What Explains a Peaceful Greek Trade City in Ancient Egypt?

Originally published December 10, 2010 | Kansas City infoZine | by Jeannine Chatterton-Papineau | Excerpt:

Dr. Alexander Fantalkin of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology is delving deeper into this unique piece of ancient history to come up with a new explanation for how Naukrtis developed, and how its inhabitants managed to operate on foreign soil and create a new sense of common identity.

The Greeks that inhabited Naukrtis, explains Dr. Fantalkin, may have come from warring city states at home, but they formed a trade settlement in Egypt under the protection of powerful Eastern empires. This link not only brought them together as a culture, but explains how they were allowed to operate in the midst of Egyptian territory. Dr. Fantalkin's theory was recently presented at the Cultural Contexts in Antiquity conference in Innsbruck, Austria, and will soon be published in the proceedings of the conference.

Lecture - Interconnections and Trade Between Crete/the Aegean Islands and Egypt

Originally published February , 2010 | Challenging the Past | by Marsia Bealby | On February 20th at 2:00pm UK time Marisa Bealby of the University of Birmingham will be conducting a lecture on the interconnections and trade between Crete and Egypt from 1850 to 1400 B.C.E at the New Walks Museum in Leicester, UK.

Sailing Into Antiquity: Unearthing Clues About Ancient Egypt’s Sea Trade

Originally published January 11, 2010 | The Boston Globe | by Colin Nickerson | Here's an excerpt:

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.

[...]

'She’s found the first fragments of an ancient Egyptian seagoing vessel - a ship that actually sailed in pharaonic times,' Wachsmann said.

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."

Follow the link to the video on PBS NOVA: Building Pharaoh's Ship.

Taming the River

Accessed August 11, 2009 | Business Today | by Ali El-Bahnasawy

The following is an excerpt from Business Today about the Nile River. Follow the above link to read the full story.

Shouting orders to his crew in a heavy Upper Egyptian accent, barge captain Emam Hussien supervises 300 tons of stone as they are illegally dumped into the Nile. His rusty old barge is resting in a small canal that feeds into what used to be a busy river port called Athar El-Naby near the intersection of the Maadi Corniche and the Ring Road.

The dark-skinned, strongly built Hussien brought the stones to Cairo from Beni Suief, a two-hour trip upriver. He had not worked in two weeks, so when a building owner offered him the job, he did not hesitate.