Explore a Pharaoh's Boat
Fastenings
The Khufu boat features no nails. Along with the puzzle-piece
joggling, its builders connected adjacent planks with
mortise-and-tenon joints, a kind of peg-in-hole technique. They also
lashed the hull planks together with rope made from a grass called
halfa. (Here, an original knot tied by pharaonic shipbuilders.) They
didn't wrap the rope around or through the hull planks, which might
have promoted leaks. Rather, they worked it through thousands of
V-shaped channels they laboriously carved into the inside faces of
planks. In essence, they sewed the ship together.