The boat, which is the second such vessel to be found on the
site, was believed to have been built for King Khufu who ruled
Egypt during the fourth dynasty more than 4,500 years ago.
First discovered in the 1980s, experts say they have so far
uncovered 700 pieces of the boat from the site and now believe
that they have unearthed most of its pieces.
"We are celebrating the extraction of the largest plank of
wood," said the project's main supervisor Mamdouh Taha, adding
it measures 26 meters (85 feet) long.
Archaeologists and conservation experts extracted the piece from
a pit nearly three-meters underground and moved it to a
conservation center located next to the discovery site.
Egyptian and Japanese archaeologists are working on the project
with an aim to restore all the boat's pieces and display them in
the Grand Egyptian Museum when it opens next year.
Egypt hopes ongoing archaeological discoveries can boost its
ailing tourism industry, a critical source of hard currency
which has suffered in the aftermath of mass protests that
toppled former president Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
The number of tourists visiting Egypt stood at 9.3 million in
2015, compared to more than 14.7 million in 2010, but the
country's tourism minister expressed hope earlier this month
that numbers could return to levels experienced before the
uprising.
(Reporting By Reuters Television; Editing by Julia Glover)
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