BEIJING, July 22 (Xinhuanet)-- Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat and try to reassemble it, Egyptologists announced Saturday.

    The 4,500-year-old vessel was entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great pyramid. It is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces in 1954 from another pit and painstakingly reconstructed.

    Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

    Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, believes these were symbolic vessels, not funerary boats used to bring the pharaoh Khufu's embalmed remains up the Nile from the ancient capital of Memphis for burial in the Great Pyramid.

    He said solar symbols found inside the second pit offer more evidence that those who disassembled and buried the boats believed Khufu's soul would travel from his tomb in the pyramid through a connecting air shaft to the boat chambers and that he would use the boats to circle the heavens, like the sun god, taking one boat by day and the other by night.

    Experts will begin removing around 600 pieces of timber in November, said professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan's Waseda University, who is helping lead the restoration effort with the antiquities council.

    (Agencies)