New evidence regarding political activities under Khufu's reign has recently been found at the site of the ancient port of Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast in the east of Egypt. The first traces of such a harbour were excavated in 1823 by John Gardner Wilkinson and James Burton, but the site was quickly abandoned and then forgotten over time. In 1954, French scholars François Bissey and René Chabot-Morisseau re-excavated the harbour, but their works were brought to an end by the Suez Crisis in 1956. In June 2011, an archaeological team led by French Egyptologists Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard, organized by the French Institute of Oriental Archeology (IFAO), restarted work at the site. Among other material, a collection of hundreds of papyrus fragments were found in 2013 dating back 4500 years.Pierre Tallet, Gregory Marouard: Wadi al-Jarf - An early pharaonic harbour on the Red Sea coast. In: Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 40, Cairo 2012, p. 40-43. The papyrus is currently exhibited at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass called this ancient papyrus “the greatest discovery in Egypt in the 21st century.”
