Thanks for checking out Episode 006 of the Maritime History Podcast: Khufu's Ship; or, Sailing Into the Afterlife. From the funeral procession of pharaoh Khufu, to the 1954 discovery of what is known as the Khufu ship, to the theories about its purpose, construction, and the afterlife, this episode is jam-packed with maritime history and archaeology from the ancient past of Egypt.

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Episode Transcript

It may seem a little strange, but today we’re going to start out with the story of a pyramid and the secret that it held for over 4,000 years. As you might suspect, that pyramid is none other than the Great Pyramid at Giza, a monumental structure built during the reign of the fourth dynasty pharaoh Khufu. Before we can get to the story of that pyramid though, let’s see how Egypt got to the point of being able to build such an amazing structure.

At the end of our last episode we had seen Egypt’s development up through the beginning of the first dynasty. Accuracy at this early period is difficult, but its safe to say that Egyptian pharaohs didn’t begin their pyramid-building ventures until the beginning of the third dynasty when Djoser built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first successful monumental structure to be built using finished stone. Although we can tell that the Step Pyramid began as a traditional rectangular mastaba, the builder Imhotep continued by adding more mastaba shaped steps, gradually deceasing in size as they rose higher to give the structure the pyramidal shape that is instantly recognizable today. Interestingly, Djoser’s royal vizier Imhotep was one of the first recorded architects of ancient times and among the dozens of titles held by Imhotep was that of overseer of the pharaoh’s shipyard. 

After completing that first true pyramid, the Egyptians continued to hone their building skills. By the end of the third dynasty, the pharaoh had become solidified as the sole focus of Egyptian life. Building the earliest pyramids had also allowed the pharaoh to establish what was essentially a command control societal structure. After Imhotep, the vizier and various other administrative heads became commonplace and the pharaoh used them in conjunction with the religious establishment to direct every facet of Egyptian reality. This command structure was feasible thanks to the early system of national taxation that was implemented in Egypt, in which the pharaoh played a ceremonial part as we saw with the ‘Following of Horus’ in our last episode. That event was recorded on the Palermo Stone, a fragment of a stele known as the Royal Annals of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. The Palermo Stone records the significant events of pharaohs in the first through fifth dynasties, so it can serve as a useful reference point for our discussion of early Egypt. In that timespan, the Palermo Stone records multiple pharaohs  each going on multiple tours to conduct their census and tax the people. What would cause the people to submit to the pharaoh so easily? And what eventually led to the point where an entire city would spend the lifetime of a pharaoh preparing his monumental grave for him?

Both of these phenomenon can be explained by the growth of pharaoh’s place in the religious trappings of Egyptian society. Obviously, the pharaoh had no qualms about participating in an enterprise that elevated his status from that of a leader to that of a god amongst men, and the pharaoh actually played a large part in promoting the growth of his religious role in Egypt. The start of the ‘pharaoh-as-god’ idea can be traced back to the unification of Egypt when the second pharaoh chose to assume a title that combined the names of Nekhbet and Wadjet, the vulture and cobra goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, respectively. This move symbolized his ambition to solidify his place as the lone ruler of a unified Egypt, with the goddesses of both halves his protectors. Additionally though, this early combination of the pharaoh’s image with that of the gods ultimately led to the situation outlined above: the people were glad to serve him because he was the ‘go-between’ to the gods that kept the country unified and prosperous. The pharaoh was the key to upholding Ma’at, the Egyptian perception of truth, justice, or order in the cosmos and in Egyptian society.

Enough of the development of Egyptian society, although again it’s an amazingly intriguing topic. I think we’ve sufficiently laid the groundwork to understand the accomplishment that the fourth dynasty pyramids really were, so let’s now meet the fourth dynasty pharaohs and discuss their ship-building ventures. The first pharaoh of the fourth dynasty was Sneferu, and the title he adopted as pharaoh both indicates the scope of his ambition and succinctly proves our discussion about the pharaoh functioning as a god and focal in Egypt. Sneferu adopted the title netjer nefer, which literally meant ‘the perfect god.’ Quite the claim. Anyhow, as I said, Sneferu set out on a pyramid building campaign that had to that point been unthought of in Egypt, not only in terms of the number of pyramids but also in terms of their size. Sneferu is remembered as having been responsible for the Bent Pyramid at Dashur, the Red Pyramid, and the Meidum Pyramid. A large part of his ability to build these pyramids was because of his relationship with other nations, and when I say ‘relationship’ I mean that other nations in this equation didn’t have much of a choice, Sneferu brought his military might to bear. 

