Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/103

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about two cubits in length, arranging them like bricks. "They attach them," he adds, "to a number of long poles till the hull is complete, when they lay the cross planks on the top from side to side. They make no use of ribs, but caulk the seams with the papyrus; they make only one rudder, and that is driven through the keel. They use a mast of acantha and sails of papyrus. These vessels are unable to sail up the stream unless they have a brisk breeze, but are towed from the shore. They are thus carried down the stream. There is to each a raft made of tamarisk, wattled with a band of reeds, and a stone, bored through the middle, of about two talents in weight; the raft is fastened to the vessel by a cable, and allowed to float down in front, while the stone is held by another cable at the stern; by this means the raft, by the stream bearing hard upon it, moves quickly, and draws along the 'baris' (for this is the name given to these vessels); but the stone being dragged at the stern, and sunk to the bottom, keeps the

been often found. The modern boatmen place a stone aft to keep the boat's head to the stream. Col. Chesney (ii., p. 640) found the Arabs using a bundle of hurdles and a stone for the kufahs on the Euphrates, exactly as described by Herodotus. Baris occurs in Æschylus, technically, as an Egyptian boat (Suppl. 815 and 858); see also Plutarch, Isis, c. 18; Iamblichus De Myst. 5, 6. All their larger, and even their market boats, had cabins. Wilkinson adds that there is as much difference now as of old in the size of the boats; and that there are some (which can only navigate the Nile during the inundation) which are rated as high as twenty-four thousand bushels of corn. The war vessels of the eighteenth and nineteenth Dynasties had a single row of twenty to fifty oars, like the Greek penteconters.]
 * [Footnote: the tombs at Beni-Hassan and Thebes, and specimens of them have