In Egypt, the remains of a boat were found, on which Pharaoh Senusret III was supposed to go on his last journey. The drawings found by archaeologists make it possible to find out what the ships of the ancient Egyptians looked like.
To the west of the Nile, inside one of the most significant monuments of Ancient Egypt, archaeologists have discovered the burial of a royal boat, presumably belonging to Pharaoh Senusret III, one of the most powerful rulers of the Middle Kingdom. A room dug underground is located near the tomb of the pharaoh.
A fleet of 120 boats is engraved on the walls of the 3,800-year-old royal chamber.
In addition to the images of ships, several boards were found in the room. According to archaeologists, these may be the remains of Senusert's boat, on which he was supposed to go on a journey beyond the grave, but over the years it decayed or it was stolen.
“We were a little taken aback,” says Joseph Wegner, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "We think there was a tomb here." Details of the discovery Wegner outlined in a study published in the International Journal of Nautical Archeology.
A large underground hall, 21 m long and 4 m wide, was first discovered beneath the ancient city of Abydos back in 1901, when archaeologists noticed its vaulted roof peeking out of the sand. But during excavations the roof collapsed and the project has been abandoned to this day.
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Wegner and his team have spent the past two years clearing the rubble from the ruins. In the process, they discovered a cache containing more than a hundred earthen vessels. "These are containers with a tapered neck, commonly referred to as beer jugs, although they were probably used to store and transport a variety of liquids," the researchers said.
The scientists were especially interested in the engravings of boats on the wall - they managed to survive underground for almost four thousand years. Between the boats there are images of cattle, gazelles and flowers. The boats are engraved on finely plastered walls. In some images, reaching up to 1.5 m in length, you can clearly see masts, sails, wheelhouses, rudders, oars, and sometimes rowers.
It is unclear whether the boats were supposed to symbolize the pharaoh's own fleet or simply Egyptian ships, and it is not yet possible to know who was responsible for the painting, but this reflects the long tradition of dumping boats near the royal burial complexes.
Questions about the purpose of these images remain unanswered. But the fact that so many boats are depicted in one place, according to the researchers, is amazing.
The tradition of burying boats near the tombs of dignitaries has been known to researchers for a long time. So, for example, in 1954, archaeologists discovered a chamber near the Cheops pyramid, in which a disassembled ship was located, and three decades later they found another one there. In the mythology of the ancient Egyptians, boats played an important role - they were the main means of transportation of the gods along the heavenly Nile and along the Duat - the afterlife.
Apparently, the implication was that in the afterlife Pharaoh would join them. Since the Egyptians lived on the east bank of the Nile, and buried people on the west, where the sun went down, they used boats as hearses, transporting the pharaoh's body and everything necessary for his life in the afterlife to the burial place.
These were high-speed oar boats with an elongated hull. We found boats in Abydos itself. In 1991, the London newspaper The Guardian reported that archaeologist David O'Connor had discovered 12 ships in chambers near the tomb of Pharaoh II of the Hasekhemvi dynasty. By 2000, two more boats were found.
In addition, 19 boats were found in Helwan, a southern suburb of Cairo, six in the Sahara and two more in the Abu Rawash area north of Giza.
The "master" of the painted fleet, Pharaoh Senusret III, ruled from about 1878 to 1839 BC. and was considered one of the most powerful rulers of the XII dynasty of the pharaohs. He limited the power of the monarchs and reformed the system of government, creating three administrative centers, each of which was ruled by a council of elders, subordinate to the king's vizier. Pharaoh managed to expand his sphere of influence in the south and achieve prosperity in Egypt.
The clay mask depicting the face of the pharaoh, preserved from those years, differs significantly from the images of other pharaohs: if they were portrayed much more majestic than in reality (this is evidenced, for example, by the results of scanning the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, who turned out to be a clubfoot owner of full thighs), then Senusert depicted close to reality. The face shows deep wrinkles at the mouth and between the eyebrows, and the eyes with heavy lids are deep-set. Traditionally, the pharaohs were portrayed as much younger.
Alla Salkova