An Ancient Boat’s Modern Ordeal

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An American congressional delegation visiting Egypt recently was shown in to see the world’s oldest boat, a stunningly sleek and graceful vessel belonging to the Pharaoh Cheops and dating from 2700 B.C. For the occasion, the museum’s ventilation system, entrusted with preserving this priceless treasure, was activated to full capacity—all 16 household fans were turned on, eight on each side of the boat. But they did little more than stir the 100-degree air in the stifling museum baking in the sun beside Cheops’ great pyramid on the Giza plateau. (See illustration)

The congressmen saw the boat, a sensational archaeological discovery in 1954, only by special arrangement with the Egyptian Organization of Antiquities. Although the minister of culture has declared that the museum would at last be ready for visitors this November, long-time Cairo residents are skeptical. “Why, they say that every year,” exclaimed one.

Controversy has swirled around the boat like the Nile eddies it once crossed. Two men claim to have discovered it. One declares that it is a “solar boat” for carrying the soul of the dead king on its eternal journey. Most experts say, however, that it was probably used to carry the body of Cheops from Memphis, where he ruled, to Giza, where he was mummified and laid to rest in his enormous pyramid.

In addition, there were arguments about the design of the museum to house the boat. Since its completion, the roof has leaked during the occasional rainstorms, the glass blows in during the spring sandstorms and the heat is so intense that the boat has shrunk slightly from its 140-foot length. The air conditioning system installed 12 years ago has never been used and the machinery has rusted in place.

The second incarnation of Cheops’ boat began when workmen clearing away a sand hill for a road between the great pyramid and the tombs on its south side found 41 parallel stone blocks each about 15 feet long. The workmen carefully chipped a hole in one block and Kamal E71″/>“I could see nothing, just black, but there was a strong aroma captured by my nose of ancient spices. By then I was sure wood was there and it had been preserved with the spices,” he says. He took his shaving mirror and bounced some sunlight into the hole. The beam picked up the point of a shiny wooden oar shaped more like an African spear than a modern-day oar. It was a moment of exhilaration and celebration that the ever-hungry wood ants had not destroyed this find as they had so many others.

When the ponderous stone covering was removed, 1,224 pieces of wood—almost entirely Lebanon cedar—were found, ranging in size from 74 feet to 4 inches and laid out in 13 crisscrossing layers. There also was a large snarl of ropes used to tie the boat together and the remains of reed mats. Each piece of wood had a wainwright’s mark chiseled in hieroglyphics indicating its position in the boat. The pieces were stored in the hole roughly where they would be when the giant jigsaw puzzle was assembled. But no one knew precisely what the completed puzzle should look like.

The organization of Antiquities turned to Ahmed Youssef, a master restorer already renowned for his brilliant work on artifacts from the tomb of Hetep-Heres, Cheops’ mother. His office walls are lined with before-and-after pictures of his work: a pile of beads becomes an intricate, many-stringed necklace, a mound of sherds becomes a vase, a cracked and broken box from Ikhnaten’s tomb becomes a thing of beauty. In 1956 Ahmed Youssef left behind his work in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor to take on the job that was to consume more than two decades of his life.

028Under Youssef’s guidance, it took 18 months to remove the wood from the niche chipped into the limestone 4,700 years ago. Each piece was photographed, listed in a book with entries giving its condition, measurements and eventually, in red ink, where in the boat it was used. There were also five categories of filing cards that listed each piece. Youssef said he did all the work himself because he believed the old Egyptian maxim that “when there are two men in a boat, they will always hit a snag.”

While the top layer of wood was found in perfect condition, that on the bottom was “like sand,” Youssef said. Some pieces were adequately preserved on one side and flaking away on the other. Some ends of pieces had rotted. Some curves had bent out of shape over the centuries. These all had to be restored before the boat could take its final form.

In the meantime, Youssef read everything he could find about boats in Cheops’ time. Then he turned to modern boats and painstakingly studied them, even building models of five types hoping they would give him a clue to the form of his mysterious puzzle. He studied the principal pieces of wood from the boat to see how they might relate to modern boats. And eventually he was ready to start reconstructing the boat. It took four years.