The Palermo Stone describes Sneferu as being responsible for “The building of Tuataua ships of mer wood of a hundred capacity, and 60 royal boats of sixteen capacity.” The stone also tells that he was the pharaoh who oversaw the “hacking up the land of the Nubians and the bringing in of seven thousand prisoners, men and women, and twenty thousand cattle, sheep, and goats…” Most important for our purposes, the Palermo Stone also tells how Sneferu saw “the bringing of forty ships of cedar wood” sometimes interpreted as “ships laden with cedar wood.” Either way, this description is seen by many historians as a reference to the land of Lebanon, or Byblos as it was called in ancient times. Old Kingdom Egypt had some ties with Byblos, and I hope to take an episode or two in the future to look exclusively at the civilization there which we now know as the Phoenicians, a civilization that played a larger role in the later period of ancient history and into the period of classical antiquity. The last thing I’ll mention in connection with Sneferu is the belief that he was responsible for the first boat in history that was christened with a name, a 100-cubit cedar wood boat that is, in some interpretations of the Palermo Stone, named “The Praise of the Two Lands,” another nod to the pharaoh as the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt, the ‘two lands’ being referenced.

So as we’ve seen, Sneferu got the ball rolling for the fourth dynasty “Golden Age of the Pyramids,” but it was his son Khufu who built the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the seven wonders of the world and the item of focus in this episode. Before we get into the specifics, I’d like to try a little imagination experiment to paint the visual picture of what Giza would have been like at the time of Khufu’s death. During his life he oversaw the building of the Great Pyramid along with the entire pyramid necropolis at Giza, and what we tend to picture in our minds today when we think of the pyramid there is a far cry from what an Egyptian would have seen on the day that Khufu’s body began its journey to burial in Giza over 4,000 years ago.

Imagine with me if you will that we are on board a cedar-wood ship docked in the ancient capital city Memphis. The ship is about 140 feet long and has a high vertical point to the prow and a stylized arching stern. While there are priests and nobles manning the oars, the oars aren’t actually in use, as our ship is being towed down-river by a smaller vessel. The priests are symbolic, as is the ship itself, because the main occupant is the pharaoh Khufu. His body occupies the main cabin, an enclosure of cedar wood that would completely shield the pharaoh’s body from the outside world. As our ship is towed down the Nile toward Khufu’s pyramid necropolis at Giza, the pyramids on the plateau grow bigger. Recently completed, their white limestone casing stones glisten in the glaring sunlight. We reach Giza and make for a canal shooting off from the main body of the Nile. Were the the river at its height during the flood season, we could make directly for the Valley Temple, but since the Nile is in its low season a canal is connected to the Temple gateway into the Giza necropolis. We dock at the Valley Temple and the ritual which has already begun moves into the next phase: the preparation of the pharaoh’s mummy. This process will take 70 days, after which a funeral procession will carry the mummy of Khufu up the causeway that connects the Valley Temple to the Mortuary Temple at the foot of the Great Pyramid. During those intervening 70 days, however, the ships on which we journeyed to Giza will be systematically disassembled and carried up the same causeway for a burial of their own. 

Now if we’d been able to tell Khufu that his grave and mummy would be looted not long after they’d been sealed, but that his funeral ships would remain hidden for millennia, I think he may have changed his burial plans. Unfortunately for him, no advice from the future was shared. His pyramid though has been a fascinating draw for explorers and adventurers since the earliest times. A ninth century Muslim ruler famously oversaw tunneling that hacked into the pyramid, a dig that is cited as the first recorded time that explorers reached the King’s Chamber, but it’s also clear that even in the ninth century they weren’t the first to have made it inside the pyramid. Khufu’s grave had already been robbed and we actually haven’t found Khufu’s mummy to this day. Fast-forward a thousand years from that dig to the famous (and probably apocryphal) stories of Napoleon’s night in the pyramid and we still see the aura of mystery that surrounds the Giza necropolis. 

