Explore a Pharaoh's Boat
In 1954, an Egyptian archeologist discovered an immense,
beautifully crafted ship buried in pieces right beside the
Great Pyramid of Khufu. Now fully reassembled, this
extraordinary royal craft, one of the oldest planked vessels
in the world, has revolutionized our understanding of ancient
Egyptian shipbuilding and continues to astonish visitors to
the Giza Plateau. In this slide show, take a close look at
this 4,600-year-old ship of state.—Peter Tyson
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Museum
Inside this building at the foot of the Great Pyramid at
Giza stands one of the most magnificent ancient
artifacts ever discovered. It was buried in the 26th
century B.C., very carefully, in a carved stone pit
directly beneath the museum where it now rests. The
artifact was interred in honor of Khufu, the pharaoh who
built the Great Pyramid, by his son and successor
Djedefre. For four and a half millennia, it lay
undisturbed in its limestone sarcophagus.
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Discovery
In 1954, Egyptian archeologist Kamal el Mallakh, acting
on a hunch, dug under a stone wall on the south side of
the Great Pyramid. Beneath a layer of earth mixed with
wood chips, charcoal, and powdered limestone, Mallakh
revealed a row of 40 limestone blocks lined up like
sardines in a can. The stones covered a rectangular,
rock-cut pit. Carving an exploratory hole in one of the
blocks, Mallakh peered below. This photo, taken at the
time, shows what he saw there: well-preserved wooden
planks and oars, draped with the remains of matting and
ropes and still smelling of cedar.
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Ship
This is what Mallakh had found, as it appears today,
reassembled, in the so-called Solar Boat Museum next to
the Great Pyramid. The 144-foot-long vessel is known
variously as the Khufu boat, the solar barque, or the
pharaoh's ship. Realizing the treasure he had on his
hands, Mallakh took 20 months to remove the boat's 1,224
separate pieces. Then a fellow Egyptian, Hag Ahmed
Youssef Moustafa, a conservator for the Egyptian
Antiquities Organization, led a team that painstakingly
reconstructed the vessel.
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Planking
Boatbuilders today typically frame a vessel first, then
add the hull's planking. The Khufu boat was shell-built,
meaning the outer skin of planks came first, then the
interior timbers and framing. The workmanship is
exceptional. The pharaoh's craftsmen shaped the ship's
30 hull planks from logs as long as 76 feet. They also
sculpted the planks to follow the shape of the hull, and
they joggled them along the edges, meaning they carved
them in such a way that they lock together like puzzle
pieces.
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Wood
Fully 95 percent original, the wood of Khufu's boat is
conifer, probably cedar of Lebanon. Having few large
trees of their own besides Nile acacia and tamarisk, the
ancient Egyptians had imported cedar from the eastern
Mediterranean region since before Khufu's time. The
pharaoh's workers axed and sawed raw logs then trimmed
them with adzes, much as traditional Egyptian
boatbuilders do today. This detail of the ship's
deckhouse displays the fine workmanship the ancients
achieved with their copper and flint tools.
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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.
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Deckhouse
On the deck stands a roofed, windowless deckhouse about
30 feet long. Within it is a seven-foot-long inner
chamber. Was Khufu's body placed here for transport
across the Nile for interment in the Great Pyramid? Was
the pharaoh meant to find shelter here while traveling
in the afterlife? As with everything else regarding the
ship's function, the intended use of the deckhouse
remains unknown.
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Paneling
Khufu's craftsmen appear to have designed the deckhouse
for easy disassembly: The structure consists of 22
prefabricated, individually framed cedar panels. Some
scholars have drawn on this point to suggest that the
ship was never meant to be used in this world, but
rather to be interred with the pharaoh for use in the
afterlife. This ship and another, in fact—a second
dismantled boat lies in another rock-cut pit nearby,
unexcavated.
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Oars
Each of the Khufu boat's 12 oars was carved from a
single piece of wood. Ten oars are lashed amidships
ahead of the deckhouse, though this positioning is
arbitrary: where, or even whether, the oars were affixed
is unknown. A final pair attaches to the stern as
steering oars. Steering oars such as these appear in
funerary carvings and paintings (see final image), and
on ship models, right into the New Kingdom, a thousand
years and more after Khufu's time.
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Deck
The ship is almost fully decked within the area bounded
by the stringers, the curved timbers seen here against
which the oars are lashed. The decking itself consists
of panels of mortise-and-tenon-joined planks. As seen
here, a wooden framework extends out from the deckhouse.
It might have held a mat or linen canopy, possibly for
evaporative cooling—moistening the covering would
have created an insulated cooler space within.
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Style
The Khufu boat is known as a papyriform vessel, because
the high ends resemble those of papyrus boats. Papyrus
is a tall sedge that the Egyptians relied on to make
boats as well as cordage, sandals, mats, and other
products. Papyriform boats, commonly seen in paintings
and carvings of the dynastic period, were ceremonial:
They were used for journeys to sacred sites and by the
gods. As can just be made out here, in the ship's prow
stood a second, wood-framed canopy. Again, its intended
use is unknown.
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Purpose
Over a half century after the boat's discovery, scholars
still debate its purpose. Some say the vessel is a solar
barque, which Khufu would have used in his persona as
the sun god Re during his daily voyages across the sky.
Others feel the ship was a funerary craft for
transporting Khufu's body on the Nile to the Giza
necropolis or on a final pilgrimage to holy sites.
(Here, a funerary barge as depicted in the Book of the
Dead of Heruben.) Like much else surrounding this
magnificent creation, its function remains an enigma.
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interactive version. The text to the left is provided for printing purposes.
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