"Strabo had visited the Egyptian city around 29-25BC and wrote of such boats: These vessels are luxuriously fitted out and used by the royal court for excursions; and the crowd of revellers who go down from Alexandria by the canal to the public festivals; for every day and every night is crowded with people on the boats who play the flute and dance without restraint and with extreme licentiousness."
"It's extremely exciting because it's the first time ever that such a boat has been discovered in Egypt Those boats were mentioned by different ancient authors, like Strabo, and they were also represented in some iconography for example in the Palestrina mosaic, where you see such a boat of a much smaller size with noblemen hunting hippopotamuses. But [an actual boat] has never been discovered before."
A 35-metre pleasure boat dating to the first half of the first century was discovered off the submerged island of Antirhodos, part of Alexandria's Portus Magnus. The vessel was constructed to hold a central pavilion with a luxuriously decorated cabin and measured about seven metres in breadth. Well-preserved timbers suggest a far larger craft than iconographic depictions and indicate it may have required more than twenty rowers. Similar vessels were described as luxuriously fitted for royal excursions and crowded with revellers playing flutes and dancing. Excavations were conducted by the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology under Franck Goddio.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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