Our final jump forward through time brings us to 1954, a year when the Egyptian Antiquities Service had drawn up plans to clear away much of the rubble accumulated around the Great Pyramid. Over the decades, archaeologists had been excavating the numerous tombs that were scattered around the pyramid necropolis, and the best place to dump the debris was at the foot of the pyramid. Well, as you can imagine, sand began to pile on top of the debris and over time sand dunes began to build up against the lower reaches of the pyramid itself. This was the problem that the Antiquities Service set out to correct. Work was slow, as they couldn’t risk bulldozing their way through the rubble and inadvertently destroying whatever may have been overlooked by earlier explorers. Despite their painstaking clearing process, by 1954 they had reached the final stages of the project and had found nothing of interest whatsoever. Then, in the spring of 1954 they got down to the limestone bedrock of the plateau and began to discover limestone slabs which, while not a major find, were at least something. The slabs were part of a wall that once encircled the entire pyramid, sealing it off from outside entrance except via the Morturary Temple where Khufu had been prepared for burial. The existence of the wall was already known before 1954, and the discovery merely confirmed the assumption that the wall had originally extended around the pyramid’s entirety. 

To fully confess, I left out one crucial fact and it’s a fact that should jump out in the mind of anyone familiar with the ancient Egyptian architects’ penchant for symmetry and exactness. While the three previously known sides of the wall had all extended along the pyramid’s base at the exact distance of 23.6 meters from the pyramid itself, this fourth wall was built 5 meters closer to the base, a fact that was perplexing to everyone except the leader of the project, a young archaeologist/architect by the name of Kamal el-Mallakh. His previous experience at other pyramid sights led him to the conclusion that this wall had been built closer to the pyramid because it was intended to conceal something that lay beneath the plateau’s surface. As Mallakh tells it, he had long been fascinated with the boat-pits connected to other fourth dynasty pyramids: five empty boat pits were found carved into the bedrock outside the Morturary Temple to Chephren’s pyramid, also located on the Giza plateau. Boat pits were also present at other fourth dynasty pyramid sites, not to mention the three empty boat-pits that had already been discovered around the base of Khufu’s Great Pyramid.

Mallakh’s workers continued uncovering the unique wall that ran along the Great Pyramid’s southern base, and as they got down to the bedrock they made a shocking discovery. The wall was built atop a layer of compressed rubble and mud that made up a plaster-like surface. Even more shocking was Mallakh’s discovery that under the plaster surface was a mixture of cement-like mortar that was used as a binding agent by the Old Kingdom Egyptians. The mortar discovery beckoned to be explored further, mostly because it was laid down in a thin line that ran perpendicular to the pyramid and to the enclosure wall, beginning on one side of the wall and running underneath it to emerge on the outside. This layout indicated one thing to Mallakh: something lie buried underneath the wall that required mortar to keep it cemented together. Within the same day of his discovery, Mallakh’s workmen had uncovered two huge limestone blocks that ran perpendicular to the wall. One-by-one they uncovered more until they’d eventually unearthed two gigantic sets of limestone blocks laid out in a row and divided into two groups: forty stones in the western group and forty-one stones in the group to the east. The two groups, when viewed from above, resembled the keys of a dilapidated piano, laid out in a row and divided in the center. The final piece of the puzzle that prodded Mallakh into obsession with the find was a cartouche carved into one of the blocks, a cartouche bearing the royal name of Djedefre, Khufu’s son and the third in line of the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs.

Despite his personal feelings that the find was of paramount importance, Mallakh struggled to gain the Service’s consent to continue digging. Initially they dismissed the find as only being part of the pyramid’s foundation, unworthy of further examination. Mallakh wasn’t one to take no for an answer, and I’m glad he wasn’t. After bugging the Service repeatedly, they finally granted him grudging permission to drill one hole into the eastern group of stones, so on 26 May 1954 that’s just what Mallakh did. The going was slow. The dig proceeded at a responsibly cautious pace, chinking away bits of the massive stone because they feared splitting it and causing it to crash down on whatever precious treasure or lack thereof lay concealed beneath. After digging down two meters below the surface they reached a rock ledge. We now know that this ledge ran the length of each side of the huge pit and functioned as a shelf for the massive covering stones to rest on. Upon reaching this ledge, Mallakh knew they were close to breaking through and he took over the digging himself, slowly chiseling away the last few inches of rock to uncover a pitch black expanse below. Years later, recalling the day he broke through into the historic pit, Mallakh described the moment this way:

“I closed my eyes. And then with my eyes closed, I smelt incense, a very holy, holy, holy smell. I smelt time . . . I smelt centuries . . . I smelt history. And then I was sure that the boat was there.”

