Scholars Will Reassemble Ancient Egyptian Boat
(AP Photo/Amr Nabil) :: Japanese technicians Yamashita, right, and Kuro Koshi, control an underground camera which display for the first time Pharaoh Cheops' second solar boat below the Pyramids site in Giza, Egypt, Saturday, July 19, 2008 which tourists will be able to see for the first time without the pit having to be uncovered again. The screen shows the boat which lies 10 metres below the surface. 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 the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.
Updated: 7/21/2008
Archaeologists and scholars will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great pyramid. They will then try to reassemble the craft.
The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces in 1954 from another pit and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.
Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images from inside the second boat pit from a camera inserted through the a hole in the chamber's limestone ceiling.
Professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan's Waseda University says the excavation of around 600 pieces of timber will begin in November.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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