From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Jan 11 2010 - 07:49:30 EST
"Punt’s whereabouts remain a mystery. Scholars can’t even pin the realm to a
continent. Bard places it on the Horn of Africa, in the region of
present-day Eritrea and parts of Sudan and Somalia. Other researchers put it
on the Red Sea’s Asian shore, in today’s Yemen"
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/01/11/boston_university_archeologists_digs_uncover_clues_to_egyptian_mariners/
Sailing into antiquity BU archeologist unearths clues about ancient Egypt’s
sea trade
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Correspondent | January 11, 2010
The archeological digs at Egypt’s Wadi Gawasis have yielded neither mummies
nor grand monuments.
But Boston University archeologist Kathryn Bard and her colleagues are
uncovering the oldest remnants of seagoing ships and other relics linked to
exotic trade with a mysterious Red Sea realm called Punt.
“They were the space launches of their time,’’ Bard said of the epic
missions to procure wondrous wares.
Although Nile River craft are well-known, the ability of ancient Egyptian
mariners to ply hundreds of miles of open seas in cargo craft was not so
fully documented.
Then the team led by Bard and an Italian archeologist, Rodolfo Fattovich,
started uncovering maritime storerooms in 2004, putting hard timber and
rugged rigging to the notion of pharaonic deepwater prowess.
In the most recent discovery, on Dec. 29, they located the eighth in a
series of lost chambers at Wadi Gawasis after shoveling through cubic meters
of rock rubble and wind-blown sand.
Only a few days earlier, Bard had been grading term papers in chilly Boston;
now, with flashlight and trowel, she was probing a musty manmade cavern, one
that might date back more than 4,000 years.
“When the last layer of sand was removed, stale, fetid air rushed from a
crack,’’ Bard said by mobile phone from the dig site, a dried-out water
course beside the Red Sea.
The reconnaissance of the room and its relics will take time and caution.
The chamber’s most likely contents include ship parts, jugs, trenchers, and
workaday linens, as well as hieroglyphic records.
“It’s a storeroom, not a royal tomb,’’ Bard stressed.
However prosaic they seem, the finds at Wadi Gawasis - including the
ancestor of the modern package label - really speak of the glitter, gold,
and glory of a long-ago civilization that bewitches us still.
The remote desert site at the sea’s edge was established solely to satisfy
the cravings of Egypt’s rulers for the luxury goods of faraway Punt: ebony,
ivory, obsidian, frankincense, precious metals, slaves, and strange beasts,
such as dog-faced baboons and giraffes.
Starting in the middle of the last decade, the Bard-Fattovich team grabbed
the attention of nautical archeologists with the unearthing of ship timbers,
limestone anchors, steering oars, and hanks of marine rope. The precisely
beveled deck beams, hull planks, and copper fittings belong to the oldest
deep sea vessels ever found, dating back at least 3,800 years.
The craft appear to have been up to 70 feet long, powered by rowers and sail
and capable of navigating deep seas.
“This is exciting stuff, important,’’ said Shelley Wachsmann, a top
authority on Bronze Age ships at Texas A&M University’s Institute of
Nautical Archaeology. He is not directly involved with Bard’s research.
“She’s found the first fragments of an ancient Egyptian seagoing vessel - a
ship that actually sailed in pharaonic times,’’ Wachsmann said.
Now the privately funded work at Wadi Gawasis - and at the nearby port
ruins, known as Mersa - is winning wider attention.
This month, Cairo’s Egyptian Museum will open a special exhibition,
“Mersa/Wadi Gawasis: A Pharaonic Harbor on the Red Sea,’’ featuring, among
other things, cargo seals, voyage accounts, and a shipping crate marked in
hieroglyphic text: “Wonderful Things of Punt.’’
Said Rosanna Pirelli, curator of the exhibition: “This is an important
scientific event, since the [discoveries] show a more advanced maritime
technology’’ in ancient Egypt.
Meanwhile, the PBS science series NOVA tomorrow will broadcast “Building
Pharaoh’s Ship,’’ a documentary detailing the reconstruction of a Wadi
Gawasis vessel by archeologist Cheryl Ward of Coastal Carolina University.
The film airs in Boston on WGBH (Channel 2) at 8 p.m.
The journeys upon the “Great Green’’ - as one hieroglyph-inscribed tablet
found at Wadi Gawasis refers to the sea - involved fantastical feats of
organization, navigational skill, and daring. Overland trade between Egypt
and Punt dates to the third millennium BC. But by 1950 BC, the rival Kingdom
of Kush had cut off traditional desert routes, forcing Egypt to find a new
passage.
Egypt’s eastern coast - then as now - was too parched to sustain a full-time
port and shipbuilding center.
So, using timber hewn from the mountains of Lebanon, Egyptian shipwrights
built big vessels on the banks of the Nile, near modern Qift, according to
archaeology-based theory.
“These were then disassembled and transported, with all other supplies, over
the desert by donkey, a journey of 10 days’’ to reach Wadi Gawasis, Bard
said. The site adjoined a lagoon, in which a port was built. The ship parts
were marked and rebuilt by number or color code.
The lagoon has long since been swallowed by sand, but satellite images hint
at the remains of a slipway or dock.
Sea voyages to Punt would have been so costly and required such a massive
logistical effort - probably involving thousands of workers, scribes,
quartermasters, sailors, and pack animals - that they probably were launched
only a few times per century.
Punt’s whereabouts remain a mystery. Scholars can’t even pin the realm to a
continent. Bard places it on the Horn of Africa, in the region of
present-day Eritrea and parts of Sudan and Somalia. Other researchers put it
on the Red Sea’s Asian shore, in today’s Yemen.
Voyages from the port appear to have been suspended for two or three
centuries because of political instability. There is evidence that Queen
Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, dispatched a last sea mission to Punt around
1480 BC, partly to obtain “mortuary incense.’’
Wadi Gawasis held its secrets for millennia.
Then, on Christmas Day 2004 - Bard’s second season of exploring the site -
she thrust her hand into an odd hole in a cliff’s wall. She was thrilled to
feel nothing: the indication of a larger space beyond.
Removal of rock rubble revealed a room containing a mud brick, some beads,
and a grinding stone. Antiquities, sure, but Egypt’s sands are littered with
such millennia-old shards and scraps.
Instinct, however, told the professor from Boston that the sun-scorched
slopes concealed more than broken pots and earthenware adornments. “It just
felt like we were on to something,’’ Bard said.
Within days, the team had uncovered another human-hewn cavern - this one
connecting to a series of underground storage rooms. Here were ships’
timbers. Here were sea anchors. Here were bundles of intact nautical rope.
Here was a tantalizing tale of ancient seafaring.
“The rope was neatly stored, coiled, and knotted, exactly as some sailor
left it,’’ Bard said. “It was a moment perfectly frozen in time for 3,800
years.’’
*Colin Nickerson can be reached at nickerson.colin@gmail.com. *
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