to transport the material.
The Royal Egyptian cubit was 20.67 inches in length, and the common
cubit 18.24 inches. The river had fallen to such an extent that it was
not possible to make use of these rafts, and others of a smaller size
had to be constructed. For this purpose Una was despatched up the river
to the country of Wawa-t, which Brugsch considered to be the modern
Korosko. The inscription states--

"His Holiness sent me to cut down four forests in the South, in order
to build three large vessels and four towing-vessels out of the acacia
wood in the country of Wawa-t. And behold the officials of Araret,
Aam, and Mata caused the wood to be cut down for this purpose.
I executed all this in the space of a year. As soon as the waters rose
I loaded the rafts with immense pieces of granite for the Pyramid
Kha-nofer, of the King Mer-en-Ra."

Mr. Villiers Stuart found several pictures of large ships of this remote
period at Kasr-el-Syad on the Nile, about 70 miles below Thebes, in the
tomb of Ta-Hotep, who lived in the reigns of Pepi I. and his two
successors. These boats were manned with twenty-four rowers, and had two
cabins, one amidships and the other astern.[3] The same explorer
describes the contents of a tomb of the sixth dynasty at Gebel Abu
Faida, on the walls of which he observed the painting of a boat with a
triple mast (presumably made of three spars arranged like the edges of a
triangular pyramid), and a stern projecting beneath the water.

Between the sixth and the eleventh dynasties Egyptian history is almost
an utter blank. The monuments contain no records for a period of about
600 years. We are, therefore, in complete ignorance of the progress of
shipbuilding during this epoch. It was, however, probably considerable;
for, when next the monuments speak it is to give an account of a
mercantile expedition on the high seas. In the Valley of Hamamat, near
Coptos, about 420 miles above Cairo, is an inscription on the rocks,
dating from the reign of Sankh-ka-Ra, the last king of the eleventh
dynasty (about 2800 B.C.), describing an expedition by sea to the famous
land of Punt, on the coast of the Red Sea. This expedition is not to be
confounded with another, a much more famous one, to the same land,
carried out by direction of Queen Hatshepsu of the eighteenth dynasty,
about eleven centuries later. Sankh-ka-Ra's enterprise is, however,
remarkable as being the first over-sea maritime expedition