The Khufu solar boat, discovered in May 1954 by Kamal el-Mallakh on the south side of the Great Pyramid, has been the subject of three pavilions in seventy years. A boat-archaeologist's biography of the first boat, the second boat, and the new pavilion at the GEM.
Each chapter handles one episode in the life of the boat: the 1954 discovery, the long reconstruction of 1958-1968, the old pavilion at Giza, the 2021 night move, the new GEM pavilion, and the second boat still being reassembled.
On the twenty-sixth of May 1954, Kamal el-Mallakh, working on the south side of the Great Pyramid as part of the inspectorate's plateau-clearance programme, uncovered the limestone-sealed pit that contained the dismantled cedar-wood timbers of what is now known as the first Khufu boat. The discovery is the start of the modern history of Old Kingdom boat-archaeology.
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Between 1958 and 1968 Ahmed Youssef Moustafa, the chief restorer of the Antiquities Service, reconstructed the boat from its 1,224 disassembled cedar-wood timbers. The reconstruction took ten years and remains, as a piece of object-reconstruction work, one of the most accomplished interventions in the discipline.
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The first Khufu boat was displayed, from 1982, in a purpose-built pavilion on the south side of the Great Pyramid, directly above the pit in which it had been found. The pavilion was a controversial piece of architecture from the day it opened — it sat, literally, on top of an archaeological site — but it served the boat for thirty-nine years.
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On the night of the sixth to seventh of August 2021, the first Khufu boat was moved from the old pavilion at the south side of the Great Pyramid to a new pavilion at the GEM. The move — by a custom-built remote-controlled vehicle, at a maximum speed of one kilometre per hour, over ten hours — is the single most-watched object-move in Egyptian archaeology.
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A second cedar-wood boat, in a sealed pit immediately east of the first, was identified by Japanese radar survey in 1987 and excavated in stages from 2011 by a joint Egyptian-Waseda University team. The second boat is still being reassembled at the GEM-CC and is expected to be installed in the new pavilion in the late 2020s.
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Boat-archaeologist with the Khufu reconstruction team, third generation on the project. Father and grandfather both worked on the original 1958-1968 reconstruction under Ahmed Youssef Moustafa. Author of the standard 2019 monograph on the second boat. More on the project →