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Solar barques were the vessels used by the sun god Ra in
ancient Egyptian mythology Egyptian mythology is the collection of myths from ancient Egypt, which describe the actions of the Egyptian gods as a means of understanding the world around them. The beliefs that these myths express are an important part of ancient Egyptia ...
. During the day, Ra was said to use a vessel called the Mandjet ( egy, mꜥnḏt) or the Boat of Millions of Years ( egy, wjꜣ-n-ḥḥw), and the vessel he used during the night was known as the Mesektet ( egy, msktt). Ra was said to travel through the sky on the barge, providing light to the world. Each twelfth of his journey formed one of the twelve Egyptian hours of the day, each overseen by a protective deity. Ra then rode the barque through the
underworld The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underwor ...
, with each hour of the night considered a gate overseen by twelve more protective deities. Passing through all of these while fending off various destructive monsters, Ra reappeared each day on the eastern horizon. He was said to travel across the sky in the Mandjet Barque through the hours of the day, and then switch to the Mesektet Barque to descend into the underworld for the hours of the night. The progress of Ra upon the Mandjet was sometimes conceived as his daily growth, decline, death, and resurrection and it appears in the symbology of Egyptian mortuary texts.


Funerary practices and religion

In folklore, a boat of this kind is used by the sun god. Thus, as the
pharaoh Pharaoh (, ; Egyptian: '' pr ꜥꜣ''; cop, , Pǝrro; Biblical Hebrew: ''Parʿō'') is the vernacular term often used by modern authors for the kings of ancient Egypt who ruled as monarchs from the First Dynasty (c. 3150 BC) until the ...
was a representation of the sun god on earth, the king would use a similar boat upon his death to travel through the underworld on their journey to the afterlife. One of the most well known examples of this is the
Khufu ship The Khufu ship is an intact full-size solar barque from ancient Egypt. It was sealed into a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid of pharaoh Khufu around 2500 BC, during the Fourth Dynasty of the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom. Like other buried ...
, which was built and then buried at Giza along with
Khufu Khufu or Cheops was an ancient Egyptian monarch who was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, in the first half of the Old Kingdom period ( 26th century BC). Khufu succeeded his father Sneferu as king. He is generally accepted as having c ...
and the rest of the items he would take with him to the afterlife. The ship was originally displayed in the specially-built Giza Solar boat museum, but was subsequently moved to the
Grand Egyptian Museum The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM; ''al-Matḥaf al-Maṣriyy al-Kabīr''), also known as the Giza Museum, is an archaeological museum under construction in Giza, Egypt. It will house artifacts of ancient Egypt, including the complete Tutankhamun ...
.


See also

* Ancient Egyptian royal ships * Abydos boats * Solar deity *
Trundholm sun chariot The Trundholm sun chariot ( da, Solvognen), is a Nordic Bronze Age artifact discovered in Denmark. It is a representation of the sun chariot, a bronze statue of a horse and a large bronze disk, which are placed on a device with spoked wheels. ...


References

Ra Barques Egyptian mythology Egyptology Mythological ships {{Egyptian-myth-stub