The Land of Punt

A land known through Egypt

Punt is known almost entirely from Egyptian records, which describe it as a distant, rich land and sometimes call it "God's Land." No site in Punt itself has been identified by archaeologists. What survives are Egyptian inscriptions, temple reliefs, harbor remains and the goods Egyptians brought home.

Expeditions

The first clear mention comes from the Palermo Stone, which records an expedition around 2500 BCE under King Sahure that returned with myrrh-type resin and large amounts of electrum, a natural gold-silver alloy. Middle Kingdom inscriptions from around 1985 BCE and roughly fifty years later describe expeditions of 3,000 and 3,700 men. At Mersa Gawasis on the Red Sea, the ancient harbor of Saww, excavations led by Kathryn Bard and Rodolfo Fattovich since 2001 have found Middle Kingdom ship timbers, anchors and rope. They also found obsidian, which does not occur naturally in Egypt and may have come from Punt.

The best-known voyage was sent by Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BCE. Reliefs on the Portico of Punt in her temple at Deir el-Bahari show the queen announcing the expedition, Egyptian soldiers under the official Nehesy in Punt, and Egyptians carrying balsam trees. The last known expedition dates to the reign of Ramesses III in the twelfth century BCE.

Goods

Myrrh was the most prized import. Other goods linked to Punt include incense, ebony and other woods, gold and electrum, and obsidian. Live baboons were also brought to Egypt, which is why their mummified remains have become evidence in the search for Punt.

Where was Punt?

Scholars have long disagreed. NOVA summarizes the main proposals. In the nineteenth century Heinrich Brugsch argued for Arabia and Auguste Mariette for the Somali coast. In the 1960s Rolf Herzog placed Punt on the upper Nile in Sudan. Kenneth Kitchen, from 1971 onward, favored eastern Sudan and northern Ethiopia, the most widely accepted view in NOVA's account. In 2003 Dmitri Meeks argued for the western coast of Arabia, and later work proposed lands on both sides of the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The documentation project at Hatshepsut's temple notes that the route, whether by sea, along the Nile or overland, is also debated.

A 2020 study in eLife by Nathaniel Dominy and colleagues tested mummified baboons using oxygen and strontium isotopes. One New Kingdom baboon was born outside Egypt, and the two New Kingdom specimens pointed to a region covering much of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, with parts of Somalia and Yemen. The authors say this fits a Horn of Africa or southern Red Sea location for Punt but stress that their sample was tiny and their results provisional.

Significance

Punt's trade shows that Egypt kept up long-distance sea contact with the southern Red Sea and the Horn of Africa for more than a thousand years. It is one of the earliest documented long-distance trade links between African peoples.