Berenike and the ancient maritime spice route.

AuthorFattovich, Rodolfo
PositionBook review

Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route. By STEVEN E. SIDEBOTHAM. The California World History Library, vol. 18. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2011. Pp. xvii + 434, illus. $49.95.

Beginning in the mid-1970s and early 1980s with the pioneering fieldwork of Abel Moneim A. H. Sayed at Wadi Gawasis and D. S. Whitcomb at Quseir al-Qadim in Egypt, together with J. Zarins at Sihi in Saudi Arabia, the archaeology of the Red Sea over a very long time span from the Middle Stone Age to the mid-second millennium C.E. has been emerging as an area of investigation at the interface between various disciplines (e.g., Egyptology, Ethiopian Archaeology, Arabian and South Arabian Archaeology, Classical, Byzantine, and Islamic Archaeology). This investigation includes both coastal sites and shipwrecks, which are the subject of study of maritime archaeology, and sites in the hinterland of the Arabian and African coastal plains. At present, however, the only link between the projects is the geographical location of the individual sites in the coastal regions of the Red Sea (and in a slightly larger perspective the Gulf of Aden), without an appreciation of the Red Sea as a specific geo-cultural region that played a crucial role in the development of the macro-scale network of social, economic, and cultural interactions between Europe, Africa, and Asia in the last five millennia, and was thus a decisive factor in the origin of the modern global world system.

From this perspective, the investigations that Steven E. Sidebotham and his team have been conducting for almost twenty years at Berenike, a Roman port close to Ras Banas on the southern Egyptian coast of the Red Sea, are an excellent example of a true Red Sea archaeology in terms of research design, multidisciplinary analysis of recorded data, and interpretation of the evidence in a global context. These investigations are a significant step forward to better reconstructing and understanding the development of the Red Sea maritime route as a commercial highway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, and its role in the global economy of the early to mid-first millennium C.E.

Although the study of ancient Roman trade in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean may sound marginal to some scholars, this is a crucial topic in world history. The ancient Romans indisputably contributed to consolidating earlier regional sea routes into an interregional circuit from Indonesia to...

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