On a sunny morning this past January, Ingo Strauch, an expert in ancient Indian history, crouches in the courtyard of what was once an Egyptian temple

A Buried Ancient Egyptian Port Reveals the Hidden Connections Between Distant Civilizations

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2024-06-27 20:00:07

On a sunny morning this past January, Ingo Strauch, an expert in ancient Indian history, crouches in the courtyard of what was once an Egyptian temple. The floor is littered with fallen stones and columns. Nearby, carved hieroglyphs are visible on the salt-corroded walls, which in some places still stand nearly eight feet high. Located just a few hundred steps from the glittering water of the Red Sea, in Egypt’s eastern desert, this remote shrine was dedicated to the mother goddess Isis some 2,000 years ago. Today, the ruins form the most prominent feature of a barren, windswept landscape, inside a restricted military zone a few hours from the modern border with Sudan. But Strauch, scrutinizing a recently unearthed slab, is immersed in a different world. Just beneath the sand lies a once-bustling, cosmopolitan port city from which mighty ships laden with gold and wine sailed across the ocean and brought back spices, jewels, perfume and other exotic cargo in return.

In antiquity, this site, known as Berenike, was described by chroniclers such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder as the Roman Empire’s maritime gateway to the East: a crucial entry point for mind-boggling riches brought across the sea from eastern Africa, southern Arabia, India and beyond. It is hard to imagine how such vast and complex trade could have been supported here, miles from any natural source of drinking water and many days’ arduous trek across mountainous desert from the Nile. Yet excavations are revealing that the stories are true.