The Land of Punt and the Somali coast: what the Egyptian records say

In short

Punt (in Egyptian, Pwnt) appears in Egyptian records for more than 1,300 years. The Egyptians also called it Ta-netjer, "God's Land". They went there by ship for myrrh and incense to burn in their temples, and for ebony, ivory, gold, animal skins and live animals.

No Egyptian text gives a map. Where Punt lay is still argued. The main views are set out below, each with its source. The modern Somali state of Puntland took its name from Punt (BBC News, Puntland profile).

Every recorded Egyptian contact with Punt

The American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted collected the early records in 1906 (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 2, §247):

• Fourth Dynasty (about 2600–2500 BC). A man from Punt appears as a servant of one of the sons of King Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid.
• Fifth Dynasty. King Sahure sent an expedition to Punt. King Isesi sent another, which brought back a dancing dwarf.
• Sixth Dynasty. Under Pepi II an officer named Enenkhet was killed by "the Sand-dwellers on the coast" while building a ship for Punt. Another expedition went under the assistant treasurer Thethy.
• Eleventh Dynasty (about 2000 BC). Henu, chief treasurer of Mentuhotep III, sent an expedition to Punt and went with it as far as the Red Sea coast.
• Twelfth Dynasty. An officer of Amenemhet II named Khentkhetwer recorded his safe return from Punt. Another expedition went under Senusret II. A Middle Kingdom story, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, is set on a voyage to Punt.
• Eighteenth Dynasty (about 1470 BC). Queen Hatshepsut's expedition, carved on her temple at Deir el-Bahari (see below).
• Twentieth Dynasty (about 1150 BC). Papyrus Harris I, from the reign of Ramesses III, describes ships returning from Punt and their goods carried overland to Coptos on the Nile (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 4, §407).

Breasted noted that apart from Hatshepsut's reliefs, "none of these sources contains more than the meagerest reference to the fact of the expedition" (vol. 2, §247).

Hatshepsut's expedition, about 1470 BC

The fullest record of Punt is a series of painted reliefs on the middle terrace of Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahari in Thebes. The expedition returned just before the ninth year of her reign (Breasted, vol. 2, §246). Five ships are shown.

The land. The reliefs show the houses of the people of Punt "set on poles", among trees, beside water (§254).

The ruler. The chief of Punt is named Perehu. Behind him walks his wife, named Eti in Breasted's reading (Ati in other translations), then two sons and a daughter, and three servants driving "the ass which bears his wife" (§254, 258).

The meeting. The text over the people of Punt reads (§257):

"Why have ye come hither unto this land, which the people know not? Did ye come down upon the ways of heaven, or did ye sail upon the waters, upon the sea of God's-Land?"

The Egyptian inscriptions present the people of Punt as paying tribute. Joyce Tyldesley, a biographer of Hatshepsut, reads it as a trading mission that the temple texts describe in the language of tribute (Tyldesley, Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh, 1996, pp. 145–149).

The cargo. Over the ships (§265):

"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 ihmut-incense, sonter-incense, eye-cosmetic, with apes, monkeys, dogs, and with skins of the southern panther, with natives and their children. Never was brought the like of this for any king who has been since the beginning."

Thirty-one live myrrh trees were brought back to be planted at the temple of Amun (§272). The reliefs were later damaged: Hatshepsut's name and figures were hacked out after her death, and Amun's name was erased under Amenhotep IV (§246, note).

Where was Punt? What each source says

• The Egyptian port. Excavations led by Kathryn Bard and Rodolfo Fattovich at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis on Egypt's Red Sea coast found ship timbers, anchors and inscribed stelae naming Punt expeditions. This was a harbour for the voyage, so Punt lay south along the Red Sea (Boston University, Mersa/Wadi Gawasis project).
• The baboon study, 2020. Egypt imported sacred hamadryas baboons from Punt. Nathaniel Dominy and colleagues measured oxygen and strontium isotopes in 155 modern baboons from 77 places and compared them with mummified baboons. Two New Kingdom mummies "were sourced to a region that encompasses much of present-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, and portions of Somalia and Yemen." The authors write that this "corroborates the balance of scholarly conjecture on the location of Punt" (Dominy et al., eLife, 2020).
• The follow-up DNA study, 2023. Mitochondrial DNA from a later baboon mummy (about 800–540 BC) matched modern baboons in Eritrea, Ethiopia and eastern Sudan, pointing to the port of Adulis in Eritrea for that later period (Grathwol et al., eLife, 2023).
• Archaeologists of the Somali coast. Neville Chittick wrote that "to the Ancient Egyptians, the land of Punt, usually identified with the northern Somali coast, was equated with the land of incense" (Chittick 1979, p. 273). Sada Mire places Punt "possibly somewhere on the African side of the southern Red Sea Coast" and writes that it "may well be the area of current-day Somalia/Somaliland" (Mire 2015, African Archaeological Review 32).
• Other views. Jacke Phillips reviewed the evidence linking Punt and later Aksum (Phillips, "Punt and Aksum: Egypt and the Horn of Africa", Journal of African History 38, 1997). Dimitri Meeks argued for western Arabia (Meeks, "Locating Punt", in O'Connor and Quirke, Mysterious Lands, 2003).
• Names. W. H. Schoff recorded Eduard Glaser's view that the names Pano and Opone, on the Somali coast in the 1st-century Periplus, echo "Punt" (Schoff 1912, notes p. 87).

"Puntite" claims and looting

Since 2012, sites in Somaliland have been reported as "Pharaonic" or "Puntite". Sada Mire was asked by the Somaliland government to look into them in 2014. She found that the sites shown to her were cairns emptied of their stones, and that a man was selling so-called "Pharaonic" sculptures for up to US$15,000. She wrote that the sculptures and the sites "must be examined properly", and that demand for them has driven looting (Mire 2015).

Related pages

• Before 1300: the ancient Somali lands
• The Somali ports in the Periplus
• Frankincense and myrrh: the ancient Somali incense trade