The Ancients - Berenike and the Red Sea Spice Route

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Situated on the western coast of the Red Sea in antiquity were a series of thriving seaports, bringing in trade from as far as way as Sir Lanka. Key mercantile centres, where goods made in Iberia could theoretically have been sold alongside items crafted thousands of miles to the east, in South East Asia. Of these seaports, one of the most remarkable has to be Berenike, a thriving cosmopolitan trading centre, first for the Hellenistic Ptolemaic Kingdom and later for Imperial Rome.To talk through the site’s extraordinary archaeology we were delighted to be joined by Professor Steven Sidebotham from the University of Deleware. Steve has been leading excavations at the site for several years and in this podcast he highlights why Berenike is one of the most exciting archaeological locations anywhere in the World. 

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we are talking about another extraordinary ancient city. We've talked about Rome, we've talked about Palmyra, we've talked about Petra, but now we're heading slightly further south. We're going to the west coast of the Red Sea and an incredible, ancient, cosmopolitan, thriving trading post,

an emporium called Berenike. Now, Berenike, it was on the ancient spice route, the sea spice route, had connections with ancient India, with inland Africa, probably with the kingdom of Axum further south in modern day Ethiopia, also with Ptolemaic Egypt, hence the name Berenike, and then Imperial Rome and the Mediterranean. It's an extraordinary site and this multitude of different cultures is emphasised through the archaeology that survives. Now to talk through the archaeology

from this ancient trading post, I was delighted to be joined by Professor Stephen Sidebotham from the University of Delaware. Steve has led excavations at this ancient emporium, so it was great to get him on the show to talk through what we know about ancient Berenike. Here's Steve. ancient Berenike. Here's Steve. Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Now, the ancient Red Sea spice trade, as we were just saying just before we started recording,

this seems like an amazing lens through which to understand the extensive trade networks of antiquity that stretch so much further than the ancient Mediterranean. Absolutely. It was a combination of overland and sea, of course, and Berenike was not the only port involved in this, from Egypt anyway, but it was certainly the largest and the longest lived. but it was certainly the largest and the longest lived. And we have now enough archaeological evidence to show that Berenike's contacts extended as far west as the Iberian Peninsula in Morocco, on the one hand, and Indonesia on the other, with the vast bulk of the eastern trade, of course, coming from India and from Sri Lanka, but also from Southern Arabia, coastal sub-Saharan Africa, and some other places that we haven't been able to determine yet. We have pottery from places we have not identified. So there's some other places lurking out there waiting to be identified as trade contacts with Berenike. Fantastic. That's very exciting in itself. But first things first,

Fantastic. That's very exciting in itself. But first things first, whereabouts is Berenike? If you take a look at a map of Egypt, you'll notice that the Red Sea coast runs roughly northwest to southeast or north-northwest to south-southeast. And if you go down from Suez, about 825 kilometers, you'll see a cape that sticks out. We're just south of that cape. And if you want to pinpoint it, if you were to go to Aswan and go due east from there, about 260 kilometers, that would intersect with the 825 coming from Suez. And that's where we are. I mean, from what you're saying there, that sounds like Berenike, that is pretty far south in what we consider ancient Egypt. Absolutely. In Ptolemaic and Roman terms, it is the southwestern most port of the Roman Empire and of Ptolemaic Egypt. The Ptolemies, of course, had stations further south to capture elephants, but those were really not within their political realm.

those were really not within their political realm. So you mentioned the Ptolemaic Kingdom just then. When is Berenike founded? Is it very much to do with the Ptolemaic Kingdom? Absolutely. Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the second king of that dynasty, founded it. He founded a number of ports along both the Red Sea coast of Egypt and farther south on the African Red Sea coast.

The exact date of founding, hard to say. Plenty of the elder talks about it in his natural history, but he doesn't give a more precise date than to say Ptolemy II. Our archaeological evidence has pinpointed it a little bit better than that. It can't be any later than around 250 BC, probably in that quarter century, roughly 275 to 250 BC. So that's also, as you mentioned, he's only the second Ptolemaic ruler, and the Ptolemaic kingdom emerges in the aftermath of Alexander's death, who dies in the late 4th century.

So this seems like Berenike is founded quite early during the Ptolemaic rule over Egypt. Berenike is founded quite early during the Ptolemaic rule over Egypt. Absolutely. Many people see it as a completely new phenomenon, but it isn't. If you look back throughout the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom, and even the late period of Egyptian history, they had this fascination with the Red Sea and with Punt, wherever exactly Punt is. So I don't see this as something brand new. I see this sort of as an extension of a policy that earlier Egyptian governments had. Maybe they went a little bit further afield or did this more often, but the concept of trading further south in the Red Sea, or maybe even outside the Red Sea a little bit, nothing new there.