His premonition was spot on, for indeed, a boat was there. And not just any boat, but a boat that’s among the oldest and is inarguably the largest and best preserved example of a ship from ancient history. Before we get there, though, it’s worth mentioning that Mallakh’s piercing of the boat pit set off two events. First, it set of a firestorm of national, even international interest; however, it also set the clock ticking on the preservation process, since ancient wood couldn’t last long after being exposed to the deteriorating elements. Only days after Mallakh bored the first hole into the pit, a photographer for Life magazine stuck a camera down through the hole and took one of the first photographs of what lay buried on the outskirts of Khufu’s pyramid.

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In the foreground of the photo one of the ship’s pointed oars lays atop the neatly stacked planks. In the background, at the far end of the pit the bowsprit of the ship juts out above the pile of pieces which have dust and debris strewn across the reed mats that cover them. It was a historic photograph, and one which really didn’t indicate the magnificent ship that would emerge from the combined pieces that lay buried for so long. The task of putting those pieces together fell to the Antiquities Service’s chief restorer, a man named Ahmed Youssef Moustafa. But Hag Ahmed, as he is called, was forced to wait until the pieces could be removed from the pit, and the process of removing them in a safe manner took several months. A giant shed was erected around the pit and cranes were used to remove each of the limestone covering slabs. As each was removed, however, the team replaced a similar sized wooden block wrapped in water-proof cloth over the opening, so as to keep the moisture in the pit and prevent the wood from warping. Six months after the discovery, the last of the stone blocks was removed, but it would be another full year before Hag Ahmed could begin removing the ship’s pieces and preparing them in the restoration shed that had been constructed nearby.

By late June 1955, he was able to begin the painstaking process of removing each piece, one-by-one. From the beginning, Hag Ahmed stuck to his process of cataloguing each piece as it was removed. He took photographs of each layer as it was removed, making a composite photo of the layer so he knew exactly were each and every piece had been laid by the men who buried it, and as the removal process moved along, Hag Ahmed began to notice the logical sequence with which the pieces were arranged. Appropriate preservation measures were taken to ensure that nothing was lost that could be saved, and after two years of work the pit sat empty. In all, the pit had yielded 1,224 individual pieces, from the largest of the planks and the bowsprit down to the small decorative details that graced the cabin structure. With the pieces laid out in his workshop, Hag Ahmed set about the process of reassembling the ship that was originally intended to be reassembled in the afterlife, if at all. It’s important to appreciate the fact that before the discovery of the Khufu ship, almost nothing was known about the internal structure of Egyptian boats and ships. Herodotus makes passing mention of the fact that Egyptian ships didn’t have internal ribbing, but some historians dismissed that as another of Herodotus’ instances of playing loose with the facts. What it came down to for Hag Ahmed then, was that he had to assemble a complete Egyptian ship with the aid of only exterior depictions from other ancient Egyptian sites, and the manner in which the pieces themselves had been arranged in their burial. 

As he began the reassembly process, Hag Ahmed saw repeated markings on many of the individual pieces. Four markings kept reappearing, and it’s now thought that these denoted the relative quadrants to which the specific piece belonged. On a smaller scale, most of the pieces bear one of many symbols that were probably affixed as directions for where the piece fit into the ship, though the sign markings haven’t been studied in any detail. The Egyptian ‘instruction markings’ give us a good segue to talk about the major difference between the Khufu ship’s construction technique and that of most ships that are common in the world today. The modern method is to start from the inside of the ship where a keel used as the base for a skeleton of ribbing supports to which planking is then attached. The Khufu ship, like many ships of the old world was built in the opposite manner, starting from the outside and working in to a strengthening framework without ribbing support structures. This method is often referred to as the ‘shell-first’ technique, or the ‘edge-joining’ technique, both names that are quite literal. The builders would start constructing the hull or the shell by joining unevenly shaped planks together at their long edge, working toward the hull shape that’s typical of a boat. The Khufu ship in particular has a flat bottom, rather than a single keel. The Khufu ship’s edge-joined planks are also prime examples of the ancient technique of using a mortise and tenon to lock the planks together. In this case, the long edges of the planks had slots cut into them, and the planks were ‘locked’ together by inserting a tenon, which was a wooden slat, that sat in both slots equally and kept the planks from slipping. If you’ve ever put together furniture from IKEA then you definitely know what I’m talking about, but if that description didn’t do the trick then be sure to check out some of the diagrams that I’ll post on the website page for this episode.

