Qualla: Mersa Gawasis

Mersa Gawasis: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ships arrived in pieces, lashed to the backs of donkeys. For roughly ten days a caravan trudged east from the Nile across a hundred miles of broken desert, hauling cedar planks, coils of rope, jars of food, and the dismantled hulls of seagoing vessels. At a notch in the cliffs where Wadi Gawasis met the Red Sea, the crews put the boats back together, loaded them, and sailed south toward a land the Egyptians called Punt. Nearly four thousand years later, archaeologists found the leftover timbers still stacked in caves cut into the rock - dry, salt-cured, and astonishingly intact.

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Mersa Gawasis: The Harbor With Two Names

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Egyptians called this place Saww. The modern name, Mersa Gawasis, layers two later languages over the old one - mersa means port, and Gawasis is a medieval word for a scout boat. The site sits at the mouth of Wadi Gawasis, about 25 kilometers south of Safaga, a quiet stretch ...

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Mersa Gawasis: A Fleet You Could Carry

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The logistics still astonish. Egypt had no native cedar, so timber was felled in the hills of Lebanon, shipped to the coast, and floated up the Nile to shipyards near Coptos. There the seagoing vessels were built - then taken apart again. Their components crossed the Eastern Dese...

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Mersa Gawasis: Sailing to God's Land

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Punt was the destination, and to the Egyptians it was almost mythic - a place they called God's Land, lying perhaps 1,200 kilometers south down the Red Sea coast. From there came the things temples and pharaohs craved: myrrh and frankincense for incense and embalming, along with ...

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Mersa Gawasis: What the Caves Held

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The decisive work came in the 2000s, when an expedition led by Kathryn Bard of Boston University and Rodolfo Fattovich of the University of Naples l'Orientale opened a series of man-made caves carved into the coastal slope. Inside lay the oldest seagoing ship timbers ever found -...

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