In Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty, Khufu ruled in the 25th century BCE and raised the Great Pyramid at Giza—stone on a scale no one had ever seen. But just south of that pyramid, archaeologists uncovered something softer and stranger in 1954: two sealed pits holding dismantled royal ships. One of them was painstakingly rebuilt and displayed for decades. The other—Khufu’s “second solar boat”—remained a locked time capsule for generations. These boats were not toy models. They were full-size cedar vessels