Vistors view Khufu’s Second Boat
Visitors to the plateau were able to see the wooden vessel via a large screen hooked up to a camera which was inserted into the otherwise sealed tomb. Crisscrossing beams and planks laying on top of one another were reportedly seen inside the pit.
It was also announced today that in November this year the 4500 year old remains will be excavated and reassembled and restored.
“The unexcavated boat is thought to be of similar design, but smaller. Its wood — Lebanese cedar and acacia from Egypt — is less well preserved. A small hole cut into the pit at the time of its discovery allowed insects and air inside, contributing to the decay.
Conserving the wood and reassembling the craft could take a decade, Hawass said. Work on the first boat, by comparison, took 25 years, in part because there was little information on Egyptian boat building other than carvings and small models found in tombs. But the first effort should make it easier to piece together the second boat.
“You wouldn’t be starting from square one this time,” said John Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University.
Darnell 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.
“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 said.
Those who argue the vessels may have touched water point to rope marks on the wood that could have been caused by the rope becoming wet and then shrinking as it dried.
But Hawass believes these were symbolic vessels, not 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, the oldest and largest of Giza’s pyramids.
He said solar symbols found inside the second pit offer more evidence that those who disassembled and buried the boats believed Khufu’s soul would travel from his tomb in the pyramid through a connecting air shaft to the boat chambers and that he would use the boats to circle the heavens, like the sun god, taking one boat by day and the other by night.”
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See this report by Associated Press for photos of today’s display.
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