Egypt’s Land of Punt shipped gold, incense and ebony
Ancient Egyptian records praise Punt as a trading partner that sent gold, aromatic resins, blackwood, ebony, ivory and wild animals. Pharaoh Sahure launched a famous Fifth Dynasty voyage in the twenty-fifth century BC, yet Khufu’s era already knew Puntite gold. Where exactly Punt sat is still argued.
Egyptian texts sometimes call Punt Ta netjer, God's Land, a label tied to the sunrise regions east of Egypt that supplied temple goods such as incense. Where it actually lay has been debated for generations. Candidates run along the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean coast, from northeastern Sudan through Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti to northern Somalia, and it may even have reached across to southern Arabia. Most historians now place it in East Africa, recent work points to northwestern Eritrea, and the modern Somali region of Puntland takes its name from it.
Contact was long-lived. After Sahure's voyage, more missions followed in the Sixth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Eighteenth dynasties. Around 2000 BC an officer named Hannu organised expeditions for Mentuhotep III, though whether he sailed himself is unclear, and Middle Kingdom storytellers celebrated the trade in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. Egypt seems never to have fought the Puntites, perhaps because they lived too far away for conquest.
The best-known trip belongs to Hatshepsut, who built a Red Sea fleet and sent five ships under Chancellor Nehsi. Reliefs at her temple at Deir el-Bahri present the mission as a tribute expedition, but it was really a trading run, and they show the King and Queen of Punt and the land's trees in detail. In 2005 Kathryn Bard's team at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis found ship remains, inscribed stelae and cedar planks from that 15th-century BC voyage, identifying the harbour used for the roughly 1,200-kilometre run south.
Trade outlasted Hatshepsut under Thutmose III and Amenhotep III and ran into the 20th dynasty, when Papyrus Harris I describes cargo hauled overland from the coast to Coptos. After the New Kingdom, Punt faded into legend, surviving in love songs about lovers feeling carried away to Punt.
Source: Land of Punt
