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CAIRO, Egypt —

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Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian woody boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza’s Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday.

The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another indentation in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the faro who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images of the inside of the stand by boat dent from a camera inserted through the a hole in the hall’s limestone ceiling. The video image, transmitted onto a small TV monitor at the site, showed layers of crisscrossing beams and planks on the floor of the abstruse pit.

“You can smell the by,” said Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Experts will begin removing around 600 pieces of stock in November, uttered professor Sakuji Yoshimura of Japan’s Waseda University, who is helping lead the restoration straining with the antiquities congress.

The discovery of the boat pits more than 50 years ago by workmen clearing a large mound of wind-blown debris from the south side of the Great Pyramid is considered common of the most numerous significant finds attached the plateau. They are the oldest vessels to have survived from antiquity.

The reconstructed ship is steady display in a museum built over the pit where it was discovered. It is a narrow canal measuring 142 feet through a rectangular deckhouse and long, interlocking oars that soar overhead.

The cedar timbers of its curved hull are lashed together by hemp rope in a technique used until recent times by traditional shipbuilders along the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

The unexcavated boat, made from Lebanese cedar and Egyptian acacia trees, is design to be of similar design, end smaller and less well preserved.

John Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, said new research into the second boat could fill in some blanks about the significance of the vessels and help fix upon whether they forever actually plied Nile River waterways or were of innocently spiritual import.

“In Egypt, almost everything absolute had its correlate meaning or significance in the spiritual world. But there’s a lot of debate for the reason that to whether these vessels ever were used or not,” Darnell said.

Those who argue the vessels may obtain touched water point to be ropy marks on the wood that could have been caused by the rope suitable wet and then shrinking similar to it dried.

But Hawass 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, the oldest and largest of Giza’s pyramids.

He said solar symbols found inside the second pit offer more evidence that those who disassembled and buried the boats believed Khufu’s man would travel from his sepulchre in the pyramid through a connecting air shaft to the boat lodgings 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.