5,000 year-old boat dating back to Mahabharata era unearthed near Egyptian Pharaoh’s grave

The ancient Egyptian pyramids of Giza have fascinated humankind since centuries by their known and unknown mysteries. Even till date, researchers continue to toil hard to recover lost knowledge, treasures, and graves of the rulers who once walked on Egyptian soil. To the fruition of their efforts, those researchers, backed by their zest and modern technology, have retrieved a lot of buried things.

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However, as if all that was not enough, recently, a team of scientists and archaeologists found a huge Egyptian wooden boat buried in a pit next to the Great Pyramid at Giza.

According to historians, the ancient vessel was purposely buried next to the Pharaoh Khufu’s burial place to transport the Pharaoh’s spirit to the heavens. This comes from the ancient Egyptian belief in life after death; they believed that in the after-life the boats will be required to transport the Pharaoh’s soul up to the heavens.
So, for now, in order to recover the boat buried deep underground, a team of scientists are being led by a restoration team from Waseda University in Japan, who has devised cutting-edge techniques to save the boat.

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Reportedly, the boats have been carefully dismantled into more than 1,000 pieces before being dug up along with guidelines on how to join them.


Now, doing so is not as easy as it may sound. It involves hard labour and can take a week to recover a single plank because the planks are very fragile, and removing them can cause further damage. Therefore, to accomplish their objective, a temperature controlled lab was erected to restore the pieces on site next to the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu.

The team recovers, restores, and cleans the wood pieces carefully in order to put the whole picture together.