And so does this sound like the primary purpose of constructing this coastal town for trade further east or further southeast? Yes, most likely. In fact, most definitely. The major reason for the Ptolemies founding this port was specifically to capture elephants. As many people know, elephants were sort of the armored divisions of the Hellenistic period. The Ptolemies at the time, of course, were having problems with the Seleucids. Indian elephants were what supplied the Seleucid army. So the Ptolemies being cut off from that supply had to find their own. And of course, they found it immediately south of where they were.

They established those other ports that I've been referring to, the elephant hunting teams would go inland in areas of what are Sudan and Eritrea today, for the most part, capture them, bring them to the coast. They'd be put on specially built ships, actually called elephant tegoy, elephant carriers, and then shipped north to usually just to Berenike, and then they'd be marched overland to the Nile. And in fact, up until our excavations, we only had literary testimony for that. We now have archaeological evidence for it. We found what can only be, by process of elimination, must be an elephant retaining pin, very similar to the kind, those deep ditches you see in zoos today, to keep the

elephants on one side and you on the other. And then nearby, we found molars, elephant molars, and also part of a skull of a juvenile elephant. So we know they passed through here. I mean, now we have archaeological confirmation. What we don't know, because the bones are too degraded, is we cannot determine which species, although we know that bush elephants and forest elephants were predominated in the area at that time but but exactly which species of elephant that we don't know that's really really interesting so you're telling me that now we have archaeological evidence confirming it that these special ships sailed up to berenike with their

elephants the elephants disembarked and they were put in these maybe temporary places before they went further into Egypt. Yeah, they probably, of course, would have suffered from seasickness and other shocking sea travel experiences. And they would have come ashore and been calmed down and maybe fed and then eventually marched across the desert. And we do actually have from one of the stations on the road, we actually, the French recently found some ostraca that actually talk about provisioning one of the elephant hunting teams. We don't know if they're going or coming, but we knew that this was the route that they had to take. And again, now we have some archaeological confirmation

that that was the case. We've also found a number of graffiti of elephants along the way. So, you know, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, right? It's probably a duck or in this case, an elephant. So I love ancient graffiti. I mean, you can learn so much from that

just to confirm, can't you? And going a bit further on from that. So it sounds like initially Berenike is very much this place for the Ptolemies obtaining their elephants from overseas. Well, not overseas, but further south. Does its purpose change at all? Berenike's purpose, does it change as the Ptolemaic period progresses and we get nearer, let's say, the second century BC? Absolutely. Here we have epigraphic, inscriptional evidence that tells us there's new officials being created who are in charge of the Erythrotholus of the Red Sea.

And we do have some trade contracts. So we know that while the government seems to dominate early on with the importation of these war elephants and probably, you know, some gold and ivory, ivory for sure as well, coming without the elephants, that, yeah, there's the more commercial, you know, the more civilian commercial aspect of it develops during the course of the Ptolemaic period. And again, when you get to the Roman period, there's not a huge break as people suspect, but you have a continuation of that civilian commercial experience on a huge, massive scale that you didn't have in the Ptolemaic period. So when the Romans do take over Egypt following the death of Cleopatra and the Basil of Actium and Augustus and all that, you're saying that basically these trade connections with the further east were there already, but when the Romans take over, this is when it really starts to kick off. This is when Berenike really becomes the centre for trade.

Yeah, there's not a lot of evidence that the Ptolemies traded extensively outside the Red Sea. Some Ptolemaic coins have turned up in India. There's some very slight evidence for them in southern Arabia outside the Red Sea. But certainly if they did that, it was very sporadic. How the Roman trade is going to differ, in addition to being quantitatively greater, is they're going to greatly expand the geographical areas that they're in contact with. Just look at a map of the Roman Empire. They have a potential consumer market there that's many, many times that of what Ptolemaic Egypt was. And so obviously the

trade can only go one way, and that's it's going to go exponentially upwards. And so certainly from the first century AD on, and here we got lots of archaeological evidence from the site, especially in the period of the Flavians, you know, 69 to 96, it really takes off. And we have extensive evidence of contacts with southern Arabia, with especially India, southern India, northwestern India, Sri Lanka. We have some beads later on, not in this early period, that may come from Vietnam and or Thailand. We can't completely confirm that. And we do have this one bead. It's one bead only. So one bead does not make a trade contact, right? It could have come third or fourth hand. That's without doubt from the island, from the site of Jatim,

which is a site in eastern Java. And unfortunately, that was a surface find. I picked it up back in the 90s. I thought it was strange looking. I'm not a bead specialist, but it certainly looked out of the ordinary to me. So I picked it up and photographed it and sent a copy to our bead specialist. And he contacted me and said, well, you know what this is? I said, of course not. That's why I'm asking you what it is. And he got very excited. He says, well, this is a bead from Jatim and Eastern Java. You go to any of the bead catalogs and boom, right there, there are the parallels. They jump right out. So then the big interesting question is how did that bead from Eastern Java, how did it get to Berenike? And you can see some guy

accidentally gets in his pocket somehow, like a foreign coin that you pick up on your trip, and then he arrives at Berenike somehow, and it gets lost, falls out of his pocket for me to find 2,000 years later or whatever. So very interesting. But that's the furthest east that we have. We have no Chinese material at this point. But still, during the early stages of the Roman Empire, from what you're saying, perhaps either directly or indirectly, there seem to be ships going from or to Berenice from the eastern side of India. Well, certainly from the western side extensively. I've also excavated a patanam, which may be the ancient Luzerus on the southwest coast of India. And for sure, I mean, there's parallels between Patanam.

