We’re not really. This is another example of the “archaeologists being baffled” storyline in the press I mentioned elsewhere.
We have literally known about this port and its contacts since it still existed. That’s even in the article above.
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.
One Greco-Roman text, known as the Periplus Maris Erythraei , or “Voyage around the Erythraean Sea”—which Bhandare, of Oxford, described as “a kind of Lonely Planet guide for the first century A.D.”—lists the port as a hub for maritime trade routes stretching south as far as modern-day Tanzania, and east, past Arabia, to India and beyond.
And we’ve known where it is since the early 19th century.
until the Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni, after nearly perishing from thirst in the search, rediscovered it in 1818 and hired a Bedouin youth to dig in the Isis temple with a giant seashell. A handful of European and American travelers followed
And finally, Sidebotham himself has been excavating there since 1994!
finally winning a permit in 1994. Now he brings an international team of specialists for a few weeks each winter, watched over by a sand-colored military base just up the coast.
This is not mind-blowingly new stuff. It’s mind-blowing, yeah, but not new. But the press always wants to make everything a new discovery, only because it is new to them. Apparently, reporting that a research project has been steadily adding to our knowledge of the ancient world for the last 30 years isn’t sexy enough.
In fact, we discussed aspects of Berenike here on the BBS before.
