Of all the artefacts to descend from the Fourth Dynasty, with the exception of the pyramids themselves, Khufu’s funeral boat is a survival which is little short of miraculous.12 The boat is a wonderful creation, slender, elegant and beautiful. Even today it is a moving, dramatic, and most precious inheritance, unique, having survived over four and a half thousand years in pristine condition when it was found, even with some of its mooring ropes intact.
The lines of Khufu’s boat are exquisite and on the water she must have been a glorious sight. Until the present day no larger boat had sailed the Nile. She has one notable feature which, however tenuously, may link her with more modest sisters in the distant Arabian Gulf: every plank in Khufu’s boat is sewn, not nailed or riveted. The technique of sewing craft is immensely ancient; it was still practiced until recent times in the remoter reaches of Oman’s coast where it may have possibly originated.13 As an aside it may be noted that if the boats shown on the rock carvings in the Wadi
Figure 8.1 Arguably the most remarkable survival of an artefact from the Fourth Dynasty is the solar boat built for Khufu and probably used in his funeral rites. A construction of surpassing beauty the boat has been entirely reassembled, conveying the exceptional quality of form and design which the finest objects from the Pyramid Age invariably display.
Source: photograph author.
Hammamat, for example, represent those on which the carriers of Sumerian or Elamite influences travelled across the Red Sea and were, as is most likely, sewn, it would be perfectly possible for them to be broken down, carried overland, even across the desert, to the western Arabian coast, reassembled and sailed across to Egypt.
An elegance of line and a strict regard for minimal decoration in monumental sculpture and in architecture are amongst the glories of this age. Throughout the Old Kingdom Egyptian art at its best always demonstrated these qualities; it was only much later, particularly in the New Kingdom when alien influences, especially those from northern lands, had penetrated Egypt, that a more florid, extravagant and luxuriant style of decoration became predominant. Even then, in some of the finest New Kingdom sculpture for example, it is possible to observe artists striving to return to the purer style of the earlier periods. In Saite times, much later still, there was a deliberate archaicizing tendency where pastiches of Old Kingdom forms were conscientiously produced, a rare and remarkable example of the artists of a nation paying deliberate homage to their predecessors of nearly two thousand years earlier.
World History