And the director of the Patanam excavations has actually worked at Baranike. And I've worked there. So, you know, we understand the context. So up and down the west coast of India anyway, especially the Kerala, the Malabar coast of southwest India, for sure, because that was a major source of black pepper that was one of the major imports. From the eastern side, that's probably at least occasionally, but on a regular basis, that's a little bit more difficult to determine. I've also excavated Arikamedu, which is on the southeast coast in Tamil Nadu of India, three seasons,

and we certainly found a fair amount of Roman material there. Some of it may have come by sea, but some of it may also have come overland from Patanam. So probably, yes, some sea contacts with the southeast coast of India, but how regular, how frequent, that we don't know. You mentioned pepper there from India. What other spices are we talking about here? That would certainly be the main import. And let me just digress a little bit there to give you an idea. Of course, pepper finds, individual or small clutches of black pepper have been found all over the empire, up on Hadrian's Wall. They found some there. There's some of those letters from Vindolanda that talk about the pepper. And then they've been found, you know, in bog areas in Germany and Roman forts there. So they've

popped up here and there, but we have just completely blown away the competition. Again, we found many thousands of peppercorns in all kinds of contexts, both trash dumps and domestic and religious. But the thing that really put us on the map in the pepper competition was we found two of these large clay jars. They're similar to Mediterranean dolia, but they're Indian made. And in one of them, we found over seven and a half kilograms of black peppercorns. And of course, needless to say, we've trumpeted this around the world. So, you know, the people in the UK and Germany, they're going on about their three or four peppercorns. We're saying, we find that in one trench on a daily basis. I mean, you come on, you guys, let's get real here. We've just blown you away here.

There's no way you're going to find seven and a half kilos of peppercorns on your site. And we know that from the sources as well, the literary, that that was a major import. Other items, and some of these do appear in the record, the archaeological record, some don't. Some that we find corroborate the ancient literary testimony that you see in people like Pliny the Elder or in the Periplus. Other items that we find appear in no ancient sources. And so, not to avoid your question, but really there's two categories of, if you will, exotic imports. And those are the exotic imports that probably were for commercial purposes. There were others that were probably brought in by people coming from the East for their own personal use. So,

you're going to have things like jewelry, you're going to have things like the odd Indian coin, you're going to have especially Indian pottery, you know, that they're going to cook on, eat off of, and so on. So those are imports, but they're not, as you see, for commercial purposes. And they're a good indicator of the presence of people from South Asia dwelling at the site. Other specific items, we have a lot of teakwood, probably the largest single, that is quantitatively, species of timber we have on site is teakwood, which is imported, which came from India. And you're going, you know, what is all this doing here?

And if we look at it in the context in which we find these things, they've all been recycled into the walls of later buildings, which was a traditional Egyptian way of recycling dismantled ship timbers. And when we look at the timbers recycled as leveling courses into the walls of our buildings, they all have the little mortise and tenon slots. So clearly either came from large boxes, wooden boxes made of teak, or they're dismantled ship timbers, probably the latter. And again, predominantly teak from India, with the second most being actually cedar, most likely from Lebanon. Anyway, I didn't really get to answer your question about imports for commercial purposes. Pepper is definitely going to be the main item. They certainly imported,

if I can get away from the spices for a minute, textiles in large quantities. Again, whether for immediate use by people at Berenice or for a larger commercial export market, we're not sure. But we found in a 5th century Roman trash dump what looked like nothing more than a kind of dishrag, you know, you'd clean your countertop with. And then subsequently, we found parallels in some cave paintings in India at Ajanta that date exactly to the same period, the 5th century. And you can see it hanging there on this painting on the wall in the Ajanta cave. It's exactly the same decoration. And then I was on the Silk Road in Western China a few years ago, and I went to a museum there, and it looked like I found exactly the same thing. It looked like it came off the

same bolt of cloth. So it was pretty clear. These are what we call resist dyed cotton textiles. And it was pretty clear that that particular design on cotton was very popular and must have been exported in large quantities, both from the Indian perspective, both to the west and to the north. And I would guess if you had any kind of preservation in Southeast Asia, you'd probably find it there as well. So in other words, these export markets weren't just one-to-one, point-to-point. Somebody was, in the case of this particular cotton textile, was mass producing it. And then it had markets all over the place.