Anyhow, all the planks were secured by these mortise and tenon joints, and reed matter was placed between the edges of the planks to serve as caulking. Since reeds would expand when wet, then they worked perfectly as a tight water barrier once the ship was in the river. On the interior side of the hull a wooden support batten, basically a wooden rod that was flat on one side, was run along the inside seam of each plank edge. Each plank then had V-shaped hole cut in the interior edge at regular intervals. The hole didn’t pierce completely through, and it allowed the builders to further strengthen the plank joining because they could feed rope through the holes that ran perpendicular to each plank edge and they could tightly secure the wooden support battens along the seams. Again, this is a bit hard to describe, so pictures really are worth a thousand words! 

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The design of the Khufu ship was quite ingenious in practice, because once the boat was placed in the water, the wood would swell up and the lashings along the inside structure would shrink, tightening the bindings even further and keeping the ship watertight for a pleasure cruise on the Nile. Well, probably no pleasure cruising for Khufu since this ship was his funeral barge, but you get the picture. The construction method of this ship, and likely all early Egyptian ships, was also extremely practical, at least in one sense. The edge-joining methods they used required nothing to be permanently fastened, so a ship could easily be taken apart, carried across dry land in a train of pieces, and then reassembled to be put back into the next body of water. Some historians suspect that this method was used by the Egyptians who ventured out into the Red Sea, and in an upcoming episode we’ll take a look at the plausibility and the archaeological evidence that’s been found to date to support this theory.

Back to Khufu for now though. The sheer size and complexity of this ship is difficult to describe, and I’m probably not doing it justice, so if you want to read more about the ship, check out this fabulous book detailing the whole story of the ship’s discovery, reconstruction, and the theories behind its origin. The book is available on the Boston Museum of Fine Arts website in a fabulous library of Giza materials that they have made freely available to the public. The last big thing I’ll mention before we get into the theories proposed for why the ship was built is an idea that I touched on last episode. It’s the idea that even after the Egyptians began building wooden ships, they still purposefully sought to evoke the style and shape of their first water vessels, the papyrus reed boat. The Khufu ship is a perfect example of this, as the curving ends are beautifully like the papyrus shape. We see this homage to papyrus not only in the ship’s silhouette but also in the small decorative details of a papyrus bud carved into the ship’s cabin columns, or in the imitation rope bindings of a papyrus reed raft that we see on the ship’s prow. This ship then was constructed with an eye toward tradition, and few traditions are as closely tied with ancient Egypt as are its religious traditions.

We must ask the question then, what religious mindset drove them to build such a majestic ship? And why would they use it only once and then bury it? That is the indication given to us by the evidence, by the way. Rope markings on certain parts of the wooden pieces indicate that it was probably submerged in water for a short period of time, allowing the wood to swell and the ropes to leave their mark. The reason for the Khufu ship’s construction, and its religious significance are the subjects of much debate, despite my intimations earlier that it was the one-time funeral barge for Khufu. I personally think that this theory lines up well with our other understandings of how ancient Egyptians depicted the afterlife, so let’s take a look at those depictions, and you can decide for yourself what you think. Our earliest written evidence of the Egyptian idea of the afterlife comes from what are known as the ‘Pyramid Texts.’ These texts were found inscribed on the inside of Old Kingdom tombs and sarcophagi dated to the fifth and sixth dynasties. Their detail and their extensive use in royal and noble tombs seem to lead to the conclusion that these text must have been in existence for at least some period of time before they were written down, much as oral traditions have always led to a written tradition. Thus, we can make a safe assumption that most, if not all, of these religious concepts were in the Egyptian mindset at the time that our pharaoh Khufu was buried in Giza. How do the Pyramid Texts line up with Khufu’s ship though? Let’s take a look.

