Probing Into Ancient Egyptian Boats In Old Kingdom

Boat is one of the greatest invention of human beings, at the same time, it was a kind oftime-honored transportation. It can not only help our ancestors to solve the source of food,but also make a kind of civilization to spread further. For ancient Egyptian, boat not merelyplay a decisive role during the movement of Egyptian unification, but also has strong impacton politics, economy and religion. Based on collating and researching the ancient Egyptianboats can make us know the excellence of their shipbuilding skills and the originality of thebuilders, and what’s more it offers us strong material supporting to investigate Egyptian myths,legends, creationism and their idea of the afterlife, so we can understand Egyptian religionroundly. This paper aims at study of the boats of Egyptian Old Kingdom when the ancientEgyptian history was in a time of creation, and ancient Egyptian artistic style and tradition wasgoing to maturity, their shipbuilding skills and boat’s types were formed in this stage, thereby, theOld Kingdom was the representative period of Egyptian artistic original. The materials used in thispaper come from two groups: physical materials and the non-physicals. The former includesdifferent kinds of ship-models of variety of materials: ceramic, wooden, ivory etc. and the realboats excavated by archaeologists from tombs. Non-physical materials contains: the decorationpaintings on pottery, the paintings and relief on the tombs or temples，classical writers’compositions, ancient Egyptian literature, funeral inscriptions and autobiographicalinscriptions etc. The physical materials about boats let us know the ancient Egyptian ships’structures and building methods directly, but the nun-physicals provide us literal evidenceon their daily life and religious thoughts. This article through the boats, one kind of commontransportation, shows its deep effect on ancient Egyptian unification and their foreignrelationships, meanwhile, the delicate relation among the boats, myths and religion offers usa new point to find out ancient Egyptian idea of afterlife and idea of present. Boats can beseen everywhere in our life but always be ignored by us, it’s meaningful when we explorethe history of ancient Egypt.