Ancient Navigation and Ancient Trade: The Journeys to Punt

This is a nice review of the discoveries at Wadi Gawasis since 2004, and mentions some upcoming television specials.

Sailing into antiquity
BU archeologist unearths clues about ancient Egypt’s sea trade
By Colin Nickerson
Globe Correspondent / January 11, 2010

[Excerpted] 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.

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 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.’’

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.’’

Where is Punt?

From the San Francisco Chronicle

Scientists zero in on ancient Land of Punt
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Saturday, May 8, 2010

Thousands of years ago, there once stood a place called Punt, a land of gold and ebony, and ivory, frankincense and myrrh.

To the pharaohs who built their palaces along the Nile, the Land of Punt was the source of great treasure. Among the most prized were Punt's leopards and baboons, which they viewed as sacred and took as royal pets.

The pharaohs sent great expeditions to Punt; they welcomed delegations of Puntites to their palaces, and their scribes recorded their gifts and commercial products in detail.

But not one of the Egyptian scribes who wrote about the strange land - Ta netjer, or God's Land, as it was sometimes called - ever revealed exactly where it lay.

The riddle was left to modern-day scholars to solve.

Now researchers armed with the sophisticated tools of modern physics have tackled the problem and declared that while they still can't tell exactly where Punt was, they do know where it wasn't.

Disputes over Punt's location have gone on for decades. Punt (pronounced Poont), archaeologists have said, was in Mozambique, or Somalia; or on the Sinai Peninsula or in Yemen, or somewhere in Western Asia where Israel, Lebanon and Syria now lie.

Narrowing the search
At a recent meeting in Oakland of the American Research Center in Egypt three scientists announced with confidence they had ruled out all of those five locations, and there was no disagreement from the 300 archaeologists there.

The Land of Punt, the scientist said, must have existed in eastern North Africa - either in the region where Ethiopia and Eritrea confront each other, or east of the Upper Nile in a lowland area of eastern Sudan.

The three experts, all specialists in arcane disciplines, were:

-- Nathaniel J. Dominy, a UC Santa Cruz anthropologist and primate ecologist who studies the lives and habitats of apes, baboons and other monkeys, as well as human evolution;

-- Gillian Leigh Moritz, a specialist in manipulating the mass spectrometer in Dominy's laboratory to analyze the stable isotopes of oxygen and other elements;

-- Kathryn A. Bard, a Boston University Egyptologist who for nearly 10 years has been excavating the ancient Red Sea harbor of Wadi Gawassis, where royal sailing expeditions were sent to Punt and returned with precious cargo.

The key to solving the mystery of Punt was Dominy's intimate knowledge of baboon geography - there are five species of the animals, and Dominy can identify the African regions where each one has its specialized habitat. He also knows the characteristics of the body tissue of each species.

"We used baboons as a lens to solve the Punt problem," he said. "They were among the most important commodities brought back to the pharaohs from Punt, but until now no one has known where those baboons came from."

The British Museum in London's collection of Egyptian antiquities holds two mummified baboons that were once gifts from Punt to the pharaohs, and although museum officials would not allow Dominy to drill into the mummies for bone samples to analyze their DNA, he was allowed to snip a few precious hairs from the baboons for Moritz to work on.

Clues in the water
Despite their age, those hairs still contained trace molecules of the water the animals drank when alive, and Moritz could analyze that water to determine the ratio of two oxygen isotopes in the hairs.

It's a complicated bit of chemistry, but every oxygen atom is made up of three different stable isotopes - their atomic masses - and the ratio between two of them, oxygen-16 and oxygen-18, varies significantly in the rainfall and humidity from one part of the world to another, even from different parts of a continent.

Moritz used her mass spectrometer in the Dominy lab to determine the oxygen isotope ratios in the hairs of each mummified baboon, and compared them with the ratios in all five species of baboons living in varied parts of Africa today.

"The results of the mass spectrometer showed us that the region of Ethiopia and Eritrea was the place to look for Punt," she said.

Bard, the Boston University Egyptologist, said the findings are convincing and make Punt more real than ever, but she suggests that the land might also have existed in a similar nearby baboon region - perhaps in eastern Sudan.

Remains of ships
The ancient harbor on the Red Sea where Bard is excavating is called Mersa/Wadi Gawassis, and Bard's excavations have yielded well-preserved ship's timbers, anchors, coils of ancient rope, and the rigging of seagoing ships that date from the reigns of several Pharaonic dynasties.

From that port, a pharaoh named Amenhotep IV sent a major expedition to Punt some 3,800 years ago during the eighth year of his reign, Bard and her colleagues have discovered.

"We've made a wonderful find there," Bard said. "It was really amazing - 40 cargo boxes from the ship, and some were inscribed with the name of that very king, the name of the scribe, and the inscribed words, 'wonderful things from Punt.' "

Ancient Navigators: Report on Wadi Gawasis Ship

NOVA hosts a special on "Pharaoh's Ship" (about Wadi Gawasis) tonight on PBS - hopefully it will run again. 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.’’ © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

Journey to Punt

The article is a bit unclear - did the archaeologists actually sail the vessel they built all the way to "Punt" - which I take to mean the Somalian horn of Eastern Africa??? Archaeologists recreate Egyptians' fabled voyage to Land of Punt Cairo, March 16 : An international team of archaeologists has reconstructed an ancient Egyptian ship of the first quarter of the second millennium BC called 'Min of the Desert', in order to find how the ancient Egyptians sailed to the fabled Land of Punt. Until a few years ago, there was a widely held belief that the ancient Egyptians did not travel long distances by sea because of their poor naval technology. People in the past tended to assume that the ancient Egyptians did not make long-distance trips because little evidence of such journeys has been found. Based on this belief, they also thought that the Land of Punt, the fabled source of many ancient Egyptian imports, could not have been located in the Horn of Africa, but must have been in southern Sinai. However, this view is changing. Now, according to a report in Al-ahram weekly, in order to find how the ancient Egyptians sailed to the Land of Punt, and how did they use their maritime technology to resist the destructive forces of the sea, a team of French, Italian, American and Egyptian archaeologists working with shipping experts have reconstructed an ancient Egyptian ship of the first quarter of the second millennium BC called "Min of the Desert". The idea was to set sail across the Red Sea in order to experience how the ancient Egyptians sailed to Punt and to expand the data available from archaeological evidence and the technical study of ships in ancient Egypt. Such ships were built without using nails, and the planks used to construct them were designed to fit together like pieces of a puzzle. "The purpose of the expedition was to understand the capabilities of a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian ship," said ship archaeologist Cheryl Ward of Florida State University. The rigging of the ship was reconstructed from models and from the bas reliefs at the temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Al-Deir Al-Bahari. "Our primary goal was to demonstrate the extraordinary capability of the Egyptians at sea, as many people, including fellow archaeologists, have thought of the Egyptians as tied to the Nile and lacking the ability to go to sea," Ward said. The test rides were made in the shape of short trips on the Nile, then in the Red Sea, and then in the shape of a longer trial voyage south towards the Sudan from Safaga along the route used by the ancient Egyptians. According to Mustafa, "Once the sail was set, all of us remarked on the efficiency and simplicity of the ship when maneuvering and steering, and on its responsiveness." --- ANI