Egyptian contacts with Africa gradually extended even further than Lower and Upper Nubia, bringing them into contact with a region in East Africa that they describe as Punt. Trading missions were sent there from at least the 5th Dynasty (2494-2345 bc) onwards in order to
Map of north-east Africa during the pharaonic period, showing Nubian sites and {inset) the probable location of the land of Punt
Obtain such products as gold, aromatic resins, African blackwood, ebony, ivory, slaves, and wild animals (for example, monkeys and cyncocephalous baboons). By the New Kingdom, such expeditions were being depicted in temples and tombs, showing the inhabitants of Punt as a people with a dark-reddish complexion and fine features; they were shown with long hair in the earlier paintings, but from the late i8th Dynasty onwards they had evidently adopted a more close-cropped style. The last definite indications of expeditions to Punt date to the time of the 20th-Dynasty ruler Rameses 111.
There is still some debate regarding the precise location of Punt, which was once identified with the region of modem Somalia. A strong argument has now been made for its location in either southern Sudan or the Eritrean region of Ethiopia, where the indigenous plants and animals equate most closely with those depicted in the Egyptian reliefs and paintings.
It used to be assumed (primarily on the basis of the scenes at Deir el-Bahri depicting Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt in the mid-i8th Dynasty) that the trading parties travelled by sea from the ports of Quseir or Mersa Gawasis, but it now seems likely that at least some of the Egyptian traders sailed south along the Nile and then took an overland route to Punt, perhaps making contact with the Puntites in the vicinity of Kurgus, at the fifth cataract.
The Deir el-Bahri scenes include depictions of the unusual Puntite settlements, comprising conical reed-built huts set on poles above the ground, and entered via ladders. Among the surroimding vegetation are palms and myrrh trees, some of the latter already in the process of being hacked apart in order to extract the myrrh. The scenes also show myrrh trees being loaded onto the ships so that the Egyptians could produce their own aromatics from them (and it has been argued that this in itself may be an argument for the combined Nile-overland route from Punt to Egypt, given the fact that such plants might well have died during the more difficult voyage northwards along the Red Sea coast). These myrrh trees might even have been replanted in the temple at Deir el-Bahri itself, judging from the surviving traces of tree pits there.
World History
