shows a merchant ship on a trading expedition. Vessel artifacts match this depiction.
Stephane Begoin
The scenes carved into a wall of the ancient Egyptian temple at Deir el-Bahri tell of a remarkable sea voyage. A fleet of cargo ships bearing exotic plants, animals, and precious incense navigates through high-crested waves on a journey from a mysterious land known as Punt or “the Land of God.” The carvings were commissioned by Hatshepsut, ancient Egypt’s greatest female pharaoh, who controlled Egypt for more than two decades in the 15th century B.C. She ruled some 2 million people and oversaw one of most powerful empires of the ancient world.
The exact meaning of the detailed carvings has divided Egyptologists ever since they were discovered in the mid-19th century. “Some people have argued that Punt was inland and not on the sea, or a fictitious place altogether,” Oxford Egyptologist John Baines says. Recently, however, a series of remarkable discoveries on a desolate stretch of the Red Sea coast has settled the debate, proving once and for all that the masterful building skills of the ancient Egyptians applied to oceangoing ships as well as to pyramids.
Archaeologists from Italy, the United States, and Egypt excavating a dried-up lagoon known as Mersa Gawasis have unearthed traces of an ancient harbor that once launched early voyages like Hatshepsut’s onto the open ocean. Some of the site’s most evocative evidence for the ancient Egyptians’ seafaring prowess is concealed behind a modern steel door set into a cliff just 700 feet or so from the Red Sea shore. Inside is a man-made cave about 70 feet deep. Lightbulbs powered by a gas generator thrumming just outside illuminate pockets of work: Here, an excavator carefully brushes sand and debris away from a 3,800-year-old reed mat; there, conservation experts photograph wood planks, chemically preserve them, and wrap them for storage.
Toward the back, a padlocked plywood door seals off an adjacent cave. As soon as the door is unlocked, a sweet, heavy, grassy smell like that of old hay wafts out, filling the area with the scent of thousands of years of decay. In the thin beam of a headlamp, one can make out stacked coils of rope the color of dark chocolate receding into the darkness of the long, narrow cave. Some of the bundles are as thick as a man’s chest, and the largest may hold up to 100 feet of rope.
The rope is woven from papyrus, a clue that it may have come from the Nile Valley, where the paperlike material was common. Archaeologists found it neatly, professionally coiled and stacked, presumably by ancient mariners just before they left the shelter of the cave for the last time.
Boston University archaeologist Kathryn Bard and an international team have uncovered six other caves at Mersa Gawasis. The evidence they have found, including the remains of the oldest seagoing ships ever discovered, offers hard proof of the Egyptians’ nautical roots and important clues to the location of Punt. “These new finds remove all doubt that you reach Punt by sea,” Baines says. “The Egyptians must have had considerable seagoing experience.”
Digging in Egypt was supposed to be a side project for Bard and her longtime research partner Rodolfo Fattovich, an archaeologist at the Orientale University of Naples. The two scholars have spent much of their careers excavating far to the south of Mersa Gawasis, uncovering the remains of ancient Axum, the seat of a kingdom that arose around 400 B.C. in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. When a 17-year civil war in Ethiopia ended in the early 1990s, Fattovich and Bard were among the first archaeologists to return to digging there.
Neither is a stranger to sketchy situations. Fattovich was working in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, in 1974 when a coup toppled the country’s monarchy. Bard, who has degrees in art and archaeology, spent a year making the sometimes dangerous overland trip from Cairo to Capetown in the mid-1970s. She often wears a red T-shirt reading “Don’t Shoot—I’m an Archaeologist” in more than a dozen languages.
Their time at Axum was cut short by another war. In 1998 fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea flared up while Fattovich and Bard were excavating a collection of tombs just 30 miles from the border. The archaeologists were forced to flee, driving more than 200 miles south through the Simian mountains of Ethiopia on a one-lane dirt road.
9(unknown*no*no*0)&guid=ON){kind=small}
