Queens Boat for Her Future

The remaining two pits, in which intact boats were found, are on the south side of the pyramid. According to Lehner, the boat pits on the southern side of the complex differ from the others in one important aspect. They are long, narrow and rectangular, rather than boat shaped, and they contain the disassembled parts of real boats. That the pits were built no later than the end of the 4th Dynasty is demonstrated by the fat that they lie partially under the pyramid's southern enclosure wall, which is dated to the end of that dynasty.

The two southern boat pits were discovered in 1954, during cleaning work, by the young Egyptian architect and archeologist Kamal el-Mallakh and inspector Zaki Nur. The eastern pit was covered by a roof of forty-one huge limestone slabs weighing between 17 and 20 tons each. The largest is about 4.8 meters long. The three westernmost of these stones were much smaller than the others and have been interpreted as keystones. The pit measures about 32.5 meters in length. When one of the slabs was raised from the eastern pit, the planking of the great boat was seen, completely dismantled, but arranged in the semblance of its finished form.

The cedar boat now on display was originally dismantled into 1,224 individual parts. On top of the wood was a layer of mats and ropes, an instrument made of flint, and some small pieces of white plaster. The prow of the boat, a wooden column topped by a round wooden disk, was found at the western end of the pit. This column was connected to two long wooden pieces that extended along the bottom of the pit. Most of the wooden parts had been tied together with ropes. Also found inside the pit were many other items, such as twelve oars, each mad from a single piece of wood, fifty-eight poles, three cylindrical columns and five doors. In total, there were thirteen layers of materials consisting of 651 artifacts ranging in size from 10 centimeters to 23 meters.

The boat was removed, piece by piece, under the supervision of Ahmed Youssef Mustafa, the master restorer who worked on Hetephere's funerary furniture. It is 43.3 meters (142 feet) long and made of Lebanese cedar wood and some acacia. Its displacement was 45 tons. The maximum draft is 1.48 meters (5 feet). It is 5.9 meters wide. The separate parts of the boat had numerous U-shaped holes so that the boat could be 'stitched' together using ropes made of vegetable fibers. Interestingly many of the boats planks were marked with signs for prow, stern, port and starboard. Nevertheless it took Mustafa some ten years to completely reassemble the boat. That work was not completed until 1968.

The boat's prow and stern are in the form of papyrus talks, with the stern one bent over. Therefore, it is essentially a replica of a type of papyrus reed boat, perhaps dating back to the Predynastic Period. During the Old Kingdom, it is not difficult to find many objects simulating the Egyptian's earlier construction material in more durable material. It has a cabin, or inner shrine, which is enclosed within a reed-mat structure with poles of the same papyrus-but form that we see in the canopy of Hetepheres. It also has a small forward cabin that probably was for the captain. Propulsion was by means of ten oars, and it was steered using two large oar rudders locate din the stern. There was no mast, and therefore no sail, and the general design of the boat would have not allowed it to be used other than for river travel.

On the walls of the pit in which the boat now displayed in a special museum was found, there were many builders' marks and inscriptions, including some eighteen cartouches containing the name of King Djedefre. This suggests to many Egyptologists that some parts of his tomb complex were not completed until after his death. One scholar, Dobrev, has theorized that the two boat pits on the south side of the Great Pyramid were built by Djedefre as a gesture of piety connected with the establishment of the local divine cult of his father and founder of the royal necropolis in Giza. However, if the boats were used in the funeral of Khufu, it would be natural for Djedefre to have buried them with his cartouches.

It took a number of years to reassemble the boat, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, so that it could be displayed in its own boat museum next tot he pyramid.

A side view of Khufu's famous boat at Giza

In the neighboring pit on the west, the boat remains sealed up with the original twenty covering blocks. In 1987, the American National Geographic Society, in association with the Egyptian office for historical monuments, examined this pit by boring a hole into the limestone beams covering it and inserting a micro camera and measuring equipment. The space was photographed and air measurements made, after which the pit was sealed again. It was hoped that the pit had been so well sealed hat the air inside would have last been breathed by the ancient Egyptians, but there were obvious signs that this was not the case. Within, the parts of the disassembled boat were again arranged in their correct relative positions, though the pit was shorter than the fully assembled boat would have been.