With the use of pegs and new ropes but no nails, a slender, delicate boat of ethereal beauty slowly took form in Youssef’s workshop. Its graceful lines sweep from the carved papyrus standard in the bow, the symbol of southern Egypt, to the lotus standard in the stern, the symbol of northern Egypt—the halves of Cheops’ domain. A cabin in the back half of the boat was for the body of the dead king. (See illustration)

On each side, several inches from the cabin’s walls, are 18 uprights. Archaeologists believe rush mats were mounted on these and suspended over the top of the cabin. When water was poured over them and the wind blew, the cabin was cooled by a primitive form of air conditioning.

Two long oars in the stern served as rudders. In front of the cabin there are five oars on each side of the boat. Two men would have worked each oar, Youssef said. Where the bow begins to curve upward there is a small shelter for the captain of the boat. The deck is open on the sides to the shallow hold to keep the boat light and high in the water. There is a gangway that can be lowered and raised and a small hatch to the hold. Once the boat was put into the water, the wood would swell and the ropes would shrink, making the vessel seaworthy, Youssef said.

Despite the years he has spent on the 029boat, Ahmed Youssef says he finds “something new and more interesting” about it every time he comes to see it. After dedicating so much of his life to the boat, he is distressed that it may soon be doomed by the stifling, leaky museum that houses it. Although another boat has been discovered nearby but not yet excavated, Youssef, now 64 and working on a yearly contract after his retirement, does not seem to have the strength to begin anew.

The museum is a modernistic capsule of painted glass built over the excavation for the boat. Its busy crossbeams and window frames deny the viewer an uncluttered look at the boat and the building itself is too small to permit an overall view of the boat. But the vessel cannot be moved again, Youssef said, because of the condition of the wood and because it is hard to untie and reassemble. Before the boat was finally finished in the museum in 1971, it had been untied five times as the Organization of Antiquities tried to decide where to display it. By then Youssef had the routine down to a science—three months to take the boat apart and six to put it together again.

It is generally agreed that the work remaining to be done on the museum to rescue the boat and to permit the public to view it is minor. “It could be done in 23 hours, not 23 years,” said Kamal El Mallakh, the first man to see the gleaming rows of ancient wood that now are rapidly deteriorating.

Although he is no longer with the antiquities organization, he has maintained a fatherly interest in the boat—which he prefers to call a solar boat—and in Ahmed Youssef, “a great man and a great artisan.”

Zahi Hawass, first inspector of the Giza district for the antiquities organization, said the current plan is to replace the glass with a synthetic material that will let in the light but not the heat. It will be an expensive process, he said, but he is convinced tourists would happily pay even 3 Egyptian pounds ($4.32) to see the world’s oldest boat. “I paid $3 to see Plymouth Rock—it’s just a rock—and a new boat, only 20 years old. This boat is 4,700 years old.”

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BAR Bows to Reader’s Demands on Back Issues

Despite an announcement in the March 1977 issue requesting individual subscribers not to order certain back issues of the BAR—so that full sets of BAR would be available for institutional libraries—reader demand for all back issues has continued strong.

Many readers asked to be put on the “waiting list”, although there is no such list; others bluntly told the BAR to re-print.

A number of issued became unavailable even on library orders.

Finally, bowing to reader demand, BAR Editor Hershel Shanks announced that all back issues of BAR would be reprinted. These re-prints are now available to all readers, individual and institutional.

The re-prints are exact copies. The pictures have the same clarity as the originals. The only difference is that the full color inserts of the original have been re-printed in black-and-white.

Volume I which consists of the four issues published in 1975 is available at $9.50 for the set, Volume II, containing the four issues published in 1976, is offered at the same price. Individual issues are available at $2.50 per issue.

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An American congressional delegation visiting Egypt recently was shown in to see the world’s oldest boat, a stunningly sleek and graceful vessel belonging to the Pharaoh Cheops and dating from 2700 B.C. For the occasion, the museum’s ventilation system, entrusted with preserving this priceless treasure, was activated to full capacity—all 16 household fans were turned on, eight on each side of the boat. But they did little more than stir the 100-degree air in the stifling museum baking in the sun beside Cheops’ great pyramid on the Giza plateau. (See illustration) The congressmen saw the boat, a sensational archaeological […]