Trade between the Roman Empire, Arabia and India in the light of archaeological excavations in Egypt's Eastern Desert

The 2013-2014 lecture begins a series that aims to take stock of the archaeological research carried out over the last thirty years in Egypt's Eastern Desert by teams of several nationalities. A French team, led by H. Cuvigny (CNRS), has excavated the Mons Claudianus and Domitianè quarries and the Roman army strongholds dotted along the caravan routes linking the Nile to the Red Sea (Figure 1). English teams led by D. Peacock, V. Maxfield and L. Blue were responsible for work on the porphyry quarries of Mons Porphyritès, the port of Myos Hormos in Qusayr al-Qadim and the port of Adoulis in Sudan. An American team, led by D. S. Whitcomb and J. H. Johnson, researched the port of Myos Hormos in the late 1970s, while another team, led by C. Meyer, worked on the gold mines of Wadi al-Fawakhir in Byzantine times. The town of Coptos has been the subject of numerous studies by the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (under the direction of C. Traunecker and L. Pantalacci), the University of Michigan (under the direction of H. Wright and S. Herbert) and the Sea Power Centre (Australia, under the direction of G. Gilbert). Finally, S. Sidebotham and his collaborators criss-crossed the desert, multiplying prospecting and discoveries, before excavating the Ptolemaic and Roman port of Berenice from 1994 to 2014.