The sea calls you; you hoist up your sails, and come. CHAPTER II. EARLY EGYPTIAN SHIPS FROM ABOUT 6000 B.C. The earliest information that we can find about the sailing ship comes, of course, from Egypt: for although the first signs of the dawn of culture were seen in Babylonia, yet that is an inland country and not a maritime region. Notwithstanding the fact that to the east of the Syro-Arabian desert there flow the navigable rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, and granting that it is only reasonable to suppose that the earliest inhabitants on the banks of these important streams did actually engage in the building of some sort of boat or ship, yet we are not in a position to make any statement from definite evidence. The age of the Babylonian civilisation is exceedingly remote, and long prior to that of the Egyptians, but that is the most that we can say. What their rowing or sailing craft were like—who knows? The discoveries made in this, the most historic corner of the world, by Layard and his successors have told us something about the craft that breasted the waters of the Tigris, but this information belongs to no period earlier than 700 or 900 B.C. Whether subsequent discoveries may lift up the curtain that hides from our view the remains, or at least the crude designs, of the first objects that were ever propelled by wood or sail is entirely a matter of uncertainty. Of one thing we may rest assured—that Babylonia was in a comparatively high state of civilisation about six thousand years before the Christian era. For at about this date from the East came Babylonian settlers, who found their way towards the setting sun and, finally halting to the North-West of the Red Sea, colonised the region on either side of the Nile. Here, then, they arrived from Babylonia, not a barbarian wild tribe, but, as we know from the most learned Egyptologists, a highly civilised people, possessing great ability in certain arts and of definite intellectual development. It would be only natural that a band of emigrants that had been living by the banks of the Tigris or Euphrates should eventually settle by a river. An Englishman who has lived all his life on the lower reaches of the Thames, is far more likely to fix his habitation on the shores of a colonial river than to trek inland and ultimately “bring up” in the middle of a grazing country. The new inhabitants of the land that we know by the name of Egypt would feel themselves at home by its river. Whatever knowledge they had possessed of boat-building in Babylonia they carried with them across the Arabian desert and put into practice along the banks of the Nile. The accompanying illustration (Fig. 3) will show to what ability these colonisers or their immediate successors had attained. Here will be noticed the earliest form of sailing ship in existence. The mast, the square sail, the high bow and the curve of the hull are to us of the highest possible interest as showing the first beginnings of the