Baris
βᾶρις
Baris (βᾶρις), a boat used on the Nile to transport merchandise, and also at funerals to convey the corpse across the river. It was, like the modern Nile boats, made of the ἀκάνθη (Mimosa Nilotica, modern Arab. sont); was flat-bottomed, and of such light draught that it could only sail up stream with a strong breeze, and had usually only one rudder. The baris was often of many thousand talents' burden. Herodotus describes (2.96) the manner of its construction and navigation, in which, as we learn from Egyptian paintings, both sails and oars were employed. (See Rawlinson's Herodotus, l.c. and 2.41, 197; Diod. 1.96.) The poets use the word to signify an Egyptian (Aesch. Supp. 815, 858; Propert. 4.11, 44) or generally an Oriental boat or ship. (Aesch. Pers. 555; Eur. Iph. A. 297.)
In the Septuagint the word is used in the sense of a tower or palace. (Ps. 44.9; Dan. 8.1.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.