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 of coast that gives no hint of its importance. For centuries it was simply lost. Confirmation came from inscriptions: a limestone anchor reused as the base of a shrine, carved with the name and titles of Ankhu, a valet of the pharaoh Senusret I, and stelae bearing the name Saww and the phrase Bia-n-Punt. The harbor named in royal decrees and the empty cove on the Red Sea were, at last, proven to be one and the same.

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 Desert by donkey caravan to Saww, where shipwrights reassembled them on the beach. After each voyage the process ran in reverse: the boats were disassembled and trekked back to the Nile Valley in pieces. The heavy stone anchors, weighing roughly 250 pounds each, were too cumbersome to bother moving. Made on site, they were simply left behind and repurposed - some becoming the bases of shrines and inscribed memorials that, by an accident of practicality, preserved the harbor's name.

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 gold, ebony, ivory, and live baboons. The most famous of these voyages belonged to Queen Hatshepsut, who sent a great expedition around 1480 BCE and immortalized it in carved reliefs at her temple at Deir el-Bahari, where myrrh trees are shown being lifted aboard for transplanting back home. Saww was the launching point. The expeditions ran across the long span of the Twelfth Dynasty, from Senusret I through Amenemhat IV, and the harbor doubled as a starting point for journeys to the mines of Sinai.

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 - cedar planks scarred by shipworm from real ocean voyages, alongside wooden steering oars, lengths of rigging rope still coiled, and cargo boxes inscribed with the names of Middle Kingdom officials. One box even carried a reference to Punt itself. These were not models or symbols. They were the actual gear of actual sailors, set down in a desert cave between expeditions and never reclaimed - a working harbor frozen at the moment its last fleet sailed away.