Model Ships

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, stretching 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 they have been useful in understanding the actual duties of the crew members, what they wore, and how the ship would have been steered. The British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other museums worldwide, display extensive public collections of these ritual boats.

Europe

Some of the oldest surviving European ship models 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 in ceremonies to bless ships and those who sailed in them.

Until the early 18th century, virtually all European small craft and many larger vessels were built without formal plans being drawn. Shipwrights would construct models to show prospective customers how the full size ship would appear and to illustrate advanced building techniques.

Ship models constructed for the Royal Navy were referred to as Admiralty models and were principally constructed during the 18th and 19th centuries to depict proposed warship design. Although many of these models did not illustrate the actual timbering or framing, they did show the form of the hull and usually had great detail of the deck furnishings, masts, spars, and general configuration. Some of these grand models were decorated with carvings of great beauty and were evidently constructed by teams of artisans.

Admiralty models served to educate civilians who were involved in the financing or some other aspect of the ship, to avoid construction errors that might have evolved as the ship itself took form.

Read more at Wikipedia.org