So that's very interesting. It's not simply a point to point, you know, the Romans want pepper. Here it is. Nobody else seems interested. Here we've got a manufactured good that seems to be in demand in late antiquity, in the fifth century, when people think, you know, things are not going well. Well, they are. They're going very well. And we know that at Berenike. I mean, the second biggest peak in the trade is actually in the fifth century, the latter half of the fourth and end of the fifth century.

So anyway, I know you have other questions you want to ask, but I thought I'd throw that out. You can't dig at a site for over a quarter of a century and not have a lot to say about it, right? Honestly, buddy, don't worry at all. That was such an interesting mon interesting monologue which you said right there and i could pick up on so many different things and ask so many different questions but what i would like to mention is that you mentioned how it seems like people from further east are coming to berenike and they seem to be dwelling there for a bit of time and i found that really interesting because a few weeks ago i was interviewing someone about the roman trade with india and how on the western coast of India, there seems to be evidence of Romans dwelling there for a substantial period of time. But it seems like these people further

east were coming to Berenice and they were doing exactly the same. Exactly. And one of the ways that we get confirmation of this, I mean, prior to about two seasons ago, two excavation seasons ago, you know, we had the pottery and stuff, which clearly you're not importing that for sale. It's going to be used by people who are bringing it with them from home. And you could argue the same thing about some of the textiles and so on. So you couldn't 100% prove their presence. I mean, they could have been there, they could have not. And then in the past couple of seasons, we have found actually a sculpture. We found a head of a Buddha figure. We found a stela with three Indian figures on it. We're still trying to figure out who those are. We have two

other statuettes of standing. They appear to be Buddha's headless, but all the iconography otherwise points to that. And what's very interesting about several of these sculptures is that they're made of local stone. So they're made at Berenike. And we can actually pinpoint a workshop for the little head because we have heads of some other typical Greco-Roman Egyptian deities that have exactly the same kind of mouth features and eye features. So it's clear that this one workshop was producing on-demand sculpture. And the fact that it's in local stone tells you someone was living there to order this. And whether he or she went into the workshop and said, hey, you know, let me give you

an oral description of what it is I want you to do, or whether they drew a little image and said, here, this is what I would like you to produce, that we don't know. But no one's going to manufacture this stuff at Baranike unless somebody's ordering it, and who's going to be ordering it? It's going to be people coming from South Asia. So I think that pretty much clinches the argument, whereas the other stuff wasn't absolute concrete evidence, but peripheral evidence or whatever. This, I think, sort of nails it down. And so that was very, very exciting. So we're in the process of publishing those four or five sculpted items. We also have a little terracotta figurine that may represent an Indian

soldier. We're not sure about that, but we're almost certain. So we'll be publishing that in JRAS, General Roman Asiatic Society here probably in the next year or so. That's very exciting indeed. And just one further question just before we go on, because you did mention it earlier and it does seem really important. The Periplus, this sounds like a very important source for this period in history and this area in ancient history. Absolutely. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a document written in Koine Greek. It's anonymous. We don't know, of course, who the author was. We suspect probably a ship captain or a merchant who made these runs between Egypt and southern

Arabia and India frequently. I don't think this is based on a single voyage. And he, whoever this guy was, obviously must have been Egyptian to write it in Koine Greek, has an extensive description of what each of these ports wants to import, what they export. And of course, he provides times of year when you should go and how many voyages, if you're just, if you're clever enough to catch the winds the right way, how many voyages you can complete within a calendar year. So it's very important. But of course, it's only a snapshot in a period of a decade or two,

probably about the middle of the first century AD. A lot of the items being traded there and some of the ports, of course, are not going to be around a couple of centuries later. They will have faded from the scene and you'll have new sources, new markets, in some cases, new items that people want and older items that they don't want quite as much. So yeah, it's a great snapshot in time. It would be wonderful if we could find, you know, a periplus from the later period. And some people look at Cosmos Indigo Ploestes as a source. He is, but he's not like the periplus at all. And of course, then there's that famous papyrus that was found in 1980 in an antiquities dealership in Egypt somewhere, first published in 1985. It's now in Vienna,

I think in the Kunsthistorische Museum there. It's called the Muziris papyrus, and it's basically a trade contract. And your viewers who are in the know will be familiar with this. It's a trade contract for a shipment of ivory and textiles and malabathrin and things like that being shipped from Muziris, which may or may not be Patanam in southwest India, to a port on the Red Sea. Now, unfortunately, there's a lacuna, there's a gap right where you want to know where the Red Sea this thing's going to be shipped to. It's missing, of course, we want to argue that it was probably Baranike. And then there's the whole discussion of it being offloaded and taken across the desert and the various fees and taxes paid and so on.

