If there’s one thing we can count on the ancient Egyptians for, it’s documentation
- they kept detailed records of everything from the lives of their pharaohs and the qualities
of their gods, to the weather and harvests, to their trading expeditions with their neighbours,
like the utopian Land of Punt.
The problem is, there is no record of the Land of Punt aside from the ancient Egyptian
sources, and they don’t mention where exactly the Land of Punt was located, so archeologists
have yet to find any evidence of this mythical place.
How did an entire ancient country disappear from history?
According to the ancient Egyptian sources, the Land of Punt was a prosperous, peaceful
nation rich in resources.
The Egyptians documented many successful trading missions with the people of Punt, trading
their valuable goods for Punt’s exotic spices, wild animals, slaves and other treasures.
Trading parties returned to Egypt loaded with precious items like gold, obsidian, ebony,
and staves of wood, which were exceedingly rare in the Egyptian desert.
Punt was also apparently reknowned for its myrrh, a resin used to make incense, which
was very important for Egyptian temple rituals.
Ancient Egyptian paintings depict the people of Punt as looking very different from the
Egyptians - Punt men had long hair and very little facial hair.
The people lived in round huts on stilts, which means they likely lived in an area prone
to flooding.
The paintings also depicted palm and myrrh trees and exotic animals.
While it’s helpful to have a wealth of information about the Land of Punt from the ancient Egyptian
sources, it’s odd that no other sources from the time mention The Land of Punt.
Does this mean that the people of Punt only dealt with the Egyptians?
That’s pretty unlikely - ancient civilizations - especially ones as advanced as the Land
of Punt appeared to be - relied heavily on their alliances with various other tribes
and peoples.
Ancient alliances were constantly shifting, and a nation that depended on only one ally
likely wouldn’t survive long in the ancient world.
It’s possible that other civilizations that interacted with the Land of Punt called them
by a different name, or that their records didn’t survive the centuries to make it
to us.
Besides, no one in ancient times was as meticulous about record-keeping as the Egyptians!
It’s also odd that the Egyptians didn’t go to war with the Land of Punt.
It was extremely common for the ancient Egyptians to take over the lands of their enemies, and
even conquer their weaker allies.
The Land of Punt was rich in resources and would appear to have been ripe for Egyptian
conquest, so why didn’t they try to take control of this prosperous land?
Perhaps it was too far away from the centre of Egyptian power, or maybe the people of
Punt were more formidable than the Egyptian sources make them out to be.
They may even have had alliances with more powerful civilizations that helped keep the
power-hungry Egyptians in check.
So where was the Land of Punt?
The Egyptian descriptions of the Land of Punt and its people do give us some clues about
the possible location of this ancient settlement.
Some of the animals shown in Egyptian paintings of Punt are known to live primarily on the
Arabian Peninsula around the Red Sea.
However, many of the trading goods from Punt that were most prized by the Egyptians may
point to it being located south of Egypt in Northern Africa.
Still others think it may never have existed at all, except in Egyptian myth.
Unfortunately, the ancient Egyptians didn’t think to leave us a map or detailed directions,
so we still have no idea where exactly the Land of Punt was.
For all we know, it’s buried under the sand, if it even existed at all…
The first documented mention of the Land of Punt in the ancient Egyptian sources dates
to around twenty-five hundred B.C.E during the Old Kingdom period, the age of the pyramid
builders.
The Palermo Stone is one of the best sources of information available to us about the first
five dynasties of ancient Egypt.
The large piece of black basalt stone is inscribed on both sides with hieroglyphic text, and
it was originally part of a much bigger piece that likely stood in an ancient Egyptian temple
or other important place.
The Palermo Stone lists the names of each ruler, as well as a list of memorable events
from each year of their reign, giving us a year-by-year run down of the major moments
of ancient Egyptian life.
During the fairly peaceful and prosperous reign of King Sahure from around 2487 B.C.E.
to 2475 B.C.E., the Palermo Stone shows the first record of a trading mission to the exotic
Land of Punt.
The trading party returned with more than twenty thousand staves of wood for building
ships, tools and cities - this was an incredibly valuable trade considering that wood was extremely
hard to find in the desert around Egypt.
The party also brought back six thousand measures of gold, a good amount of exotic aromatic
spices, and eighty thousand measures of myrrh.
As the study of ancient Egypt took off, so did the number of theories about the Land
of Punt.
By the eighteen-fifties, the new Antiquities Service of Egypt had been established in response
to the rampant ransacking of tombs by amateur archeologists and Egypt-philes earlier in
the century.
This new organization protected these valuable historic sites from treasure hunters and kicked
off more than a century and a half of proper research into the ancient Egyptians and their
neighbours.
However, legitimizing the study of ancient Egyptian sources did not solve the riddle
of the location of the Land of Punt.
Heinrich Karl Brugsch was a German Egyptologist who first travelled to Egypt in eighteen fifty-three,
where he met French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette.
Despite working closely together, the two scholars came to drastically different conclusions
about the location of the Land of Punt.
Brugsch was confident that mention of the prized aromatic spices that the Land of Punt
were known for pointed to its being located on the Arabian Peninsula.
Mariette, on the other hand, had discovered a hieroglyph that listed Punt among other
lands to the South of Egypt.
That, combined with wall paintings of the Land of Punt depicting animals that were distinct
to Africa, led Mariette to conclude that the Land of Punt must have been located in Northern
Africa, near present-day Somalia.
The area was famous in ancient times for its aromatics, especially myrrh, which was highly
prized by the Egyptians.
