Hatshepsut's Trading Expedition to Punt
Hatshepsut sent a trading expedition to Punt around 1470 BC and had the whole thing carved on the walls of her mortuary temple. Punt was a land Egypt had traded with for a millennium, somewhere on the Horn of Africa or the southern Red Sea coast — Eritrea, Djibouti or Somalia are the usual candidates, and the question is not settled. It supplied the aromatic resins that Egyptian temple ritual consumed in enormous quantity, and which had otherwise to be bought through intermediaries. Five ships went, carried in sections overland to the Red Sea or sailed down a canal, and came back with what the reliefs list: myrrh and frankincense trees with their root balls wrapped for transplanting, ebony, ivory, gold, eye cosmetic, apes, monkeys, dogs, leopard skins and people. The relief at Deir el-Bahri is the reason it is remembered. It shows the Puntite houses on stilts reached by ladders, the fish of the Red Sea rendered accurately enough to identify by species, the loading of the ships, and the ruler of Punt with his wife Ati — depicted with an obesity or lipodystrophy so specific that physicians have been diagnosing her from the wall for a century. Hatshepsut planted the myrrh trees in terraces in front of the temple, and the pits are still there. She presented the expedition as a divine command from Amun to open the way to the land of the god. It is the fullest visual record of an ancient trading voyage anywhere. Egypt was importing directly from a source it had previously reached only through middlemen, which is the commercial point the propaganda is wrapped around.
- Year: 1470 BCE
- Category: Economic
