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the ship in order to obtain leverage in working the lee on special occasions when the loom must have been previously lifted out of the crutch ; but the stirrup may also have been used to support the rudder-paddle when not in use, or when it was ‘triced up.’ Occasionally ships had only one rudder-paddle, as shown in tomb paintings and in the model of the Scandinavian ship lately found at Christiania, to be seen in the Pitt-Rivers Collec- tion at Oxford, which rudder-paddle being on the starboard side explains the derivation of this word from ‘steer-board.’ Other tomb paintings show as many as three rudder-paddles on one side. Four- oared boats, without masts or sails, are also repre- sented in the Deir el-Bahri paintings of queen Hatsepsu’s expedition as bringing off goods to the ships, and these have only one paddle-rudder, which is shipped in a crutch in the centre of the aa but with the same stirrup as shown in the ships.
There is no visible anchor of any kind on board the ships, nor any arrangement for using one; but the pilot on the forecastle has a long pole in his hand with which he is sounding the depth of the water. The only anchor used in those early days was a heavy weight, generally a large stone or a basket full ‘of smaller ones. No anchor, properly so called, is represented in any Egyptian sculpture or painting. The hooked anchor (éyxvpa) is first mentioned by the poet Pindar (I. v. 18) in the 5th cent. B.C. ; it was without flukes. Homer always uses the word etval, meaning a stone anchor ; and Ephorus, the historian of the 4th cent. B.C. (Strabo, vii. 3), attributed the invention of the two-armed anchor to Anacharsis, a Scythian prince of the 6th cent. B.C. In the time of Herodotus (ii. 96) the merchant ships of the Egyptians on the Nile, when sailing down stream, used a heavy stone attached to a rope from the stern as a drag to keep their heads straight, in conjunction with a raft of tamarisk floating on the water, attached to the bow, so as to be acted on by the current which ’ pulled the ship down stream, whilst the stone held her back, as is still the practice on the river Euphrates ; * but there is no mention of the use of a bow anchor, whether of stone or any other material.
The form of the Egyptian ships admitted of their lying at anchor as easily by the stern as by the head, and, paddles which could be lifted out of the water being used instead of rudders, there was no fear of the latter being broken by the sea, as was the case when the modern rudder, hung on ‘ gud- geons’ by means of ‘pintles,’ was substituted in later times. The advantage of anchoring by the stern in narrow waters or when suddenly shoaling water at night, as in the case of St. Pau ’s ship off the island of Melita (Ac 27%: °), where the rudder- paddles were triced up clear of the water, 1s obvious. But this vessel had means of anchoring by the bows if desired (v.2°), and no doubt the Egyptian ships also ; large stones, wooden tubes, or sacks filled with lead or other heavy weights being used as anchors. '
The masts of queen Hatsepsu’s ships were prob- ably derived, like the Egyptian ships in the time of Herodotus (ii. 96), and even at the present day, from the gum-arabic tree of Nubia (Acacia nilotica, Delile), known to modern Arabs as the sont, a corruption of the ancient Egypt name shant, which is as old as the 4th dynasty, or of one of the many varieties of this tree in that region. The equally common seyal, or ‘ash’ of the ancient Egyptians (Acacia seydl, Delile), which Canon Tristram supposes to be the ‘ shittim > wood of the Bible (Ex 25. 26. 37. 38), is scarcely more than a variety of the sont, and, like it, 1s frequently
* Chesney, vol. ii. p. 640.
made of flax.
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mentioned in the hieroglyphs, and is of the same antiquity.
The ships of Solomon built at ‘Ezion-geber (1 K
96) were probably of the fir and cedar supplied by Hiram (1 K 5%"), which do not grow in Egypt or Nubia, although much imported for use in Egyp- tian temples from the 5th dynasty downwards. No mention, however, is made in the Bible of the material used in shipbuilding. Onesecritus, chief pilot to Alexander the Great (Pliny, vi. 24), the ships which traded in the 5th cent. B.C. between Taprobane (Ceylon) and the country of the Prasians (Calcutta) during four months of the year, the voyage lasting 20 days, were rigged like the Nile boats, and were built of papyrus stems as we see them in process of construction depicted 3000 years earlier on the walls of the tomb of Anta at Deshdsheh; but these were only coasting vessels. merchant vessels in the time of Herodotus are described by him (ii. 96) as being built with- out ribs, the planks, 2 cubits in length, being arranged ‘like bricks’ (i.e. probably the planking was double, the middle of the outer plank over- laying the two ends of the inner one), and joined together by long ‘tree-nails’; the planks were caulked with stems of ‘byblus’ (Papyrus antt- quorum, L.), the sails being material, which seems incredible ; but whether of flax or byblus, the ‘ cloths’ of the sails were placed horizontally instead of vertically as now. ropes of Egyptian shi byblus (Herod. vil. 25, 34) as the 27th or Persian dynasty (B.C. 480), and, according to the same authority (Herod. ii. 96), the sails also,—whilst those of the Pheenicians were But it is doubtful if the Nile boats,