Maritime Technology. Boats and ships were always a crucial technology in ancient Egypt because the Nile River tied Egypt together and the empire had long coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Watercraft were an important theme in Egyptian art. In the Predynastic and Pharaonic Periods extraordinarily detailed paintings and models make scholars better informed about the actual construction of Egyptian ships than they are about any other ancient nautical tradition before the Greco-Roman Period. Even better than this artistic documentation, however, are the actual remains of Egyptian boats, which are known from Dynasties 1, 4, and 12, as well as from the Persian Period. Unlike most ancient boats or ships, Egyptian boat remains have all been discovered on land, not in underwater excavations. The Egyptian boats or boat fragments that are known are mostly funerary, designed to accompany a dead person into...