To this day, the semi-autonomous region within modern Somalia located at the very tip of
the Horn of Africa goes by the name of Puntland.
While this might seem to add credibility to Mariette’s theory, the name was actually
chosen in nineteen ninety-eight because of the theory that this was the original location
of the Land of Punt.
Relations between the ancient Egyptians and the people of Punt appeared to remain friendly
throughout the centuries - no small miracle in brutal ancient times!
Trading expeditions continued throughout the Middle Kingdom period, with sources listing
expeditions of three-thousand men and more travelling to Punt to trade.
Some of the best information we have about the Land of Punt and its people comes from
the New Kingdom period.
A large relief painted in the burial temple of female Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt
for twenty years around fourteen-fifty B.C.E., depicts a large trading mission to the Land
of Punt as one of the greatest accomplishments of her reign.
The relief provided many important clues about Punt, including depictions of the people,
their homes, the native animals and plants and even the names of the rulers at the time
- King Parahu and Queen Ati.
Unfortunately, the relief neglected to provide an accurate map or directions to Punt.
The last recorded trading expedition to the Land of Punt happened in the twelfth century
B.C.E., under the reign of Ramses the Third.
Records of this trip make it clear that at least part of the journey involved sailing
through the Red Sea, which would point to the Land of Punt being located somewhere in
the Arabian Peninsula.
When friendly people ruled the lands of Nubia along the Nile River just south of Egypt,
the Egyptians were able to use the River to reach the Land of Punt.
But, when their southern neighbours were hostile, the Egyptians were forced to assemble their
ships in the Nile, then disassemble them and transport the pieces a hundred miles over
land to where the Nile meets the Red Sea at Saww.
There, the ships would be reassembled and set out for Punt, and when they returned,
the goods they brought back from the trading mission would then be carried back to Egypt
using donkeys.
Archeologists have unearthed some amazing discoveries at Saww that support this theory,
including ship timbers, stone anchors and ropes dating back to the Middle Kingdom.
They also uncovered cargo boxes with painted hieroglyphs that read: “Wonders of Punt”,
as well as pieces of ebony and obsidian that they assume came from Punt, since they weren’t
native to Egypt.
Even with the wealth of evidence uncovered at Saww, experts still couldn’t agree on
where exactly the Land of Punt was located.
In the nineteen sixties, German anthropologist Rolf Herzog declared that the Land of Punt
must have been located along the Upper Nile just south of Egypt based on the plants and
animals depicted in the relief paintings and other sources.
However, the reliefs also clearly showed travel by sea, and this location would not involve
sea travel, so the mystery remained unsolved.
In the nineteen seventies, British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen noted that the Land of Punt
was unlikely to have been located in the Arabian Peninsula, and he used linguistic evidence
to support his theory.
He explained that the ancient languages of the Arabian Peninsula did not have a hard
“p” sound, so it would be unlikely that both the name of the civilization and the
name of one of their rulers would start with the letter “p”.
After four decades of researching and writing about the Land of Punt, Kitchen concluded
that it must have been located in present-day Eastern Sudan or Northern Ethiopia.
Rather than resolve the question, Kitchen’s theory only spawned more alternative ideas
about the location of the Land of Punt.
One of the most interesting and controversial ideas is that the Land of Punt never actually
existed at all - except in the myths and imaginations of the ancient Egyptians.
An alternate ancient Egyptian name for the Land of Punt translates to “Land of the
Gods”, and the sources allude to the fact that the Egyptians believed that they originally
came from the Land of Punt.
The divine mother goddess of the ancient Egyptian religion Hathor was said to have come from
Punt, and the Egyptians seemed to consider Punt to be the origin of their culture.
An ancient Eygtian song references Punt the way someone might mention heaven in a modern
love song - the lyrics say: “When I hold my love close, and her arms steal around me,
I’m like a man translated to Punt, when the world suddenly bursts into flower.”Whether
this means that the Land of Punt was the ancestral homeland of the people who would later found
Egypt, or simply a mythical land of the gods is still unclear.
Even in more recent years, the question of the location of the Land of Punt remains a
hotly debated one.
A two-thousand and three paper by Dmitri Meeks revisited the idea of Punt being located on
the Arabian Peninsula, this time placing it in Yemen, which Meeks believes is the only
location on the peninsula that is situated correctly relative to Egypt while being in
contact with near eastern and Mediterranean neighbours.
This theory was further supported by Stanley Balanda, who reinterpreted some text from
the Hatshepsut’s relief about where the trading party made camp.
Rather than pitching tents “by the sea”, he read it as pitching tents “on both sides
of the sea”.
If in fact the Land of Punt is located on the Red Sea, then there’s only one place
that could match this description - the Straits of Bab el Mandeb, where present-day Djibouti
and Yemen face each other across a narrow channel of water barely as wide as the English
Channel.
While it does seem that experts are getting closer to coming to a consensus about the
location of the Land of Punt, archeologists have yet to unearth any hard evidence of settlement
in any of the proposed locations.
Archeology in the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea area is still in its early days, so
hopefully future digs will unearth new evidence to help us finally locate the Land of Punt.
Until then, scholars will continue to debate the location of the Land of Punt.
Whether it turns out to have been in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Arabia or even just
in the imagination of the ancient Egyptians, we’ll just have to wait to find out for
sure where the mysterious Land of Punt was and where it went.
Now go check out our other videos, like this one called “How An Advanced Ancient Civilization
Mysteriously Vanished”, or this other video right now!