Author Description

This tome, the first in a new Excavation Series published by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, represents a renewed commitment to the Ptolemaic-Roman emporium of Berenike on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. Initially Berenike was a principal entrepot for the importation of elephants, ivory and gold for the Ptolemaic government. In Roman times the expanded volume and variety of merchandise was more commercial and civilian in nature. The Berenike Project, now a joint American-Polish endeavor, builds and expands upon surveys and excavations conducted at this site and its environs for eight seasons by an American-Dutch team between 1994 and 2001. The result of two short fields seasons appear here: conducted in early March 2008 and late January-February 2009. While some of the chapters are brief reports, which will appear in fuller form elsewhere, others are more expansive and detailed. The material contained herein should be useful to those interested in many aspects of Hellenistic-Roman ports in general, and the Eastern Desert and Red Sea coast of Egypt in particular. The volume should also appeal to those with a wider interest in the ancient cultural and economic exchanges between the Mediterranean basin and the Hellenistic-roman world on the one hand and those peoples and cultures situated along the littorals and in the hinterlands of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean basin on the other during the course of eight centuries.