The ancient Egyptians and their ships on the "Big Green"

January 14, 2010

The traces of the ancient sea trade to the Land of Punt

The archaeological excavations in Egypt, Wadi Gawasis, they found no mummies, no large monuments, but the archaeologist Kathryn Bard of Boston University and his colleagues are uncovering the remains of the oldest ocean-going ships and other relics related trade with a mysterious realm of the exotic Red Sea called Punt.
"They were the space launches of their time," said Bard's epic missions sent by the pharaohs to procure wondrous wares.

Although the Nile River craft are well known, the ability of ancient Egyptian mariners to navigate hundreds of miles of open sea cargo craft was not fully documented so far.
Then the team led by Bard and Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Fattovich, has begun to explore maritime storerooms in 2004, discovering evidence, made of hardwood and sturdy, the deepwater prowess of Pharaonic fleets.
In the most recent discovery, December 29, 2009, found the eighth in a series of lost chambers at Wadi Gawasis after shoveling through cubic meters of rock debris and sand accumulated by the wind.
Just days before, Bard papers in chilly Boston, but now, with the torch and trowel, he was probing a grotto full of mold, that might date back over 4000 years ago.
"When the last layer of sand was removed, stale, fetid air came out of a crack," Bard said by phone from a dig site, a dry water course, near the Red Sea .
The reconnaissance of the room and its relics will take time and care. The contents of the room most likely include some kind of ship, pitchers, platters, linens, and daily, as well as hieroglyphic.
"This is a warehouse, not in a royal tomb," said Bard.
However prosaic seem, the findings in rivenuti Gawasis Wadi - including the ancestor of the modern package label - really speak of treasures, gold, and glory of an ancient time, a civilization that still fascinates us.
The remote desert site, the sea was established solely to meet the desires of the rulers of Egypt for luxury goods from distant Punt: ebony, ivory, obsidian, incense, precious metals, slaves, and strange beasts, such as dog-headed monkeys and giraffes.
From the middle of the last decade, the team of Bard and Fattovich has attracted the attention of nautical archeologists with the discovery of pieces of wooden ships, limestone anchors, oars and rudders, and hanks of marine ropes. The chamfered beams of a bridge, hull planks, and copper fittings belong to the oldest seagoing vessels ever found, dating back at least 3,800 years ago.
The boats seem to have been over twenty meters long, powered by oars and sails, and able to sail in deep waters.

"This is exciting stuff, important," said Shelley Wachsmann, a top authority on ships of the Bronze Age, a researcher at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University. He is not directly involved with the search for Bard.
"You have found the oldest fragments of an ancient Egyptian ship - a ship that actually sailed in pharaonic times," Wachsmann said.
Now the work financed with private funds in Wadi Gawasis - and at the ruins of the nearby harbor, known as Mersa - are attracting wider attention.
This month (January 2010), at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo will open a special exhibition, "Mersa / Wadi Gawasis: a pharaonic harbor on the Red Sea," featuring, among other things, cargo seals, travel accounts, and defined a shipping crate, with a hieroglyphic text by writing: "Wonderful Things of Punt."
He said Rosanna Pirelli, curator of the exhibition: "This is a major scientific event, since the findings indicate a rather advanced maritime technology in ancient Egypt.
The trips on the "Big Green" - as an inscription in hieroglyphics found in Wadi Gawasis refers to the sea - involving fantastic organizational skills, navigation, and large doses of audacity. The commercial relations between Egypt and Punt date back to the third millennium BC But by 1950 BC, the rival Kingdom of Kush had cut traditional desert routes, forcing Egypt to find a new passage.
The eastern coast of Egypt - then as now - was too dry to support a permanent port and shipbuilding center.
Then, using wood from the mountains of Lebanon, Egyptian shipwrights built big ships on the banks of the Nile, near modern Coptos, according to the theory of archaeologists.
"These were then disassembled and transported, with all the other supplies in the desert with a donkey, a journey of 10 days to reach Wadi Gawasis," Bard said. The site is near a lagoon, where a port was built. The ship parts were marked and reconstructed based on the number or color code.
The lagoon has long since been swallowed by the sand, but satellite images suggest the existence of the remains of a slipway or dock.
The sea voyages to Punt were so expensive and required a massive logistical effort - probably involving thousands of workers, scribes, quartermasters, seamen, and pack animals - which probably took place only a couple of times each century.
The real position of Punt remains a mystery. Scholars are not even able to put the kingdom on a specific continent. Bard puts it on the Horn of Africa, the region now called Eritrea and parts of Sudan and Somalia. Other researchers have put him on the Asian shore of the Red Sea, in the Yemen.
The trip from the port appear to have been suspended for two or three centuries, due to political instability. There is no evidence that Queen Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, sent one last mission to Punt by sea around 1480 BC, in part for "incense funeral."

Wadi Gawasis held its secret for millennia.
Then, on Christmas Day 2004 - the second season of Bard on the research site - the archaeologist put his hand in an odd hole in a rock. She was thrilled to feel the void: the indication of a larger space beyond.
The removal of rock rubble revealed a room containing a mud brick, some beads, and a grinding stone. Antiques, of course, evil sands of Egypt are full of thousands of these old shards and scraps.
The instinct, however, said the professor from Boston that the fragments burned by the sun hid something more than broken pots and ornaments in clay. "I felt like we were on to something," said Bard.
Within days, the team had discovered a cave dug by human hands - and in connection with it, a series of underground storage rooms. There were timber ships, anchors, coils of rope nautical intact. There was a fascinating story of ancient navigation.
"The rope is well preserved, even rolled up and tied, just like a sailor would leave" Bard said. "It was a perfect moment frozen in time, for 3,800 years."