9/9/2023 0 Comments Ebony obsidian eritrean![]() Inside the caves, the archaeologists found stone anchors, ship timbers, and two curved cedar planks that they believe were steering oar blades for a ship that was about 65 feet long. "Ever! It's just an astonishing site with incredibly well-preserved evidence." The storage caves revealed chambers with a trove of nautical items dating back approximately 3,800 years "I've been excavating in Africa for over 30 years, and I've never seen anything like this," says Bard. ![]() On subsequent exploration, the storage caves revealed chambers with a trove of nautical items dating back approximately 3,800 years. A few days later, Bard and the rest of the research team found an entrance to a second cave, excavated into fossil coral bedrock. On further excavation, she was "thrilled" to realize she had discovered a man-made cave. On Christmas Day 2004, barely an hour into a dig on a sandy bluff above the port, Bard stuck her hand into a fist-sized hole that appeared in a hillside. The "valley (wadi) of the spies," as it translates to English, "probably because contraband came through there in more recent times," Bard says, was the land route to the port from which flotillas set sail to Punt. An associate professor of archaeology at Arts & Sciences, Bard has co-directed excavations with Fattovich since 2003 at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, the site of an ancient Egyptian Red Sea port. But, despite chronicles of long-ago expeditions to this bountiful land, and more current scholarly theories about its likely location in a variety of places either in eastern North Africa or Arabia, Punt's whereabouts remains an elusive mystery.Īrchaeologist Kathryn Bard and her longtime colleagues in African research, Rodolfo Fattovich and Andrea Manzo, professors of archaeology at the University of Naples "l'Orientale" in Italy, have made some extraordinary discoveries that shed light on Egypt's Red Sea trade with Punt. Punt was the premier destination for Egypt's sailing ships in the Red Sea trade network in the Middle Kingdom/12th Dynasty (circa 1985–1773 BCE). Carved in stone, scenes and texts tell of sailing expeditions sent south on the Red Sea to Punt ("poont") and Bia-Punt (land of Punt) to acquire highly prized raw materials that were unavailable in Egypt: ebony, ivory, and gold leopards, baboons, and other exotic live animals for the royal zoo and the coveted aromatics frankincense and myrrh, required for use in temple ceremonies and some mortuary rituals. Ancient Egyptians called it "God's Land." During the Old Kingdom (2686–2125 BCE), when pharaohs were constructing massive, towering pyramids on land, they were also sending ships to sea in the hopes of enriching their kingdom.
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