The boat of pharaoh Cheops has covered its last journey, the 7.5 kilometers that separated it from the museum in which it was located since 1982, next to the Great Pyramid, to its new home, the new museum of Egyptian civilization. The transfer of the fragile and millenary boat, 42 meters long and 20 tons heavy, was an engineering masterpiece and everything went smoothly, according to General Atef Motfah, head of operations.
The boat was loaded onto a special vehicle brought from Belgium and moved remotely, equipped with a shock absorber system that dampened any vibrations. The journey of the boat, closed in a metal container whose humidity was constantly monitored, lasted a total of 10 hours, at a speed of 750 meters per hour.
As with the transfer of 22 royal mummies from the Cairo Museum on April 3, the operation was transformed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi into a scenic parade full of light effects, a celebration of the past greatness of a country that today can boast very few successes and that is going through a profound crisis, also due to the tourism block following the Covid epidemic. The new museum, which will be inaugurated who knows when, has precisely the purpose of attracting visitors again and reviving the economy, gathering in one place the most precious pieces of the various Egyptian collections.
Among these there is undoubtedly the boat of Cheops, still the subject of studies that have not solved the many mysteries that surround it. The craft was found in 1954 in a sealed pit on the south side of the Great Pyramid. It was disassembled into 1,224 pieces, the wood of which had remained intact for more than 45 centuries. It took 13 years to rebuild it, certainly much longer than it took to build it at the time of the 4th dynasty pharaoh. The work was completed by a great expert and restorer, Ahmed Yatrssef Mostafa, at the time the greatest connoisseur of the ships of ancient Egypt. He too was amazed by the beauty of that harmonious boat, with its soaring bow and the walls of the “cabin” built so that it was not possible to see who was inside.
Above all, it was the construction technique that left you amazed: there was not a single nail, the Lebanese cedar planks were held together by rope ties knotted inside, without any trace of them being seen when looking at the planking from the outside. Between one plank and the other there was no caulking and it is assumed that the watertightness was ensured by the swelling of the wet wood. Cheops’ boat has a typically Egyptian structure, but its construction technique seems to have been imported from abroad, perhaps from that same Lebanon, at the time occupied by the Phoenicians, from which the wood came.
The boat, according to the explanations given to tourists, was to be used by the late pharaoh to reach the Duat, the afterlife, which in the Egyptian tradition was in the West, where the sun sets. But it is also possible that it was also used to transport Khufu’s body along the Nile to his burial site. Some scholars say they have found traces that show that the boat has sailed, others think that without caulking it could not float. Certainly the refined system of binding the planking is foreign to the Egyptian tradition, which usually employed wooden boards with tiles joined by bronze hooks and butterfly joints, as in the two small boats of Sesostris III (1846-1839 BC) found at Dashur .
Cheops’ boat had been kept for nearly 40 years in a building designed by the Italian architect Franco Minissi, making it so that visitors could observe it from all angles and from different heights. It would be a shame if the new staging made us regret the extraordinary excellence of that exhibition.