WATANI International
10 July 2011
Last June, the stone blocks laid in place 4,300 years ago by Fourth-Dynasty masons to cover Khufu’s second solar boat on the Giza Plateau were ceremoniously lifted as a prelude to restoring the boat. The second boat is thought to be smaller than its sister ship, which is about 140 feet long.
Using a pulley system, a team of scientists lifted the first of 41 limestone slabs, each weighing about 16 tons, to uncover fragments of the ancient ship. Over the next two months, experts expect to unearth about 600 pieces from the boat’s underground resting place. Both boats were made from Lebanese cedar and Egyptian acacia trees.
The entombed boat was untouched until 1987, when a team from the National Geographic Society threaded a tiny camera under the site’s limestone surface to see what lay beneath and found it. Other similar cavities nearby were empty.
Khufu’s cartouche
The restoration, which is expected to take four years, will be carried out jointly between Egypt and Japan. It is being hailed as the world’s first restoration project to be fully conducted by using modern technology.
The project will include lifting the timbers, which are in particular need of attention. The segments of the boat, which was dismantled before it was placed in the pit in the third millennium BC, will be moved to a specially-constructed laboratory for examination and treatment.
When restoration is complete the boat will be placed on show in a small museum near the Fayoum road entrance to the Giza Plateau. During a press conference given by Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass and Sakuji Yoshimura, director of the Waseda University archaeological team, Hawass said that while the Egyptian and Japanese teams were cleaning the fillings around the sides of the covering stones, they revealed a cartouche of King Khufu and beside it the name of the crown prince, Djedefre, without a cartouche.This was the second cartouche of the great King Khufu ever found, the other being inside the Great Pyramid. Hawass said that this suggested that the second boat may have been placed in the pit before the one beside it, the boat now on show in the Khufu Solar Boat Museum next to the pyramids.”
First boat
The first solar boat was discovered in 1954 by the Egyptian archaeologist Kamal al-Mallakh, but the opening that leads to the second boat was not unearthed until 1994. In 1987 Ahmed Qadri, the head of the antiquities department, conducted an experiment to photograph and test the air and humidity inside the pit. At the time, the Egyptian -Japanese team fitted a device to control the level of temperature and humidity automatically, maintaining the temperature at 25 Celsius and the humidity at 24 per cent to best preserve the wooden remains.
There were 41 stone blocks covering the second pit, each of them weighing about 16 tons. Yoshimura said modern lifting equipment was designed to raise the blocks and then cover the hole with chemically-treated wood to help maintain temperature and humidity.