Reassembling a pharoah’s ride
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CAIRO — Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza’s Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday.
The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry in the afterlife the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid.
Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images of the second boat pit from a camera inserted through a hole in the chamber’s ceiling.
“You can smell the past,” said , director of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Experts will begin removing about 600 pieces of timber in November, said professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan’s Waseda University, who is helping lead the restoration effort with the antiquities council.
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