So that's another really important source. Although there's a lot of debate about exactly when these taxes are levied, exactly who's responsible for all the movement of these goods. But that's another source. That's a really extraordinary source. It sounds like to really get an idea of what it must have been like at Berenike and the trade there. And you mentioned that the language is a version of Greek. But it sounds like from your research and what you've done there, this wasn't the only language spoken at Berenike. Oh, absolutely not. at any kind of a port, any time in history, anywhere in the world. You've got people from

all over the place passing through or very transitory or, as we just talked about earlier, staying there for more extended periods of time. So at this point in time, we have documented 12 different written languages at the site. And of course, this sort of complements all the religious stuff I was referring to earlier and some of the stuff that I haven't yet. And of course, this sort of complements all the religious stuff I was referring to earlier and some of the stuff that I haven't yet. And the predominant language is certainly Greek, no doubt about it, with a distant second being Latin, with the Latin more or less used, of course, for more official government things, although the Greek is too. And sometimes we have bilingual, you know, both in Greek and Latin saying the same thing. And so certainly by

far and away, the most predominant is Greek, and then the second is Latin, and then we have a smattering of others. Of course, we have hieroglyphs, Demotic, Coptic, Ad Berenice. We have Himyarite, which is a South Arabian, pre-Islamic South Arabian language. We have Tamil, Brahmi, we have Prakrit, we have Sanskrit, we have a couple others. We have one we've never been able to decipher. It's a Depinto Unassured, and every time I give a lecture, I show it and say, anybody in the audience know, if you know what this is, please tell us because we have no clue. And so that's sort of the mystery one at the moment. We've recently found ample archaeological evidence for the kingdom of Meroe, one of the African kingdoms further south in what is Sudan today, for their presence officially on the site. We've got a large statue of one of the Meroitic gods, I mean, human-sized, life-sized statue in fragments

that sat at the front of the Temple of Isis at Berenike. So clearly, in some official capacity, they were there. And I know we'll talk about the temple a little bit later. And another group, interestingly enough, known as the Blemis. The Blemis were this sort of ephemeral, we're not quite sure exactly where they were located, desert tribe. They're mentioned in a lot of literary sources. They certainly were present along the Nile in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia. And we know that they were probably present at Berenike through various, you know, some pottery that may or may not have been made by them. And again, for the first time, this blew us out of the water. We were excavating a building north of the Isis Temple, and we came across an inscription in Greek. It's about two and a half

meters long, and it mentions the name of a Blemish king. So we know they were there officially as well. And of course, the interesting thing is, what kind of de jure or de facto relationship did this blemy king and the blemy government have with the Romans in, say, the 5th century? And that, of course, we don't know. But, you know, that's why we dig. So maybe we'll get some more information and be able to nail that down a little bit better in the future. In other words, we have, if you're looking at it strictly from the ethnic point of view, yes, the languages tell us that. A lot of the artifacts tell us that. A lot of the botanical remains, I mean, the food remains tell us that. And now, of course, the clincher is when you got it in writing, it's pretty irrefutable. And so that

inscription came up, the blemish one was a complete surprise. It was toppled over. And before we broke it up, because it looked like just a chunk of nothingness, before we broke it up, we took a look underneath it. And there it was, this Greek inscription mentioning this blemish king. And so obviously, that was one of the major finds that particular season. I just love the fact that what we've been saying there, you may have had Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Kushites in the Kingdom of Merai, so like Africans there, ancient Africans, Jews, Arabians, Indians.

I mean, it's insane. It would have been a very cosmopolitan, polyglot society. In fact, several of the inscriptions that we have found in the ISIS temple courtyard specifically mention the profession of some of the people, and they're translators, they're interpreters. but I don't know, you know, X, Y, or Z. So you can probably have a bunch of people there who aren't directly associated with the trade, but without whose presence you couldn't have it, you know, you need to be able to talk to these people who are coming off the ships from wherever. And it's very handy to have somebody who speaks Tamil or can translate from Tamil to Aksumai, if that was by, you know, I mean, who knows? But yeah, it was very much a polyglot, a cosmopolitan society, and everybody seems to have more or less gotten along pretty well. Because, of course, they were all there for the same reason. They were there to make money.

And that was the common denominator there. You know, we're all here to make money. And, you know, I need you, and I want you, and I'm not going to have problems with you because I want to do business with you. So yeah, there's no evidence of a lot of postilities. I mean, we've come across no evidence of tension or problems within the community, though you could argue how would you be able to detect that in the archaeological record. But there's no defamatory graffiti anywhere. We haven't seen any of that kind of thing. It all seems to be relatively pleasant as it can be sort of a Middle Eastern bizarre

atmosphere, where people are negotiating, I'm sure, a lot of trade deals. Well, in this Middle Eastern bizarre atmosphere, and you actually mentioned it slightly earlier, this Temple of Isis, this seems like this was really and is a really astonishing discovery. It is. In fact, we didn't discover it. And this ties into something I think you're interested in, and that is who first rediscovered Berenice in the modern sense. So I might as well bring that in because it ties in with the temple.

