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J HORNELL ON 



tation of boats upon Greek and Roman vases, coins, and triumphal friezes, than the 

 continual recurrence of a well-defined ocitlus on each bow. The mariners of ancient 

 Italy and Greece are credited with the belief that ships required eyes to see their 

 way from haven to haven ; it may well be that the common multitude held this 

 crude belief in later days when confidence in the Old Gods began to wea.ken, when 

 once-definite beliefs began to grow vague and formless, but in the beginning it is pro- 

 bable that religious import attached to its employment. This view is strengthened 

 when we find that the ancient Egyptians, in days before Greece and Rome took shape, 

 endowed with eyes the funeral boat wherein the mummy of the departed was ferried 

 across the Nile to the tomb. These eyes, carefully depicted with well-defined con- 

 ventionalized lids and eyebrows (fig. 30), symbolized the eyes of unseen Osiris who 



Fig. 31. — Fore part of a Greek galley from a vase in the British Museum ; c. 500 B.C. (after Chatterton). 



would eventually guide the bark of the dead to that other land not to be entered save 

 by the aid of this deity and his shallop. 



Except on these funeral boats the Egyptians do not appear to have used this 

 eye symbol. The carefully drawn paintings of their sea-going vessels, such as the 

 great sailing galleys employed by Queen Hatshepsut on her famous trading venture 

 to the land of Punt, show no trace of it. 



Neither to the river vessels depicted in Assyrian sculptures, unless it be merged 

 in the eyes of the figurehead, but with the appearance of Greek and Roman ships in 

 the Mediterranean the custom became common. 



On galleys depicted upon Greek vases and coins, the oculus appears as early as 

 500 B.C. (fig. 31). From this time onwards the succession of eyed boats has been un- 

 broken in Europe. During the days of Imperial Rome the .symbol was equally com- 

 monly used as in earlier Greek times. For some reason, the custom died out in the 



