All Fans of the Berenike Project past, present and future – welcome! Visit our fanpage and share in our discoveries and our life in the desert on the Red Sea Coast and in the mountains. Join us in an exotic journey tracing the footsteps (and shipways!) of ancient merchants. We will show you Berenike the way we see it, a way you won’t in the serious scientific reports (assuming you gain access to any of those). First, some basic facts about the site and a flick to watch. It was about 276 BC that Ptolemy II gave the green light for founding a harbor very far down south on the Red Sea coast. It was a measure of his respect and admiration for his mother, the queen Berenike, whose name means “one who brings victory”, that he called this new port after her. It seems fitting enough considering that it was a frontier post, established in a desolate spot, between the Red Sea on one side and the Eastern Desert mountains, on the other, far from Egyptian civilization. Any civilization, in fact. To the north lay sources of emeralds and other minerals, to the south and west the famed gold mines. Standing guard over these mineral treasures was Berenike, once truly a pearl of the Eastern Desert. In those pioneering times Berenike was the port of delivery of goods coming from the south: the transports of war elephants that the ancient authors wrote about (elephants were the “armored tanks” of Hellenistic warfare), but also precious ivory, exotic spices and other goods. The discovery of how the monsoons work enabled sailing even further out, to India. Archaeologists have found records of at least 11 different languages and alphabets from the whole world being used regularly in the harbor. We have no doubt that the inhabitants of the ancient harbor included Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Indians, Palmyrenes, Nabateans and Jews. Every season of excavations is a chance to add new names to these lists. What was this international set of people doing in this far-off and forsaken place? Merchants waited for favorable winds to carry their ships south or anxiously expected the safe return of their loads. In the meantime, they did what they knew best: traded and made business deals, got their ships repaired in the harbor workshops, drank wine and played dice in the taverns (and got cheated — archaeologists have found some loaded dice!), supplicated all their different gods, and generally enjoyed themselves like all true men of the sea do. Hopefully, we can get you to live with us this great adventure. Like and share — we need plenty of volunteers for our expedition :) (text: J.Rądkowska, I.Zych)
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 09:32:06 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015