Model Ships (37970)

Ship models or model ships are scale representations of ships. They can range in size from 1/6000 scale wargaming miniatures to large vessels capable of holding people. more...

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Ship modeling is a craft as old as shipbuilding itself, going all the way back to ancient times when water transport was first developed.

History

Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptians were first to carve detailed ship models that have survived to date. It was a common aspect of the Egyptian funeral practice to include highly accurate and detailed, painted, sycamore wood models of a ship and crew, intended to transport the soul of the deceased to the afterlife.

These models, which may be almost 5000 years old, are truly remarkable in their state of preservation. Since the models usually show the crew in their respective places, these models have been useful in understanding the actual duties of the crew members, what they wore, and how the ship would have been steered. Much of what we know today about ancient seafaring has come to us from these models. The British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other museums worldwide, display extensive public collections of these ritual boats.

Ship models created in more recent times

Some of the oldest ship models, still surviving, have been those of early craft such as Galleys, Galleons, and possibly Carracks, dating from the 12th through the 15th centuries and found occasionally mounted in churches, where they were used to bless the ships and those who sailed in them. Other rare and often very crudely built models of that time period have found their way into collections at various museums around the world.

Despite the fact that some fine artists painted and sculpted masterpieces of architecture and the human and animal form, it seems that no truly representative drawings of ships seems to have survived from this period. Most surviving pictures or engravings are apparently greatly out of scale, although like maps of that period, they were greatly decorated with drawings of real and imagined sea monsters, leaving the nautical historian very little to work with.

Through the earlier centuries, and even into the 18th century, virtually all small craft and many of the larger ships were built without any formal plans being drawn. Shipwrights were apprenticed to their craft at an early age and the art was passed down from father to son. Ship models were being built by designers of large ships primarily to show their prospective customers how the full size ship would appear, and also to introduce advanced building techniques. Few shipping merchants could read a construction draft, and still fewer individuals were sufficiently advanced in the art of drafting or the mathematics necessary to that art. Add to that the fairly primitive method of paper making, with its acidic product tending to discolor and disintegrate, and it is understandable why so few ship's plans survived outside of the Royal Shipyard in England, which to this day is a major source of information on ships of the earlier centuries.

Read more at Wikipedia.org