It would have been strange if a nation with such a vast waterway, and living in such close proximity to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, should not have left behind some memorials of her shipping. Happily we have no need for disappointment, for the information surviving to us is of two kinds. Firstly, we have the wall-pictures of the ancient buildings, which show almost everything that a picture could tell of a ship and her rigging. These wonderful illustrations have been faithfully copied on the spot. But besides these, within recent years have been unearthed most interesting little wooden model boats. These are of two kinds, those made in the form of a funeral bark, and those which are models of the actual ships that sailed up the Nile at the time they were made. In the former the dead man is seen lying under a canopy or open deck-house with or without rowers. These funeral barks, not being sailing boats, are only of interest in pursuing our present subject as showing us the general lines and shape of the hull, together with the steering and rowing arrangements. It is the models of sailing ships that demand our attention. These were placed in the tombs with the intention of providing the deceased with the means of sailing about on the streams of the underworld. Very touching is the care of the ancients that man’s most beautiful creation—his ship—should not be separated from him even in death. (We shall see, later on, a similar devotion expressed in the burial of the Vikings.) Models of houses and of granaries, with curious little men working away, so that the departed should not be lacking for food while he sailed about the underworld, are also found. Some of these models of ships, granaries and soul-houses are to be seen in the British Museum and the South Kensington Collection. The reader who is interested in the subject will find additional information in the fascinating book by Professor Flinders Petrie.[1] Each boat was provided with masts and sails and elaborately decorated steering oars. Dr. Budge, in his guide to the Third and Fourth Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum, points out that another religious idea was connected with these boats, namely, the conception of the boat of the Sun-god, called the “Boat of the Million of Years,” in which the souls of the beatified were believed to travel nightly in the train of the Sun-god as he passed through the underworld from West to East.