More re Ancient Egyptian boat to be excavated, reassembled

Middle East Online (Jason Keyser)

Thanks to Rick Menges for the above link.

Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday.

The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images of the inside of the second boat pit from a camera inserted through a hole in the chamber's limestone ceiling. The video image, transmitted onto a small TV monitor at the site, showed layers of crisscrossing beams and planks on the floor of the dark pit.

"You can smell the past," said Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Experts will begin removing around 600 pieces of timber in November, said professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan's Waseda University, who is helping lead the restoration effort with the antiquities council.

The discovery of the boat pits more than 50 years ago by workmen clearing a large mound of wind-blown debris from the south side of the Great Pyramid is considered one of the most significant finds on the plateau. They are the oldest vessels to have survived from antiquity.

The reconstructed ship is on display in a museum built above the pit where it was discovered. It is a narrow vessel measuring 142 feet with a rectangular deckhouse and long, interlocking oars that soar overhead.

The cedar timbers of its curved hull are lashed together with hemp rope in a technique used until recent times by traditional shipbuilders along the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

The unexcavated boat, made from Lebanese cedar and Egyptian acacia trees, is thought to be of similar design, but smaller and less well preserved.

John Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, said new research into the second boat could fill in some blanks about the significance of the vessels and help determine whether they ever actually plied Nile River waterways or were of purely spiritual import.

And thanks to Stan Parchin for sending me this one. As usual Stan has done a great job of summarizing additional data pertinent to the current topic, putting the planned project into its historical context:

Suite 101

The Associated Press reported on July 19, 2008 that visitors to the site of Khufu's second solar boat could view live images of the subterranean barque transmitted from a camera in its limestone pit to a television monitor. Beginning in November, archaeologists will assist Professor Sakuji Yoshimura, an Egyptologist at Japan's Waseda University, in the excavation of some 600 timber beams and planks from the pharaoh's vessel. Zahi Hawass, Director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has assured the public of the ship's restoration and reassembly for future display. This second boat is smaller and less well-preserved than the one discovered nearby in 1954.

Khufu

The Egyptian Museum's ivory Statuette of Pharaoh Khufu (Dynasty IV) (ca. 2551-2528 B.C.) is thought to be the only complete sculpture of the Old Kingdom's second ruler, the builder of the Great Pyramid and its funerary complex at Giza. Its body was discovered by British Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie in 1903 in a temple at Abydos during an excavation. The head was found at the same location three weeks later. The pharaoh is also known from two fragmentary likenesses in New York's Brooklyn Museum and Munich's Staatliche Sammlung für Ägyptische Kunst.

Egypt State Information Service

"The second Cheops boat has been discovered with the help of modern technology as a high resolution camera is being used to convey the details of the boat which is still inside its own hole," Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawwas said Saturday 19/7/2008 during a celebration held on the occasion.

A large number of tourists gathered to view such important discovery of the solar boat which is located 10 meters beneath the surface of the earth in the west of the Cheops boat museum in the Pyramids area using a camera.

Restoration work will be made to the boat before moving it from its current location to be displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum to be inaugurated in 2011, he said.

See the above pages for more details.