Google Celebrates The Discovery of The World’s Oldest, Largest Ship in Egypt
On Sunday 26th of May, Google celebrated the discovery of the Khufu ship in 1954 with a Google doodle. This ship is considered the world’s oldest and largest ship.
Khufu ship was discovered in the vessel inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. This discovery was made 65 years ago by Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh after he mined under a stone wall on the south wing of the Great Pyramid.
Mallakh then opened a group of stone blocks covering a hole in the ground, which held series of carefully piled cedar wood planks, ropes and other parts required to reconstruct the ship.
History says that Khufu was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. He was said to have ruled more than 2,500 years before the birth of Jesus.
The ship is also known as a ‘solar barge’ because it is believed that it was placed inside Khufu’s burial tomb to use it to sail across the heavens after death with the sun god Ra.
The huge, well-designed ship is said to be 4,600 years old. It’s very well built as it could still sail if launched back into the Nile today.
However, it was a mystery how ancient Egyptian had made their vessels, forcing restoration scientists to learn some basics about shipbuilding.
Khufu
Decades later, restoration experts successfully put together the 1,224 separate pieces into the 44-meter long boat.
The restoration process was supervised by Haj Ahmed Youssef; a restorer from the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, who researched ancient Egyptian boat-making only to restore the Khufu boat. He had visited the Nile shipyards before beginning the restoration process.
It’s displayed inside the specially-built Giza Solar Boat Museum, just outside the pyramid. Another dissembled ship was also found inside the pyramid and reconstructed in 2011.
Khufu was called ‘Cheops’ in Greek word. Besides ordering to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, there is no adequate information about this era.
