Exhibit and TV show about seafaring in Ancient Egypt

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.’’

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.

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.

PBS science series NOVA will broadcast today “Building Pharaoh’s Ship,’’ a documentary detailing the reconstruction of a Wadi Gawasis vessel by archeologist Cheryl Ward of Coastal Carolina University.

Excerpted from an article by Colin Nickerson for boston.com

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3. Conference: Ancient Egypt not isolated from Mediterranean cultures
4. Exhibit: "Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt"
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Tags: wadi gawasis

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Exhibitions, Films/TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.