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The Buddha statue depicts Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in South Asia around 2,550 years ago. Born a prince, he would later renounce his worldly wealth and seek out enlightenment, eventually becoming the Buddha, a Sanskrit-derived word that means "the enlightened one," according to Buddhist tradition...The newfound statue dates to between A.D. 90 and 140, said Steven Sidebotham, a history professor at the University of Delaware who is co-director of the Berenike Project, told Live Science in an email.The 28-inch-tall (71 centimeters) statue shows the Buddha standing and holding parts of his robes in his left hand, representatives from the Egyptian...

On exami[ni]ng hair samples of mummies in the scanning electron microscope we found a piece of tissue between the curls which had the characteristic appearance of silk. To show that the specimen was silk, we performed infrared studies using multiple internal reflection, allowing nondestructive identification of the material. The spectra clearly identified silk.We performed amino-acid anaylsis of the sample according to the method in ref. 2 and obtained the typical spectrum of hydrolysed silk, with high glycine, serine and alanine peaks as originally described by Shimura. To exclude the possibility that the silk specimen could have been added later to...

Archaeologists have been excavating the city of Berenike on Egypt's Red Sea coast on and off since 1994. Berenike was founded between 275 and 260 BC, but was temporarily abandoned sometime between 220 and 200 BC, before being repopulated for many centuries. After Egypt was annexed by the Roman Empire in 30 BC, Berenike became the empire’s southernmost port....the well dried up between 220 and 200 BC, and sand was blown into it by the wind. This sand is preserved in the well, and contains two bronze coins dating from the decades before 199 BC. Elsewhere in the fortress, there...

Archaeologists Uncover Ancient Maritime Spice Route Between India, Egypt Archaeologists from UCLA and the University of Delaware have unearthed the most extensive remains to date from sea trade between India and Egypt during the Roman Empire, adding to mounting evidence that spices and other exotic cargo traveled into Europe over sea as well as land. "These findings go a long way toward improving our understanding of the way in which a whole range of exotic cargo moved into Europe during antiquity," said Willeke Wendrich, an assistant professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA and co-director of the project....

A 2,300-year-old fortress that protected an ancient port called "Berenike" has been discovered in Egypt on the coast of the Red Sea... Constructed at a time when Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies, a dynasty of pharaohs descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals, the fortifications are sizable. "A double line of walls protected the western part of the fortress, while a single line sufficed farther to the east and north. Square towers were built at the corners and in strategic places where sections of the walls connected," wrote archaeologists Marek Woźniakand Joanna Rądkowska in an article recently published...

CHENNAI: A broken storage jar with inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi script has been excavated at Quseir-al-Qadim, an ancient port with a Roman settlement on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. This Tamil Brahmi script has been dated to first century B.C. One expert described this as an “exciting discovery.” The same inscription is incised twice on the opposite sides of the jar. The inscription reads paanai oRi, that is, pot (suspended) in a rope net. An archaeological team belonging to the University of Southampton in the U.K., comprising Prof. D. Peacock and Dr. L. Blue, who recently re-opened excavations at...

On the edge of Egypt's eastern desert, known to natives as "the red land," Berenike thrived as a trading port for goods from Europe, Asia and southern Arabia. Sidebotham's digs have turned up such varied items as Indian-made pottery and beads, a figurine of Venus, timbers made of cedar from Lebanon, a clay jar containing decorative silver pieces, Roman glass, sapphires and other gems, a mother-of-pearl cross and sliver of Turkish marble used as veneer for walls. One large jar found embedded in the courtyard floor of a temple contained nearly 17 pounds of black peppercorns, which had been imported...

One way to understand the implications of the archaeological discoveries at Pattanam is to delve into the amazing wealth of data from the excavations at the lost Ptolemic-Roman port city of Berenike, on Egypt's Red Sea coast. During the Ptolemic-Roman period (third century B.C. to sixth century A.D), Berenike served as a key transit port between ancient Egypt and Rome on one side and the Red Sea-Indian Ocean regions, including South Arabia, East Africa, India and Sri Lanka, on the other. This ancient port city was well-connected by roads from the Nile that passed through the Eastern Desert of Egypt...

Fragments of pottery with inscriptions in one of pre-Islamic languages have been found by a U.S-Polish team of archaeologists near Berenike, a Greco-Roman harbour on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. The finds confirm that Berenike was the most active Red Sea port during Hellenistic and Roman times. Inscriptions and other written materials found in Berenike have been written in 12 different languages. This attests to the cosmopolitan mix of people who lived in or passed through the town. Berenike was founded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in 285-246 B.C. The international team of archaeologists led by professor Steven Sidebotham of the...