Mystery of Egyptian dessert boats .( English ) Vision Innovative
Mystery of Egyptian desert Boats.
"We never expected to find such a fleet, especially so far from the Nile," said David O'Connor, the expedition leader and curator of the Egyptian section at The University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, in a telephone interview from Philadelphia.
O'Connor has worked at Abydos since 1965, for the last seven years at a previously excavated but abandoned site called the northern cemetery.
Working with the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, his team from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University aims to learn more about Egypt's earliest pharaohs. The period ended in 2,700 B.C.
“Originally, the building must have had hundreds and hundreds of boat drawings,” Wegner says. “They are phenomenal images, with a lot of detail showing the structure of the boats, the form of the hulls, masted and unmasted boats, rowers, oars.”
Part of the researchers’ fascination with the discovery comes from its location. The boat was found about a half-mile from the edge of the Nile River flood plain, and about nine miles from the river itself, meaning despite traveling along some smaller canals, the boat also moved across land to reach its final destination.
Senwosret III constructed multiple tomb sites before his death, leading to the possibility that he was buried either in a pyramid he built in northern Egypt or in his Abydos tomb. Uncovering a royal boat burial like the one Wegner’s team found suggests the tomb was the king’s resting place.
From earliest times, Abydos was known for monuments honoring Osiris, ancient Egypt's god of resurrection.
The boats, O'Connor said, were found eight miles from the Nile, each encased in a mud-brick coffin and gingerly placed inside a pit into which ancient priests inserted pottery offerings. The pit was covered with mud bricks and plaster.
The buried boats probably never sailed the Nile but were built to serve as magical vehicles to transport dead pharaohs through the sun's rays by day, the starry skies by night.
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