So Giovanni Belzoni in October 1818 rediscovered the site. And he and a lot of the subsequent 19th century visitors, many of whom were British, but we also have some Americans from the Civil War. In fact, two guys from the Civil War working together who had fought on opposite sides in the American Civil War, were out there digging away on behalf of one of the Egyptian rulers, or even a Russian guy was out there at one point. Anyway, Belzoni rediscovered it and actually started digging in the non-scientific sense. And he was sure it was an Isis temple. And we've since, of course, come to learn it's primarily a temple dedicated to Isis with a secondary use by Serapis.

So a lot of the subsequent visitors in the 19th century after Belzoni worked there, visitors in the 19th century after Belzoni worked there. A guy named John Gardner Wilkinson was there, and then subsequently James Wellstead was there, and there were a number of others, and they all focused on the temple. I mean, in those days, of course, everybody was interested in big buildings and temples and stuff. And while they did find some interesting things, some of which are at the British Museum in the basement there from the Isis Temple, some of which are at the British Museum in the basement there from the ISIS temple. We had avoided digging there in the 90s and the early 2000s because we simply assumed that there was nothing more to find, that these earlier guys had more or less cleared it out. And then very interestingly, one of our Dutch colleagues, Martin Hentz, I want to mention his

name there because without him, we wouldn't have done it. He said, you know, I've been back over these 19th century records and I think they missed something. So I said, okay, well, let's give it a shot. And whoa, are we glad we did because we've got now dozens of inscriptions, almost all in Greek, some in hieroglyphs. We got dozens of pieces of sculpture in wood and bronze and stone. And it just has really blown the lid off our knowledge of Berenike because, of course, a lot of the inscriptions in the courtyard are dedicated by merchants and other people, interpreters, people involved in the trade. And they specifically will thank ISIS for having protected their crews or for a safe voyage. And of course, because they mentioned the emperor and the year of the emperor's reign,

we can pinpoint this right down to a specific year that this guy is making this dedication. In one case, we have one guy who's made probably four dedications. So he's obviously doing very well. And one of his dedications is actually a massive inscription over the front of the temple. So clearly, he was making the kind of money where he could not only dedicate, you know, well, nice statue bases with accompanying statues that are now missing, but he actually apparently rebuilt the temple in the Roman period during the reign of Tiberius. And interestingly enough, he and his family probably come from the Bay of Naples area around Puteoli. And of course, we know that that was one of the sources of some of the merchants

who were involved in some of the long distance trade with the East. This isn't the first in terms of knowing this, but it's certainly a first in naming this guy as being associated with activities at Berenice during the time, well, from the time of Tiberius up through the time of Claudius, at least. So for a decade and a half, two decades. This is the early first century AD there, I'm guessing. And forgive my ignorance on all this, but first of all, who is Isis? And you also mentioned Serapis. Who are these two gods and why Isis? Right. Isis, of course, was an extremely popular deity way back in pharaonic times. And of course, she was the consort of Osiris and the mother of Horus.

She was syncretized, that is, she was associated with, of course, many deities outside of Egypt. She was extremely popular in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In the Mediterranean, she was syncretized with all manner of goddesses, including Aphrodite, of course, and others. But in Egypt, she specifically has an association with the sea, as she did in the Mediterranean. Of course, sailing in the Mediterranean was pretty much, if not closed down, certainly greatly limited in the wintertime because of the bad weather. And in the spring, of course, they would have something called the Pleiophasia, which was an official opening of the sailing season, and it was Isis who was, of course, associated with that. So we strongly suspect, of course, she had a similar maritime-related

purpose at the temple at Berenike. It would make all of the sense in the world for her to do that. at the temple at Berenike, it would make all of the sense in the world for her to do that. Now, Serapis, of course, does not have as long a pedigree as Isis, who can trace hers way back for thousands of years. He's basically a Hellenistic creation by the Ptolemies. He's a hybrid deity, and so he doesn't really have a history earlier than the Ptolemies, but he became very popular in the Ptolemaic period and later in the Roman as well, not just in Egypt, but of course also outside in the Mediterranean as well. And it's not unusual, of course, in Egyptian temples from any period to have multiple. You'd have a primary deity worship, and you might have a secondary cult going on, or even a tertiary cult

going on in another part of the temple but at this point although we haven't found any inscriptions mentioning isis in the temple we've got at least a dozen images of him heads of his so it's pretty clear that he was one of the other deities worshipped here going back to isis and her relationship with the sea from what you were saying earlier it really emphasizes why all of these travellers, especially those coming into Berenike from the sea, would go to that temple for thanks, to give thanks and to leave some, well, to leave some offerings. Absolutely. And we have some interesting things here. In addition, of course, the usual animal sacrifices.

