal hides that had been stretched and dried in the shape of a pontoon. They then covered the animal hides with lanolin to make the animal hide pontoons waterproof. (Pirate Raft 3.0 anyone? Probably more stable than our PVC pipe…)

I think it is amazing that the Assyrians figured out how to go white water rafting somewhere between the 20th -10th centuries, BC.

Source: Some history type show I was watching while trying to fall asleep last night, and Wiki of course. The people on the show actually made a raft described above and went down some rapids in Britain. Seriously awesome.