48 G. Elliot Smith on 



preserved to this day a remarkable series of bas-reliefs depicting 

 all the incidents of an expedition by sea from Egypt to East 

 Africa, which took place as long before the time of the ' Peri plus" 

 as the latter was before that of Vasco de Gama. We find the 

 prototypes of the great ocean-going ships engaged in the same 

 sort of traffic for gold, precious stones, incense, spices and slaves. 

 But Egyptian literature has preserved the evidence that these 

 maritime expeditions, not merely in the Red Sea but also in the 

 Mediterranean, were well established even in the Pyramid Age, 

 fourteen centuries before Queen Hatshepsut's time ! 



Although at a very early period in the history of mankind 

 logs and floats of various kinds were used by many peoples to 

 cross narrow sheets of water or for paddling along coastlines, 

 the real history of boat-building began^ when the earliest dwell- 

 ers on the banks of the Nile tied together bundles of reeds to 

 make floats. These simple craft not only determined the form of 

 the wooden ships that succeeded them, but the methods of 

 construction which were retjuired for making the reed floats, i.e., 

 tying them together with cords, were also adopted when wooden 



Fig. 1. — A picture from a tomb of the Pyramid Age representing the 

 making of reed-floats by tying the bundles of reeds with cords. 



ships came to be built by adding planks to the hollowed out log 

 which eventually degenerated into the mere keel of the composite 

 ship. Thus the earliest Egyptian term for shipbuildbig was the 

 word signifying "to bind" (Breasted, p. 176). 



^ See my Essay on "Ships as Evidence of the Migration of Early 

 Culture;" also J. H. Breasted, "The Eariest Boats on the Nile." — The 

 Journal of Egtjptian Archaeology, Vol. IV., 1917, p. 174. 



