Late in the 26th century BCE, while work on the Great Pyramid neared completion, Khufu’s craftsmen dismantled a cedar barque forty-three metres long, stacked its 1 224 numbered timbers in a stone pit beside the pyramid and sealed the lid with mortar for the king’s eternal voyage with the sun god Ra. The planks lay undisturbed for almost forty-five centuries.In 1954 the architect Kamal el-Mallakh eased a trial block from the pit’s south wall and smelled ancient cedar; over weeks his team removed the limestone roofing and exposed the boat pieces resting as methodically as a carpenter’s kit. Ahmed Youssef Moustafa then spent a decade studying tomb reliefs and visiting Nile boatyards before re-threading the shell-first hull with halfa-grass lashings exactly as the Old Kingdom shipwrights had done.By 1982 the resurrected vessel—long, low and without mast or oar-looms—stood in a glass-walled museum at Giza, its stitched timbers and dovetail tenons showing why ancient texts called such craft “divine barges.” Visitors walked a suspended ramp round Khufu’s timeless craft until August 2021, when engineers slid the boat, cradle and all, onto a remote-controlled transporter and carried it eight kilometres to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where it now anchors the story of the pyramid builders alongside the statues of Rahotep, Nofret and Menkaure’s triads.From a royal funerary tool to a modern engineering feat, the Khufu ship traces an unbroken arc of Egyptian ingenuity across fifty centuries.

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Khufu Ship