More than fifty years ago, boat pits were found next to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Entombed in the pits were ancient wooden boats that experts believe were intended to ferry Khufu, the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid, into the afterlife. Soon, archaeologists will excavate the fragments of the second of these boats and try to reassemble it. In doing so, experts hope to learn more about the boat, which is one of the oldest vessels to have survived from antiquity.
The 4500 year old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat that was removed in pieces from a pit in 1954. That boat was painstakingly reconstructed and is now on display in a museum built above the pit. The unexcavated boat is thought to be of a similar design to its sister ship, a narrow craft measuring 142 feet, with a rectangular deckhouse and long, interlocking oars that soar overhead. The cedar timbers of the boat's curved hull are lashed together with rope. While the unexcavated boat is believed to be smaller and less well preserved than the reconstructed ship, the two boats are considered to be among the most significant finds on the Giza Plateau.
Excavation of the second boat will begin in November, said professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan's Waseda University, who is helping to lead restoration efforts. He said that 600 pieces of timber from Lebanese cedar and Egyptian acacia trees are expected to be removed from the pit, and once the pieces of wood have been extricated, Yoshimura and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities will begin reconstructing the boat.
John Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, said that new research into the second boat could fill in some blanks about the significance of the two ancient vessels and could help to resolve a debate over their true purpose, which has remained somewhat enigmatic. Experts have been unable to determine whether the boats ever actually plied Nile River waterways or were of purely spiritual, figurative import.
"In Egypt, almost everything real had its counterpart meaning or significance in the spiritual world. But there's a lot of debate as to whether these vessels ever were used or not," Darnell explained.
Some experts believe that the boats were used in the water. It is possible, they say, that these were the funerary boats used to bring the pharaoh Khufu's embalmed remains up the Nile from the ancient capital of Memphis for burial in the Great Pyramid, his mausoleum. As evidence, they point to rope marks on the wood, which could have been caused by a rope becoming wet and then shrinking as it dried.
