Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities on Tuesday began the long-awaited transfer and assembly of the second solar boat of King Khufu, a major restoration project at the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum on the Giza Plateau.
At a ceremony, Tourism Minister Sherif Fathi and museum chief executive Ahmed Ghoneim witnessed the laying of the first reconstructed wooden beams, marking the start of the assembly of the ancient vessel.
The partially restored pieces were moved from temporary conservation to the museum’s Khufu Boat Hall, beside the first solar boat, one of the museum's treasured exhibits.
Mr Fathi said about 1,650 fragments of cedar wood were transferred and stabilised as part of “one of the most important restoration projects of the 21st century”.
The remaining components, many of them fragile, will be pieced together in a live restoration process in front of visitors, an interactive exhibition that Mr Fathi said could take up to four years to complete.
Once restored, the boat will stand alongside the first as one of the museum’s centrepieces, said Mr Ghoneim.
The first vessel, reassembled after its discovery in 1954, is suspended on one side of the vast hall, while scaffolding has been built on the opposite side for reconstruction of the second, which is thought to be 4,500 years old.
Scholars believe the two boats, found buried in pits beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, were intended to carry the Old Kingdom pharaoh into the afterlife.
The first boat was fully reassembled in the 1960s; the second could not be excavated until 2021 because of its poor state of preservation.
The Grand Egyptian Museum has drawn large crowds and renewed national pride after opening last month. The $1 billion complex, decades in the making, showcases the entire Tutankhamun collection, colossal royal statues and thousands of other artefacts displayed for the first time.