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We’ve already seen in our look at Egypt how the Nile and its cycle of annual inundation shaped the terminology of Egyptian religious expression, and the Pyramid Texts give us a first glimpse at how the water factored in. As a whole, the Pyramid Texts were inscribed on the inside of a pharaohs tomb to serve as directions for his dangerous journey into the afterlife. In the early Egyptian depiction, heaven was separated from the earth by an expanse of water. Upon death, the pharaohs path to heaven lay across the water and the man to get him there was the ferryman in charge of the transportation. Those of you familiar with Greek mythology will no doubt note the similarity to Charon, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron and into the underworld. In the Pyramid Texts, Utterance 263 references “the two reed-floats of heaven” that “are placed for Rē‘, that he may ferry over therewith to the horizon.” Utterances 300 through 311 describe the ferryman and instruct the pharaoh that in order to gain passage on the ferry he needs to know the names of the ferryman and the parts of his boat.

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Though later iterations of the Egyptian afterlife evolved from this earliest written depiction, the theme of water and journeying through the afterlife via boat remain consistent. For instance, the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom move toward a subterranean conception of the afterlife, ruled by Osiris and fraught with peril. This underworld was called Duat and was filled with lakes and rivers to be navigated by boat. With these two places, heaven and the underworld, we are brought finally to the Egyptian story of the sun god and his perpetual journey from light to dark, perhaps the underlying commonality in the different Egyptian views of the afterlife. The sun god, eventually called Ra, was said to travel in a ‘Boat of Millions,’ so called because it needed to contain all the gods and all the souls of the blessed dead. In some later books depicting the underworld, Ra travels in two boats. As he traveled across the daytime sky, lighting the Egyptian world with his brilliance, the Mandjet was his ship; but when he descended below the horizon into the underworld, the Mesektet carried him through Duat to emerge again onto the morning horizon. This idea that the soul of the pharaoh could join with Ra, that the pharaoh might even be Ra himself according to some, this idea is what some have said is the best explanation for the two boats found next to Khufu’s pyramid. Two boats, you ask? Well, yes, two boats. 

Remember earlier in the episode when I mentioned the discovery of two sets of stone slabs in 1954? The eastern pit yielded the Khufu ship that we’ve just briefly glimpsed, but the western pit was ignored in the intense focus on the Khufu ship’s discovery. It wasn’t until 1987 that an electromagnetic radar survey revealed the existence of a second boat in the western pit. In that same year archaeologists drilled into the pit to to insert a tiny camera and take photos of the wooden planks laid out in an organized fashion. It wasn’t until just recently though, 2008, that a team was able to raise over $10 million to dedicate to the restoration project. In 2011 workers finally began removing the covering stones, and even then it took another two years before the boat began to be removed. Only a few years ago, in June of 2013, removal began the roughly 600 pieces that scans revealed. So yes, the second ship is smaller than the first, and experts expect the restoration process to take at least another four years. However, the discovery of this second ship has bolstered those who feel that the Khufu ship was intended to carry Khufu into the afterlife. After all, two ships were needed, one for the day and one for the night, and if anyone would know how to piece a ship back together–instructions included–it would be the sun-god and his pharaoh, wouldn’t it?

I think that this is a great place to put a bookmark in things for now. Next time we’ll continue our look at Old Kingdom Egypt to see just how far their maritime reach extended, far enough that according the Egyptian records that it reached to a mythical land we’ll try to pinpoint on a map. We’ll also look at some technological innovations of maritime technology and the remnants of an ancient harbor on the Red Sea, all that and more next time.

Sources

• Brand, Meredith, Salvaging Khufu’s Second Solar Boat, Nature Middle East (21 June 2017).
• Cecco, Leyland, Resurrecting the Pharaoh's Solar Boat, Popular Archaeology (3 Feb. 2014). 
• Dash, Mike, Inside the Great Pyramid, Smithsonian.com (1 Sept. 2011).
• Duncan, David, Pharaoh's Bark Sails Out of the Past, LIFE Magazine, Vol. 36, No. 24 (14 June 1954), pp. 20–23.
• Herodotus, The Histories.
• Jenkins, Nancy, The Boat Beneath the Pyramid (1980).
• McGrail, Seán, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (2009).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Palermo Stone, trans. Heinrich Schäfer. [link]
• Pinch, Geraldine, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (2002).
• Pyramid Texts, trans. Samuel A.B. Mercer.
• Scalf, Foy, Rereading the 7th Count of Snefru in the Palermo Stone, Oriental Institute, Chicago (2009).
• Wachsmann, Shelley, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant (2009).
• Wilkinson, Toby, Early Dynastic Egypt (2002).
• Wilkinson, Toby, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010).