first ship. In many documents the ship name is introduced with a ship prefix being an abbreviation of the ship class, for example "MS" (motor ship) or "SV" (sailing vessel), making it easier to distinguish a ship name from other individual names in a text. "Ship" (along with "nation") is an English word that has retained a female grammatical gender in some usages, which allows it sometimes to be referred to as a "she" without being of female natural gender. History Prehistory and antiquity Asian developments The earliest attestations of ships in maritime transport in Mesopotamia are model ships, which date back to the 4th millennium BC. In archaic texts in Uruk, Sumer, the ideogram for "ship" is attested, but in the inscriptions of the kings of Lagash, ships were first mentioned in connection to maritime trade and naval warfare at around 2500–2350 BCE. Austronesian peoples originated in what is now Taiwan. From here, they took part in the Austronesian Expansion. Their distinctive maritime technology was integral to this movement and included catamarans and outriggers. It has been deduced that they had sails some time before 2000 BCE. Their crab claw sails enabled them to sail for vast distances in open ocean. From Taiwan, they rapidly colonized the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia, then sailed further onwards to Micronesia, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar, eventually colonizing a territory spanning half the globe. Austronesian rigs were distinctive in that they had spars supporting both the upper and lower edges of the sails (and sometimes in between). The sails were also made from woven leaves, usually from pandan plants. These were complemented by paddlers, who usually positioned themselves on platforms on the outriggers in the larger boats. Austronesian ships ranged in complexity from simple dugout canoes with outriggers or lashed together to large edge-pegged plank-built boats built around a keel made from a dugout canoe. Their designs were unique, evolving from ancient rafts to the characteristic double-hulled, single-outrigger, and double-outrigger designs of Austronesian ships. Early Austronesian sailors influenced the development of sailing technologies in Sri Lanka and Southern India through the Austronesian maritime trade network of the Indian Ocean, the precursor to the spice trade route and the maritime silk road, which was established at around 1500 BC. Some scholars believe that the triangular Austronesian crab claw sail may have influenced the development of the lateen sail in western ships due to