16th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

95 Zadar, Croatia | 26 September – 1 October 2021 Nesreen A. El-Galy School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK Ancient Egyptian ship & boat models – Between theory & simulation The vessel models discovered inside ancient Egyptian tombs can be potentially re- warding sources of information as three-dimensional proxies for their full-sized coun- terparts. While tomb paintings may show a great amount of detail, generally, the cross-section of the vessel is unseen. Consequently, ship and boat models are signifi- cant for the three-dimensional evidence they contain. The question is, can models be related to full-size vessels and give information about their design and development? This relies upon the extent to which we can be confident that the ancient Egyptians were accuratelyminiaturizing objects for use as “ex-votos”. Clearly, if they did then the rich variety of vessel models found in tombs can be used to augment the sparse nau- tical archaeological evidence from Egypt. Yet this translation from model and tomb painting to real-world vessel is by nomeans as straightforward as it might first appear. My research focuses on documenting, observing, and testing Egyptian vessel models using naval architectural software. In this presentation I will aim to address the role that vessel models can play in order to better understand and envision ancient Egyptian ships and boats through case studies on three groups of models from the Old, MIddle and New Kingdoms tombs. To what extent are the techniques from the science of naval architecture helpful for the analysis and interpretation of the ancient Egyptian shipbuilding industry? The analysis revealed that full-sized versions of all of the vessel models in my corpus could have effectively sailed on the Nile. Interestingly, the models and iconographic evidence from the tested groups have the same hull lines and flat bottom. It appears that while the modeler created these models approximately to scale, the drought is much shorter than would be expected. This is also demon- strated in the experimental work on full-scaled versions of these models, which in- dicated that the flat-bottomed vessels could not have functioned well in the water. By increasing the draft line to create a more rounded hull bottom, followed by the re-examination of their hydrostatics and stability, it has been shown that increas- ing the draft length results in a stable hull with the ability to resist short waves characteristic of the Nile. It is, therefore, clear that while boat models are in certain ways accurate representations of ancient vessels, they are also compromised as a source of evidence by other more practical considerations: in this case, perhaps the need to stand the model on a flat surface, or to present it – as is also the case in the tomb paintings – as floating on the waters of the Nile.