ABSTRACT
BOTH naval constructor Le Bas, who transported and erected the Paris obelisk in I 832, and Lieut.-Comdr. Gorringe, who transported and erected the New York obelisk in 188o, have written most interesting accounts of their own operations, and have made exhaustive historical research as to what had previously been done; both agreed that the ancient Egyptians must have had mechanical appliances equal in efficiency to any that we now possess; but both failed to find any proof of their opinion except in the extreme difficulty of the work itself. Since their day nothing further has been brought to light which bears upon the subject, except the discovery by M. Naville at Deir el Bahri, of the sculpture of the transport of two obelisks on a boat (fig. xvii.). Since the cuts were made for the Archreological Report of the Egypt Exploration Fund, from which these figures are taken, more remnants of the sculpture have been discovered, and among others, most fortunately, is one from the middle of the boat, and it shows'
the two obelisks stowed base to base lengthwise of the boat, instead of alongside each other as shown in fig. xviii. By this sculpture the following points have been cleared up. First: extremely heavy weights were transported by water, though Wilkinson and some other writers believe that they were always transported by land. Second: a regularly-built barge or lighter was used, which must have been at least 12 feet high out of water and 250 feet long, with pointed ends, and not a low pontoon raft. Third: the Egyptians must have discovered by former experience that if they stowed the obelisks end to end, the vessel could be narrower, and would thus be more manageable in a current than if the obelisks were carried parallel to each other as shown, which necessitates more beam. That the wider boat had already been tried is to be inferred from a text given by M. N aville, showing that in the reign of Thothmes 1., the father of Hatasoo, one Anna had brought down two obelisks on a boat 200 feet long and 69 feet wide. The width of this boat is one-third the length, and as the remaining obelisk of Thothmes 1. at Karnak is 93 feet high, a length of 200 feet would not be sufficient for two such, end to end, and allow a margin for the taper and rise of the bow and stern. Fourth: they knew that a vessel so con-
structed would" hog" or droop at the ends, as the centre only would be waterborne, and they invented the rainbow truss, which we thought a brilliant American idea, when the shallow water of the Mississippi necessitated a similar invention for large steamers, and it was called a " hog frame." This rope truss can be seen to better advantage in fig. v. All of Queen Hatasoo's Punt boats were supplied with it. There it is nearly as large as a man's waist, and so much larger than was used on board modern ships before the days of wire rope and chain, that there are no tables for calculating its strength. Approximately, on the basis of Manilla hemp, it would stand the strain of over 300 tons. It will be noted in fig. xvii., that there is a small picture of an obelisk on a boat, marked 0, just above the large obelisk; this is the determinative sign attached to the hieroglyphic name of the boat, and apparently is symbolical merely, as it simply represents half the boat, with a stern and rudder attached to it, and cuts the rainbow truss in the middle. Curiously enough, however, it shows exactly how the lashings were passed under the obelisk and over the truss, the weight of the obelisks thus pulling the middle of the truss down and lifting the bow and stern. In 1834 there were found at the Pincus some marble tablets, being what we would call to-day
the" book of allowances" of the ancient Athenian fleet; among other articles are mentioned a " hypozomata," which formed a part of the gear of every ship, and was stored on shore when she was laid up in the dockyard. I t was a rope which went from end to end of the ship, but neither Professor Bokh, the translator of the Attic tables, nor Graser, Schaeffer, J aI, Le Roy, Bloomfield or any other modern writer has been able to give a clear idea of its use, though Isadore, a Spanish writer of the seventeenth century, says that there was in ancient ships a rope going from end to end, and called a "tormentum," because it was twisted. Everyone seemed to think it was a rope like a fender. going round the gunwale just under the rail. and older writers, like Hesychius and Polybius, were no clearer, though Athem:eus says there was a hypozomata on board the great ship of Ptolemy Philopeter, which was 483 feet long, and was built B.C. 300. Smith in his .. Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul," 1848, for the first time advances the theory that because the ancient Greek ships were so long and had such heavy rostra and towers at each end, the hypozomata might have been a rope between the high stem and stern post, which was twisted in the same manner as the rope of a catapult. I t has remained for the walls of Deir el Bahri to show that there
was such a rope and how it was applied 1,300 years before the time of the most ancient Greek records.
