Browsing by Subject "ancient Egypt"
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Item Extracting Cultural Information from Ship Timber(2012-02-14) Creasman, PearceThis dissertation is rooted in one general question: what can the wood from ships reveal about the people and cultures who built them? Shipwrecks are only the last chapter of a complex story, and while the last fifty years of nautical archaeology have managed to rewrite a number of these chapters, much of the information unrelated to a ship?s final voyage remains a mystery. However, portions of that mystery can be exposed by an examination of the timbers. An approach for the cultural investigation of ship timbers is presented and attempts are made to establish the most reliable information possible from the largely unheralded treasures of underwater excavations: timbers. By introducing the written record, iconographic record, and the social, economic, and political factors to the archaeological record a more complete analysis of the cultural implications of ship and boat timbers is possible. I test the effectiveness of the approach in three varied casestudies to demonstrate its limits and usefulness: ancient Egypt?s Middle Kingdom, the Mediterranean under Athenian influence, and Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula during the Discoveries. The results of these studies demonstrate how ship timbers can be studied in order to better understand the people who built the vessels.Item The Cairo Dahshur boats(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Creasman, Pearce PaulExcavations conducted in A.D. 1894 and 1895 by French archaeologist Jean- Jacques de Morgan at the funerary complex of the ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senwosret III on the plain of Dahshur revealed some unparalleled finds which included five or six small boats. These boats provide a unique opportunity in nautical archaeology??????to study contemporaneous hulls. Today, only four of the "Dahshur boats" can be located with certainty; two are in the United States, one in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and one in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The remaining two are on display in The Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Since their excavation these boats remained relatively inconspicuous until the mid-1980s when a study of the two hulls in the United States was conducted. However, the two boats in Cairo remained largely unpublished. This thesis combines personal observation and recording of the Cairo boats over two summers to reveal more unique characteristics of the hulls and will facilitate a future study of the group as a whole. Each boat is discussed individually and is further divided into its major components by order of construction.