And we've got lots of evidence for that, including an interesting possible donkey sacrifice. Oh, my God. Towards the southwestern end of the temple, which has precedence elsewhere in Egypt. We have butchered cattle bones, which, of course, you know, that's going to tell us that they were sacrificed and then meat was eaten there. We have some desert fauna, which is unusual. We have some gazelle bones and some others. We've got some turtle remains. So we have a fair amount of faunal material. We have botanical as well. We

have evidence that they were burning some form of incense inside the temple. We have some seashells that actually have the remains of burning in it, and we can determine that it's some kind of an incense. And you wouldn't be surprised, of course, in a temple context to have that kind of thing. But now we have good, solid archaeological evidence for that. We found an Indian coin dropped in one corner of the temple courtyard, and it's Satyavana. And if you look on the map of India, that's one of the dynasties that certainly was actively trading with the West. A lot of the devices on their own coins are two-masted sailing ships. So that was very interesting. That dates from probably around 120 or 130 AD. The only other Indian coin we have found is much later. It's 4th century AD, and we did not find that in the

temple. We found that in the church, actually. So clearly, which gets us into something else. In addition, of course, to the typical pagan cults or polytheistic ones, there's others on the scene who are clearly in there to make money too. And we have a very large fifth century church, which is where we found both an oxymite coin as well as an Indian one. And I'm sure one of the purposes of the people active in the church had to be commercial activities. We know elsewhere in Egypt, the Coptic church was definitely involved in land ownership and trade. And you briefly brought up earlier about the Jews and their sort of an enigma. So far, we have only one tiny graffito that may be Hebrew or could be Aramaic. We're not sure. There's not enough there. And we also have, interestingly, we do have some ostraca that mention Jewish delicacies. And of course, that could be like

bagels and lox. It doesn't necessarily mean the presence of Jews on the site. It simply means somebody was eating Jewish food. So in other words, we've yet to find a synagogue or a menorah or anything like that that would suggest their presence. But I think it's only a matter of time. I can't believe that they would not have been there like everybody else in there trying to make money. That's what Baraniki exists for. It's not a holiday resort. Nobody's wanting to go there to sunbathe. It's a windswept, insect-filled, unpleasant place to live. So you're going to go there, you're going to make your money. Some people, of course, try to make the best of it and build these very luxurious accommodations. And we know that from some of the marble revetment that they used and the wall

hangings and the carpets and stuff, and clearly from the jewelry too, that there were some high status people living there and they're not going to want to live in a tent while the flies blow through, right? Still, it's a very unpleasant place to live. And I suspect most people stayed only as long as was necessary and then left as quickly as they could. I mean, yeah, just this big trade-off, this big bazaar, as you were saying earlier, isn't it? And you mentioned all these pets earlier. Well, you mentioned the animals earlier, and you mentioned the remains of the animals. I mean, where are the remains dumped from the temple? Are we finding those remains in the temple, or is there a special place for them? No, a lot of them are just left in the temple.

We don't know, of course, what percentage wasn't left in the temple, because that's an argument from silence. But we love people who are very messy, right, and don't clean up after themselves. We love those people because they leave their garbage right, And it's too much trouble to throw it out. We'll just sweep it in the corner, sort of under the carpet and hope nobody notices. And those are the people we like. But deliberate burial of animals who are not being offered as sacrifice, but say more as human companions or pets. We found a cemetery, an animal necropolis, which was excavated very expertly and carefully by two Polish colleagues, husband, wife, who he was the archaeologist and she was the faunal

specialist. And at this point, we have over 400 animals from that necropolis. The vast bulk, except for two goats, which are outliers, date from the first century AD, probably primarily from the Flavian period again, but maybe bracketing either side by a decade or two. And the vast majority are felines. They're cats and kittens, domestic cats and kittens. And then a distant second would be dogs and puppies. And then we have a whole bevy of other, you know, a few here and there.

We have a grivet and vervet monkeys. We have baboons. We have some birds that we're not sure the species of. They could be local. But what's really interesting, and the reason we know that their pets, or at least a lot of them are, is that some of them are still wearing collars. And they're wearing bronze collars. They're wearing iron collars.

Some of them have beads right next to the necks. So that was probably a bead collar, obviously. Some of them are very carefully buried inside jars or underneath broken pieces of pottery like amphoras. We found one, and this one really got to me. We found a dog, a male dog, a skeleton. He was about age four when he died of osteosarcoma. It's the earliest record of pet bone cancer that we have, I think, anywhere

in the world. And he died at about the age of four. And we know what his last meal was. We could examine the stomach contents. And whoever the owner was really loved this dog because they took him out and they covered him with some kind of a matting. And then they put broken pieces of amphoras all over his remains. So whoever owned him, obviously it was a near and dear. And if anybody has a pet, you know what I'm talking about. I mean, they're part of the family. And based on the last meal he gave the animal, he clearly really loved this dog.

