Ancient wood hidden for millennia in an underground chamber beside the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza will soon be excavated and reassembled into a unique pharaonic boat, according to Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.
The glorious heap of beams and planks can now be seen for the first time by the public just as it was left by the ancient Egyptians 4,500 years ago -- fully disassembled and carefully stacked. Tourists can view images of the inside of the boat pit from a camera inserted through a hole in the chamber's ceiling.
View a slideshow about the boat here.
"We are currently reviewing a Japanese proposal to fully excavate the wood fragments and rebuild the boat. The project will take five years and will cost $10 million," Hawass told Discovery News in a phone interview.
Archaeologists have long known the existence of a boat buried 10 meters (33 feet) below the last resting place of the 4th dynasty Pharoah Khufu (2589-2566 B.C.), or "Cheops" as the Greeks called him.
Two pits carved into the bedrock came to light in 1954, when a mountain of debris was cleared from the south face of the Great Pyramid.
Almost perfectly preserved, the cedar timbers excavated from the first pit were painstakingly reassembled into an extraordinary boat. About 142 feet long and made of 1,224 components, Khufu's first ship now stands resurrected in a specially built museum near the Great Pyramid.
While evidence of a second pit very near to the first one was noted first in 1954, it took some 31 years before Egyptian authorities investigated the underground chamber by inserting a camera through thick slabs of stone in 1985.
Now a Japanese team from Waseda University, led by Egyptologist Sakuji Yoshimura, has submitted a proposal to excavate, restore, rebuild and transport the boat along with its mate to the Grand Egyptian Museum. Without a prompt intervention, the vessel would be at risk of serious damage, the Japanese team said.
"Although the boat has been sealed in the pit for the last 4,500 years, it seems that in 1954 the archaeologist who discovered it opened a small hole, and insects were able to get inside. These insects may have caused some damage to the wood," Hawass said.
Similarities between the timbers of the first ship and what archaeologists have been able to see from video footage, support the theory that the two were sister ships.
"There is no question about that. The ships are about the same size and probably have the same overall appearance. Both have similar measurements for plank dimensions and fastenings, and both have pre-fabricated cabins for the deck," Cheryl Ward, one of the maritime archaeologists who evaluated the first video footage back in the 1980s, told Discovery News.
Ward, the author of "Sacred and Secular: Ancient Egyptian Ships and Boats," confirmed that the wood, mainly cedar imported from Lebanon, is rather damaged.
"There seems to be less volume of wood compared to the first pit, not because the boat is smaller but because there is more degradation. We did not see any evidence for termites, but one of the first things that we saw actually was a large beetle. So there is an opening somewhere that lets the insects come and go," Ward said.
Beautifully engineered, the boats reveal a level of skill that rivals the pyramids themselves. And like the pyramids, they raise many questions: What was their purpose? Was the embalmed Khufu taken to his pyramid in one of these ships? And why were there two boats? But most of all, why did the ancient Egyptians first build and then disassemble and buried two expensive, full-sized royal ships at the base of the Great Pyramid?
According to Hawass, the boats were symbolic vessels, and were not used in the funerary procession to carry Khufu's body from his palace at Memphis to his tomb at Giza.
"It is my belief that the boats were buried to serve symbolically -- they would transport the dead king on his daily journey with the sun god across the sky," Hawass explained.
The ancient Egyptians believed that the sun traveled from east to west in a "day boat," moving to a "night boat" for the return trip to the underworld.
"The second boat was intended to carry the king across the daytime sky, while the first one was for his night voyage," Hawass said.
He believes that the king would have been thought to travel through a channel that leads from the south side of the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.
"The oars would have been used symbolically by the sun god to kill the wild creatures that threatened him on his journey," Hawass said
As for the boat being disassembled -- that wasn't a problem.
"The sun god knew how to reconstruct it. That's why they dismantled these ships and buried them in a pit," Hawass explained.
One of the most interesting aspects about these boats is the technology with which they were built and then dismantled. Basically, they were stored like Ikea furniture -- pre-fabricated and ready for assembly.
In the case of Khufu's first ship, the timbers were carefully placed in the underground chamber, and stacked in a sequence that basically led to the vessel's finished form.
"The Egyptians had a very strong understanding on how to treat, conserve and recycle wood timbers," Ward said. "Amazingly, they were able to take these boats apart and package them for travel."
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