A distant land in the records
Punt appears in Egyptian texts from the Old Kingdom onward as a source of aromatic resins, especially incense and myrrh, along with ebony, ivory, gold, animal skins and live animals. The Egyptians sometimes called it a “God’s Land”, a phrase that linked it with the gods and the sacred goods used in temples. Egyptian sources never give a modern-style map reference, so Punt is known through the goods and voyages attached to it.
Early voyages
The earliest well-known record is from the reign of Sahure, a king of the Fifth Dynasty in the twenty-fifth century BCE or thereabouts. Reliefs from his pyramid temple show seagoing ships, and the accompanying inscriptions mention goods from Punt. The Palermo Stone, a fragmentary royal annal, also seems to mention expeditions to the region. Later Old Kingdom officials also claimed to have travelled to Punt, and Pepi II’s reign includes references to such missions, though some details are damaged or uncertain.
Egyptian sources describe other routes too. Trade goods could arrive overland through Nubia, and Egyptian contact with the Nubian civilization to the south offered another way for the same products to reach the Nile valley.
Middle Kingdom ports on the Red Sea
During the Middle Kingdom, Egyptians organised expeditions by sending men and materials across the eastern desert to the Red Sea coast. Excavations at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, a harbour site on the coast, have produced rope, ship timbers, anchors and inscriptions that support this. Some of the ship parts were reused, and storage galleries cut into the rock held equipment. The site gives a rare physical picture of how an expedition was assembled. Ships were probably built or assembled inland, then dismantled, carried to the coast and reassembled, although how this worked in detail is still studied.
Inscriptions from the Middle Kingdom, including records tied to the reigns of Mentuhotep III and Senusret I, mention voyages to Punt. A literary Middle Kingdom story called the Shipwrecked Sailor describes a fictional tale of a marvellous island, which shows that such voyages captured the imagination, but it is a story rather than a record.
Hatshepsut’s expedition
The most famous account is carved on the walls of Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari. The reliefs show a fleet of five ships being loaded in Punt with incense trees, resin, ebony, ivory, gold, animal skins and live creatures, including baboons. Myrrh trees were carried in baskets, and the reliefs appear to show an attempt to grow them in Egypt, though how well this succeeded is unclear. The scenes also depict the Puntite ruler and a woman usually identified as his wife, both drawn in a very distinctive style, and houses on stilts.
The expedition is usually dated to around the ninth year of her rule, in the fifteenth century BCE. The images carried a political message. During the Hatshepsut reign, the queen, who ruled as pharaoh, stressed her success in bringing back the god’s own goods for the temple of Amun, presenting the voyage as an achievement of her piety and power. The reliefs are therefore partly royal self-presentation, which is a reason to read them carefully. The expedition also did not start the contact, since her sailors followed older routes.
Later contact
Punt continues to appear in New Kingdom records. Texts from the reign of Ramesses III mention expeditions, and Punt goods remain linked to temple supply. After the New Kingdom the references become less frequent, and later Egyptian rulers pursued trade with the south by other means, including the Ptolemaic kings, who set up ports on the Red Sea and sought elephants for war.
Where was Punt?
Scholars disagree. Most place it somewhere along the southern Red Sea coast, in what is now Sudan, Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, partly because the animals and plants shown in the Hatshepsut reliefs fit that region. Other proposals look at the southern Arabian coast, or at a broader area linked by trade across the southern Red Sea, since the incense trade of Arabia and the Horn of Africa overlapped in many ways. A recent line of research examined mummified baboons from Egypt, which suggests origins in the Horn of Africa region, but such results are still being evaluated and do not settle the question. Punt may also have been a general name for a region rather than a single kingdom.
What the voyages show
The expeditions show that Egypt organised long sea voyages with state backing at least from the third millennium BCE. The ships were not oceangoing in a modern sense, and sailing south along the Red Sea involved careful use of winds and coastal knowledge. They also show how much Egyptian religion depended on imported materials, since incense and fragrant resins were used in rituals. The details of each voyage vary, but the sources agree that the sea route to Punt was difficult, expensive and highly valued.