And we have to assume the same was probably true with, you know, some of these other animals, the monkeys and the cats buried there. Of real interest, of course, is, and this we only discovered very recently, is that one of the cats, at least, came from India. Either came from North India, probably from the North India area. And of course, then you'd start asking yourself, well, you know, how did it get here? Was it somebody's pet? Did it sort of wander onto the ship accidentally? We don't know. And then we have two monkeys, one who was indigenous to Southern India and another that was indigenous to Northern India as well. So again, the big question is, did they get on board ship?

Well, monkeys are most likely, unlike the cat who could have wandered on, the monkeys are probably being deliberately brought on board to accompany somebody to this strange new land as a pet, a companion. So we can't prove that all of those animals were pets. Some of them may have been sacrifices, but there's no bones that are cut up to indicate butchery afterwards. And as I said, the ones with the collars or the ones that are obviously very carefully

buried under jar fragments are in the case of the dog, the four-year-old dog with the mat and then the jar fragment. They're clearly somebody's pets. So that was really interesting. It adds a really human component to the situation that you aren't going to get probably anywhere else short of an inscription that's going to tell you something like this so that's been really interesting and we're looking forward to the Polish husband and wife publishing all of this in a final volume hopefully sooner than later

absolutely right there I mean I think you really summed it up just then which I was about to say was that it really adds that human element to the finds doesn't it this idea that they could have been taking animals as companions back from their travels further east in india or just for companionship back at home it's amazing how just through the bones the cemeteries and stuff like that and the amount of work they put over to make sure that their loved pets have this nice burial how much you can tell us about the well human side of the people that we're looking at exactly yeah so they may have been tough-nosed businessmen right on the surface you know you got your you got your public persona right yeah i'm the tough-nosed businessman don't mess with me you know you're gonna this is what I'm going to, you know. Oh, yes. Then behind closed doors, the, you know, the human side comes up. They have to let it loose

every once in a while. They can't be the tough-nosed negotiator 24 hours a day, right? None of us can do that. So, yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. It'd be nice to know, you know, but there are no accompanying texts of any kind. It'd be nice to know if these animals had names. They must have, right? Who owned them? What were the circumstances? But we don't have any inscriptions or texts of any kind that tell us about this. Steve, it sounds like you and your fellow archaeologists, you've done so much at the site already and have uncovered so much, well, pristine, amazing information. But how much of the site has actually been uncovered? We're guessing maybe 2%.

Wow. I know. And that's 2% horizontally, not necessarily vertically. What I mean is, in many cases, because of the sandy conditions, we can't dig down terribly deep because, of course, the edges of the trenches will collapse. So sometimes we can only dig as deep as the geological situation will allow us. In some cases, we have hit bottom, but that's very rare. In more cases than that, we know that there's more to do. So when I say 2%, I mean 2% horizontally, not vertically. Vertically, much, much less than that. So in other words, if this were to be dug very carefully, as we've been doing, very painstakingly, very careful, as I always tell my students, archaeology is not a lab science. You can't screw it up and go back and do the experiment again, right? If you screw it up,

the information is lost. So you get one shot at this. So we do it very, very carefully. And I know we make mistakes, everybody does, but we try to be very careful and, you know, limit the number of trenches that we dig per season. So at this rate, you know, come back to us in maybe a thousand years and maybe we'll be able to tell you that we've dug up maybe 85% of the site instead of 2%. But I won't be around to see that, unfortunately. instead of 2%. But I won't be around to see that, unfortunately. Obviously, the idea is eventually when I'm no longer able to do this, to pass it along to the next generation. And believe me, there's a lot of people who'd be very interested in having this site for themselves or for, you know, their organization. So there's no lack of capable people out there. I mean, we've had a number of really good students who certainly

have a huge interest in the site and to whom I think eventually, you know, you have to pass the torch at some point, right? And so that's not going to be for a while yet, though. I plan on being there for a while longer. It's too exciting to sort of, say, walk away from. I want to know what's coming next. every season we've never had a disappointing season we've always found something really interesting and exciting every season so we always say the trade-off is the living conditions at baronica are really pretty abysmal but the site is phenomenal and that's what keeps us coming back year after year after year is what are we going to get this season what exciting goodies are we going to find so stay

tuned stay tuned indeed what more can it tell us about the ancient spice roots between the mediterranean and the east i mean that's absolutely extraordinary and the people themselves and their pets oh yeah yeah absolutely fantastic steve i mean it sounds like you and your friends you've got a lot of work still to do. So get cracking as soon as you can. I look forward to hearing more and more and more about the site in due course. Yeah, thank you. And I think if you'd interviewed any of us who work there, not just me, you'd get an equal level of excitement because it is an incredible site.

It should certainly receive a lot more attention than it has. But, you know, part of it is that the physical remains aren't all that impressive aside from the temples. It's pretty much built of jerry-rigged materials. So it doesn't have the cachet of a major temple on the Nile. So the importance of it is really the finds themselves. They're the things that really make the site what it is. Well, from what you've been saying over the past hour, it sounds truly astonishing. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, well, thank you for having me.

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