Egypt—Commerce—Sesostris—Naucratis—The Nile—Sailors of Egypt—Their boats—How navigated—Mode of building them—Cargo barges—Their rig—Steering—Passage and cargo boats—Boat for the conveyance of the dead—Variety of boats, and their superiority—Prosperity of Egypt under the Ptolemies, B.C. 283—Canal over the Isthmus—Ptolemy's great ship—Analysis of her dimensions—The Thalamegus, her size and splendour—Great size of other Egyptian monuments—Probability of such vessels having been constructed—Hiero's great ship—Not unlike a modern inland American steamer—Details of her construction, accommodation, outfit, and decorations—Greek ships—Habits of piracy—Corinth—Athens—The size of her ships as described by Herodotus—Discrepancy between the different accounts.
Egypt. The ancient history of Egypt is to be found almost exclusively in the works of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus; but it has been materially supplemented, and in many respects confirmed by the researches of modern scholars. Moreover, from the time when Young[1] discovered the key to the hieroglyphical
- ↑ Dr. Young, not Champollion, was the first to discover the true method of deciphering the hieroglyphics by determining that "certain characters in the Proper Names, whatever may have been their original import, were employed to represent sounds." This he published, in 1819, in the "Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica." Two years later, in 1821, M. Champollion published at Grenoble a work in which he still asserted "that hieroglyphics are not phonetic," and "that hieroglyphical symbols are the signs of things, and not the signs of sounds."
