Nautical Art in Ancient Egypt Lecture

The Ancient Egyptians are justly famous for the beauty of their visual arts- their architecture, their sculpture, and above all, their painting. With their art, the Egyptians did not attempt to directly reproduce their sensory impressions of the world around them. Rather, they tried to represent the perfect, ideal reality in which the world of experience was embedded. However, there is no gainsaying the fact that Egyptian artists, both sculptors and painters, were in fact experts in their art, and created images that were not only beautiful and compelling, but which did, in fact, accurately render features of the external world. Nowhere is this dual purpose and meaning of Egyptian art more apparent than in what we may call "nautical art"- that is, images of boats and ships. Of course, watercraft were crucial to the Egyptians' daily lives: they were the crucial and central transportation technology of Egypt, permitting goods, people, and armies to quickly move from one point to another, tying the country together and contributing materially to the country's unparalleled prosperity and unity. But they were also the vehicle by which the gods themselves traversed the sky and the underworld, and by which the dead reached the hereafter. As such, they were imbued with a symbolic and philosophical importance that can hardly be overstated. By examining Egyptian representations of their boats and ships, we gain invaluable insight into both the quotidian reality of ancient Egypt, and into its most important spiritual beliefs.

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