Voyages to the Land of Punt
The Land of Punt was a neighbour of Ancient Egypt whose precise location is unknown but has variously been interpreted to have covered parts of modern Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda or Saudi Arabia/Yemen.
The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut famously mounted a trading expedition to Punt in 1493 BCE. The expedition used five ships with a complement of around 210 men. The route was probably overland to the Red Sea and then south by ship; distances along the Red Sea would have been in the order of 1,500–2,000km and the hazardous round trip must have taken several months. Frankincense and myrrh, and possibly cinnamon, were among the goods brought back to Egypt. The expedition is described in beautiful narrative reliefs at the temple complex of Deir El-Bahari near Luxor, and includes the following description of preparations for the return journey:The loading of the ships very heavily with marvels of the country of Punt; all goodly fragrant woods of God’s-Land, heaps of myrrh-resin, with fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory, with green gold of Emu, with cinnamon wood, khesyt wood, with ihmutincense, sonter-incense.55
This wasn’t the first Egyptian mission to Punt (the oldest known was in the twenty-fifth century BCE – in which the expedition returned with 80,000 measures of myrrh, among other things) but is the best documented and most famous example.56 There may have been other unrecorded expeditions. The cinnamon (if it was cinnamon – the translation is equivocal) would have come from India or Southeast Asia.