Solar Boat Museum
Starts From 35.00$
in 1950, kamal el Mallekh an architect and archeologist, was working as an Antiques inspector at Giza, when he first noticed a thin line of mortar which delineated the edge of a pair of long narrow pits, end to end ,on the south side of the Great Pyramids of Khufu.on May 26 1954 , the team began to dig and eventually Me el Mallekh was lowered into a hole in one of the blocks .
The boat laboriously removed from its pit, in pieces, following preliminary consolidation of the cloth and matting which covered it and in 1958 reconstruction of the boat by Hag Ahmed youssif the Antiques Service's principal restorer, was able to begin. The ancient builders had helpfully indicated on some of the pieces which part of the craft they had come from , but the work still took over ten years to complete and was finally fully re-assembled in 1968 . No nails were used in the reconstruction and the planking was assembled through an ingenious system stitching through holes with ropes of vegetables fibers.
The solar boat measures 43.3m long, 5.9m wide, has draft of 1.48m and an estimated displacement of round 45 tones.
The signification of the buried boat is still debated .the pyramids text clearly state that at the end of the pharaoh's life on earth ,this soul ascends to the heavens in the solar barque to join this father Re.the argument about this boat was purely symbolic –part of the burial goods – or whether it actually used in the funeral processing to transport the body of the King by river to his pyramids complex.
Khufu's Solar Boat remains the most spectacular of all Egyptian boats found to date. It is now display in its own specially-built museum just a few metres from where it was founded on the southern side of the monument, an imposing legacy from the builder of the Great Pyramids.