As time went on better
boats and larger ones were built in Egypt. We can guess how strong
they must have been when they carried down the Nile the gigantic blocks
of stone used in building the famous Pyramids. Some of these blocks
weigh up to sixty tons; so that both the men who built the barges to
bring them down the Nile and those who built these huge blocks into the
wonderful Pyramids must have known their business pretty well a
thousand years before Noah built his Ark.
The Ark was built in Mesopotamia, less than five thousand years ago, to
save Noah from the flooded Euphrates. The shipwrights seem to have
built it like a barge or house-boat. If so, it must have been about
fifteen thousand tons, taking the length of the cubit in the Bible
story at eighteen inches. It was certainly not a ship, only some sort
of construction that simply floated about with the wind and current
till it ran aground. But Mesopotamia and the shores of the Persian
Gulf were great places for shipbuilding. They were once the home of
adventurers who had come West from southern Asia, and of the famous
Phoenicians, who went farther West to find a new seaboard home along
the shores of Asia Minor, just north of Palestine, where they were in
the shipping business three thousand years ago, about the time of the
early Kings of Israel.
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