An Egyptian-Japanese archaeological team has removed Tuesday a collection of 12 wooden beams from the pit of Khufu’s second solar boat in order to send them to the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) on the Giza Plateau for restoration.

Eissa Zidan, restoration director at the GEM, told Ahram Online that over the next two days the team is scheduling to remove a collection of 30 wooden beams from the pit. Before its transportation to the GEM, these beams would be subjected in situ to preliminary restoration work and documentation via 3D scans.

Zidan explains that presently a collection of 685 wooden beams have been removed from the pit; 645 of the beams have been preliminarily restored in situ, and 389 of them have been transported to the GEM.

The Khufu boats were discovered inside two separate pits in 1954 when Egyptian archaeologists Kamal El-Mallakh and Zaki Nour were carrying out routine cleaning on the southern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The second boat remained sealed in the neighbouring pit until 1987 when it was examined by the American National Geographic Society in association with the Egyptian Office for Historical Monuments.

In 2009, a Japanese scientific and archaeological team from Waseda University headed by Sakuji Yoshimura offered to remove the boat from the pit, restore and reassemble it and put it on show to the public.

The team cleaned the pit of insects and inserted a camera through a hole in the chamber’s limestone ceiling in order to examine the boat’s condition and determine appropriate methods of restoration.

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