Reed Boats -Vessels of the Gods
Many in the Water World spent their entire life on papyrus boats or large papyrus rafts. These houseboats, built floating in a backwater swamp, would rise and fall with the water and would be mobile and quite handy to have during inundations. Some had sundecks, flags and awnings as well as cabins and looked astonishingly like modern counterparts found in Louisiana bayous.
Driven by the need to communicate and yet have a place to live, reed boats became indispensable, and for eight thousand years, the Nile provided the great highway and papyrus provided the common material, one of the means by which the country could develop as a nation. The strongest and most costly boats were made of wood, but the everyday vessels, the thousands, even millions of small craft, the work boats of the ordinary souls, had to be made of cheap, reliable stuff. And that was as true in prehistoric times as it is in the 21st Century. Today it’s plastic and fiberglass, then it was papyrus. And God help the man who didn’t have one, the poorest soul in the Next World was said to be the one left on shore after death at the mercy of the elements, his soul pleading with someone for a seat in their papyrus boat.
Many in the Water World spent their entire life on papyrus boats or large papyrus rafts. These houseboats, built floating in a backwater swamp, would rise and fall with the water and would be mobile and quite handy to have during inundations. Some had sundecks, flags and awnings as well as cabins and looked astonishingly like modern counterparts found in Louisiana bayous.
Driven by the need to communicate and yet have a place to live, reed boats became indispensable, and for eight thousand years, the Nile provided the great highway and papyrus provided the common material, one of the means by which the country could develop as a nation. The strongest and most costly boats were made of wood, but the everyday vessels, the thousands, even millions of small craft, the work boats of the ordinary souls, had to be made of cheap, reliable stuff. And that was as true in prehistoric times as it is in the 21st Century. Today it’s plastic and fiberglass, then it was papyrus. And God help the man who didn’t have one, the poorest soul in the Next World was said to be the one left on shore after death at the mercy of the elements, his soul pleading with someone for a seat in their papyrus boat.