About — The Khufu Boat

My family on the boat

I am the third generation of my family on the Khufu boat project. My grandfather, Hussein el-Halawany, was one of the senior carpenters on Ahmed Youssef Moustafa's reconstruction team in the 1958-1968 programme. My father, Ibrahim el-Halawany, was a junior restorer on the same team and later coordinated the maintenance of the boat in the old pavilion from 1982. I joined the second-boat project in 2011, fresh out of my master's, and have been on the boat in one capacity or another ever since.

My training

I read for my first degree in archaeology at Cairo University, took my master's at the AUC in 2010 on Old Kingdom boat technology, and my doctorate at Waseda University in Tokyo in 2018 (the doctoral thesis is the published standard 2019 monograph on the second boat). The Waseda connection runs through my father's working relationship with the Japanese team that has, since 1987, been central to the second-boat project.

Why this biography

The Khufu boat has, for seventy years, attracted enormous amounts of writing — Mohammed Hassan's foundational 1960 paper, the long series of Japanese reports on the second-boat project, Cheryl Ward's Old Kingdom boat studies. What has been less written is the simple narrative of the object itself across its long modern life — the pavilions, the moves, the public presence. The biography is an attempt at that simple narrative.

On the night of 6-7 August 2021

I was on the move team that night. We started at six in the evening on the sixth and arrived at the new pavilion at four in the morning on the seventh. I have never, in fifteen years on the project, been more nervous than I was that night. The chapter on the move is the chapter I rewrote most often.

Sources

The biography is written from the published boat literature, from the Antiquities Service archives on the 1982 pavilion and the 2021 move, from my family's own working papers (which I have permission to use), and from my notes from fifteen years on the project. Where I have used a specific source I have indicated it.

What this is not

It is not a technical study. The technical literature on the boat — its construction, its rigging, its possible function — is enormous and is, properly, written in the journals. The biography is for the general reader who wants to understand the object's life as an object, across the seventy years from el-Mallakh's discovery to the new pavilion.

I have never, in fifteen years on the project, been more nervous than I was that night. The chapter on the move is the chapter I rewrote most often.