Archaeorama Podcast Debuts

July 29, 2008

Let's start the week with another ambitious project --  let's call it Archaeorama Podcast. 

We begin with "On The Phone", an interview podcast series in which some of the world's top archaeologists discuss their latest findings and projects. 

Archaeorama's friend Dan Kirsch joined me in this new challenge as I interviewed maritime archaeologist  Cheryl Ward and Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

In this first podcast, we talk about a glorious heap of beams and planks buried beside the Great Pyramid of Khufu 4,500 years ago.  The ancient wood fragments will soon be excavated and reassembled, Ikea style, into a unique pharaonic boat . 

The vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954. Painstakingly reconstructed, this ship now  stands resurrected in a museum built above the place where it was discovered.

Beautifully engineered, the boats reveal a level of skill that rivals the pyramids themselves. And like the pyramids, they raise many questions: What was their purpose? Was the embalmed Khufu taken to his pyramid in one of these ships? And why were there two boats?

But most of all, why did the ancient Egyptians first build and then disassemble and buried two expensive, full-sized royal ships at the base of the Great Pyramid?

Zahi Hawass and Cheryl Ward answer these questions in "On the Phone", Archaeorama's interview podcast series.

So here we go:

PUZZLE OF THE PYRAMID BOATS -- Length: 00:07:03 --  Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, and Dr. Cheryl Ward, associate professor of anthropology at Florida State University, talk to Rossella Lorenzi about two pharaonic boats buried beside the Great Pyramid  of Khufu (Cheops) at Giza.

Written and produced by Rossella Lorenzi. Narrated by Dan Kirsch.

Listen:

 

 

 

Download audio file (just right click on this link)

 

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Comments

[Canterbury Heritage]

Please make audio file downloadable

[Rossella Lorenzi]

You can actually download the audio file after you click on the "subscribe" link. But thanks for the suggestion -- I'm going to add a direct download link.