A broad range of depictions of ships and boats has survived from Bronze Age Egypt, the result of a rich visual culture, excellent preservation even of organic material, and the fundamental place of water travel in everyday life as well as in the deeply symbolic and religious structures of the Egyptian worldview. These representations consist of tomb paintings, temple reliefs, boat models mainly from tombs, and remains of actual full-scale boats. Boat models were crafted in wood, ivory, clay, and metals including gold and silver. The vast majority of the surviving examples are of wood, hinting at an entire class of models that may have existed in the Aegean, but that will have disappeared in poor preservation conditions.
The boats found in Egyptian tombs served a range of essential functions for the deceased: utilitarian vessels provided for traveling, carrying loads, hunting and fishing, and pleasure cruising; funerary boats conveyed the mummy across the Nile for burial and on journeys to Abydos and other sacred sites; and magical boats carried pharaohs on eternal journeys to cross the sky by day and the underworld by night (Jones 1995: 27). One of the principal types of utilitarian watercraft, the use of which spans the entire Bronze Age from the Old to the New Kingdom, was a skiff built from bundles of bound papyrus plants. These utilitarian craft were used locally to carry light loads and for fishing and fowling in wetlands (Jones 1995: 36). The papyrella used until recently on Corfu, mentioned above, has a form similar to the Egyptian skiff, a result of the
3.14 Ship under sail, Flotilla Fresco, Akrotiri. Wedde 2000: Catalogue 617. Courtesy of Michael Wedde.
Comparable working properties of the papyrus and giant fennel, and was used in a comparable range of settings and for similar tasks. The simple construction of these canoes, made by lashing together bundles of cut stalks with vegetable fibers or leather strips, fulfilled the requirements of low cost and low technology for families with few resources for elaborate and expensive watercraft.
World History
