The ties that bind

We barely think about rope. We use it, toss it, knot it, forget it. But remove it from human history, and everything unravels.

There would be no ships, no sails, no pyramids. No pulleys or climbing expeditions. No whaling fleets. No scaffolding. No traps or nets. No rigging, no hanging. No rodeos. No bondage—literal or metaphorical. Strip civilization of rope and everything collapses.

Rope is what lets us bind, pull, hold, lift, catch, secure, and save. It’s the unseen tether behind human daring and survival. In Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization (St. Martin’s Press, 336 pp.), Tim Queeney follows the unseen tether behind human daring and survival from prehistory through our modern era. For Queeney, rope is the quiet hero of history.

Queeney reminds us that even survival sometimes comes down to what we’re willing to hold onto—literally. In 1953, Pete Schoening held the weight of six falling climbers with a single nylon cord, “taut as a bowstring,” on the icy death slopes of K2. “Snow squalls blotted out everything below, and I couldn’t tell what was happening. My hands were freezing but, of course, I could not let go.” That was Schoening’s grip on life—not just his own, but the lives of his team.

And yet, we overlook rope. We take it for granted. We stuff it in garages or hide it behind drywall. We trust it will work when called upon, though most of us don’t know a bowline from a slipknot. But that’s the thing about rope; it doesn’t demand recognition. It just does its job. Quietly. Reliably. Until, sometimes, it doesn’t.

There’s a kind of wisdom in rope. A philosophy. You get only what you twist together. No shortcuts. The strength comes not from any single fiber but from how they’re wound—tension held in balance. Stretch too much, and it snaps. Stay slack, and it fails. Life is like that. So is trust.

“The sailor, from the very nature of his craft, has a dependence upon rope and a consequent familiarity with knots that is demanded of no other workman,” writes Clifford Ashley in The Ashley Book of Knots. This comprehensive reference work, published in 1944, details over 3,800 variations, evidence of the elaborate ways in which humans have sought to control uncertainty with something as primal as cordage.

Queeney references Ashley not as a nostalgic ode to knot-tying but as a sobering reminder that everything you touch, everything that doesn’t fall, probably owes something to rope. He also quotes U.S. Navy master ropemaker David Himmelfarb: “Rope, then, can justifiably be considered the first appliance developed by man’s ingenuity.” Let that line sink in for a minute. Without rope, there would be no modern civilization. Even the most advanced machines still rely on tension, load-bearing, and anchoring. And this reliance is not going away. Rope will follow us into space. We’ll tether satellites. Reel in drones. Drop payloads to Martian soil. The material might change—Kevlar, carbon fiber, who knows—but the principle holds. Rope isn’t outdated. It’s eternal. A quiet force that keeps things from falling apart. Quite literally.

It’s worth remembering that rope is older than the wheel, and it’s older than writing. “The production of cordage,” Queeney explains, “requires a cognitive complexity similar to that required by human language.” Rope is what made weapons work. A stone point in a spear shaft is useless until it’s lashed. A bow is just a stick until it’s bent and bound. Cordage, the author reminds us, “made the spear a thing.” Without rope, we’d still be throwing rocks at animals—and missing. Or, quite possibly, we might not be here at all.

But rope also has a dark side. It hangs men from gallows and ties prisoners to racks. Queeney doesn’t shy away from this. He recounts how, in the past, ropes secured victims’ hands while their bodies were “gradually stretched.” Joints popped. Muscles torn. Flesh split. All by the same fibers used to haul sails or cradle infants in hammocks. That’s the key takeaway here. Rope is neutral. It reflects the hands that wield it—a savior in one moment, a strangler in the next.

Even the word “connection” has lost its weight in the digital age. We talk about being plugged in, always connected—but fiber optics don’t stretch, and they don’t hold. When the signal drops, there’s no knot to tie. No tension. No trust.

In that sense, rope is much more than a relic; it’s a rebuke. It’s a time-tested reminder from an older world that real strength is earned, that things break when they’re slack, and that what lasts isn’t streamed but tied. Pulled tight and held fast. The Greeks had the Fates, three women who spun the thread of human life. The Chinese used red cords to symbolize destiny and love. Sailors trusted their lives to hemp, flax, or nylon. They all understood something we’ve mostly forgotten—that to be untethered isn’t freedom. It’s risky, even perilous.