Dear Rector, dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The ISMEO-Associazione internazionale di studi sul Mediterraneo e l’Oriente is particularly glad to bear to the scholars intervening to Seventh International Conference of the Peoples of the Red Sea Region and Their Environment, Specifically Dedicated to the Red Sea and the Gulf, the warm greetings from the ISMEO Board of Directors.
To all the participants, I am also bearing greetings from the whole audience of our International Association, which can presently rely on more than 250 members out of whom 55 foreign correspondents.
The new Association ISMEO – founded in Rome in November 2012 – has resumed an illustrious denomination, that of the Istituto per il Medio ed estremo Oriente funded by Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Tucci more than eighty years ago, denomination which better than any other traces us back to the underlying motivations of my presence to our meeting of today.
It is just because of the happy and productive osmosis between the IsMEO, directed by Giuseppe Tucci and L’Orientale University, directed by Gherardo Gnoli, two scholars whose personal and institutional collaboration was – more than a duty – a reason for existence, that the big modernisation of L’Orientale University introduced in 1972 in our university syllabus new disciplines such as Asian prehistory and protohistory, the archaeology of Ethiopia, the archaeology of Southern Arabia, Egyptology, the archaeology of Nubia, just to quote only some significant sectors among those that have originated the whole body of research representing most of the Italian presence to the big event which opens today. It is not by chance that among the ninety scholars here present in representation of more than fifty scientific institutions active in four continents, a flattering number belong in different ways to L’Orientale University and to ISMEO.
Since the late seventies of the last century, when all the mentioned scientific sectors were progressively opened, Professor Gnoli was already at work in the first preliminary steps for the Italian archaeological mission to Yemen, directed by Prof. Alessandro de Maigret under the aegis of IsMEO (since 1995: IsIAO), and soon to become a joint archaeological mission co-funded by IsIAO and L’Orientale University.
At the time of my first presidential term here at L’Orientale University, the financial package for the archaeological sector put together by these two institutions was greatly enlarged, laying the ground for that specific fund that the Board of Directors of this University, unique among Italian universities, allots so far to an impressive series of archaeological missions active in Asia and Africa. I think that our gratitude should be expressed publicly to Rector Elda Morlicchio, who wisely continued the policy of her predecessors in this field.
Seen from an overall perspective on the Red Sea, the contribution to redefining the chronology of the Ancient South Arabian civilisation, which was one of the most relevant results of that mission, has had profound repercussions on the study of all ancient civilisations of the Red Sea regions. The same happened with the new definition of Bronze Age Yemen, permitting relevant comparisons with many finds from the more recent archaeological mission of L’Orientale University in Sudan, which caused inter alia backdating the proto-historical relationship between the two areas of some one thousand years.
Also Professor Maurizio Tosi contributed deeply – just to say the least – to the IsMEO/IsIAO research on the eastern shore of the Red Sea, with surveys on the Yemeni coasts, and then in Oman (directing the Italian archaeological mission there). The crowning achievement of this long engagement – by IsMEO but no less by L’Orientale University (I cannot omit to mention this circumstance, not so much for the sake of my belonging to both institutions, but to be honest about the historical truth) – was “Arabia Antiqua: Early Origins of South Arabian States”, the first international conference on the conservation and exploitation of the archaeological heritage of the Arabian Peninsula, held in the Palazzo Brancaccio in Rome on 28–30 May 1991. The conference proceedings, published in 1996, bear clear witness to the joint organisational activities of this great event by our two sister institutions.
On the African side, after the incorporation of IsMEO into IsIAO since 1995, the international mission to Mersa/Wadi Gawasis (on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea) by “L’Orientale” University and Boston University, directed for many years by Professor Rodolfo Fattovich and now by his pupil Andrea Manzo, became subsequently the object of an agreement between IsIAO and “L’Orientale” University, and has convincingly proved how a regional system of relations, from Yemen to Egypt through Eritrea and Sudan, was already in full action in the Red Sea since the early second millennium BCE and how this system was in communication with the Mediterranean and the Near East (see, for example, the cedar of Libanon employed in building boats, Canaanean findings at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, etc.).
In this long cooperation between L’Orientale University and ISMEO, I have mentioned for the sake of brevity only the major archaeological missions, but the whole spectrum of the joint research by the two institutions is much wider. Beyond the major results briefly outlined, therefore, I think that one should emphasise how the organisation of this Seventh Red Sea Conference here in Naples should be considered as an international recognition of what has been achieved by “L’Orientale” University and ISMEO through several decades of research in the Red Sea area in the different fields of archaeology, history and linguistics. I should therefore like to thank the Board of the Association for having chosen Italy, and Naples in particular, as the seat of this Seventh Conference. As a founding member of the re-established ISMEO I am also very happy to see that this sector of research continues to be vital among many of our senior and junior members, many of them having been active for years at L’Orientale University and/or in the historical IsMEO/IsIAO.
I shall conclude these brief remarks by wishing all of you the very best for a successful outcome of this Seventh International Conference of the peoples of the Red Sea Region and their environment.
Thank you for your attention.