While working on my WIP yesterday, I had to ask myself whether or not an ancient Egyptian would have known anything about sharks.
After spending hours scouring both my library and the Interwebz, the answer still remained elusive. The Egyptians weren’t all that keen on sea travel, so they didn’t spend much time discussing marine life (though Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple contains some interesting depictions of creatures found encountered in the Red Sea during the journey to Punt).
Eventually, I decided to make an educated guess and assume that an Egyptian might have heard stories about great predatory fish that lived in the sea and occasionally took bites out of swimmers. The historian in me hates making guesses like that, but he’s rapidly learning to swallow his pedantic outrage. But it’s stuff like this that tempts me to switch gears and write about a world of my own creation. 🙂
Codex Lochianus 