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The Egyptian funerary boat on display at the Ure Museum is a typical tomb offering from ancient Egypt, and symbolizes the transport of the dead person or their soul, from life to the afterlife. Egyptians saw death as a boat journey, a trip across their River Nile, which ran down the centre of their country, joining North and South, country and city. The Nile was, in fact, the source of fertility and farming as well as trade and transport for Egyptians. This boat came into the collection in 1923 from the Liverpool Institute of Archaeology, which had received it among other objects from Professor Garstang's excavations. It is for this reason that we know of its findspot, the so-called Tomb of the Officials at Beni Hassan. The little boatmen and their oars, we think, are from the same boat but there were quite a lot of them, so without exact records we can't be sure that the pieces that make up this artefact all originally belonged together.