A passenger boat used on the Nile, typically with lateen sails.‘Happily, Monsieur Maspero was on his dahabeah at Luxor, and, as soon as I reached mine, I wrote him a note asking him to come over and see something worth looking at.’
- ‘He boarded the dahabeah and insisted upon seeing Armine.’
- ‘He brought the ruins that lie scattered for hundreds of miles along the Nile within easy accessibility by dahabeeyah and steamer, making the journey even to the remotest of them easy and speedy.’
- ‘Eventually, steamers displaced dahabeahs, opening up an Egyptian adventure to greater numbers on Thomas Cook's tours, and trains nearly finished them off.’
- ‘Before that is was a week's camel-trek through the Sahara or ten days on the dahabeeyah, the lateen-rigged Nile Galleys.’
Mid 19th century from Arabic, literally ‘golden’, denoting the gilded state barge formerly used by the Muslim rulers of Egypt.
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