Model of a Boat with Crew

Model of a sailing boat with a crew of five men. Three men work the rigging, to raise the sail to catch the wind. The steersman sits in the stern manoeuvring the large steering oar. The steersman is the only figure with linen textile wrapping in place. The pilot stands in the bows, his left arm outstretched. At the rear end of the boat is an open-sided deck cabin. The figures and part of the boat itself were originally covered with a thin layer of fine plaster and painted. Much of this decoration is now missing from the figures and the cabin canopy. The posts that support the cabin canopy are all modern reconstruction as is the mast, rigging and sail (probably carried out about 1960). There are potentially a number of errors with the reconstruction of the object as no photographs of it have been traced in the Beni Hasan excavations photographic archive at the University of Liverpool . It had previously been thought this boat matched with one from tomb 585 illustrated in Garstang (1907) figs. 80, 88, but this is wrong. There is a possibility it could be “model of a sailing boat” from tomb 203 that was given to John Rankin who did make donations to both the Liverpool Institute of Archaeology and the Free Liverpool Public Museum (now World Museum).