The Egyptians are rightly admired for producing some of the ancient world’s most accurate and sensitive drawings of plants and animals. From the Old Kingdom onward, scenes of papyrus thickets, animal husbandry, bird netting, fishing, and hunting—virtually every aspect of the natural world—captured details that only long and careful observation could have made possible. Egyptians were endlessly fascinated by nature, and Egyptian artisans were intent on depicting it accurately.
In the New Kingdom, two walls show this particularly well and, curiously, both depict scenes of foreign lands. The more recent is the “Botanical Garden” of Thutmes III, in the Akh-Menou, the king’s festival hall in the Temple of Amen at Karnak. The earlier, by about twenty-five years, is Queen Hatshepsut’s maritime expedition to the land of Punt, depicted here.
The great American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted called the Punt reliefs “undoubtedly the most interesting series of reliefs in Egypt.” That is hardly an exaggeration. The scenes form an ancient ethnographic, biological, and geographical record showing how the Egyptians tried to make sense of this strange country and fit it into their view of the world. They depicted what in Punt struck them as odd, humorous, or especially characteristic. Egyptian art frequently included representations of foreign people or foreign animals, but nowhere else do whole scenes give such attention to foreign architecture, foreign activities, and foreign landscapes. The Punt reliefs do that, precisely and uniquely.
Apparently, the Egyptians were so impressed by the unusual plants and animals they found that they made detailed records on the spot and used their notes when they undertook the temple decoration. This may reflect a realization that their world had grown, and that Egypt’s gods had extended their authority and become gods whose powers extended far beyond the Nile Valley.
Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt set out in the eighth year of her reign. Hers was not the first reference to Punt—one mention may date as early as Dynasty 4—nor was it the last. But Hatshepsut’s is the most complete, and certainly one of the most charming.
Egyptologists think that Punt was located in the Horn of Africa, in modern Somalia or Eritrea. This is based on three observations: Punt was accessible to overland expeditions from Egypt, because earlier Egyptian texts make reference to such journeys; it was also accessible by sea, as the Punt reliefs attest; and its flora, fauna, and architecture, as shown in the Punt reliefs, are consistent with what one would find on the Red Sea coast of Africa, not in the Mediterranean, Western Asia, Arabia, or Europe.
For example, the aquatic scene across the bottom of the wall indicates that Punt must be in East Africa. There are turtles, parrot-fish, scorpion-fish, soldier-fish, trigger-fish, wrasse, squid, and spiny lobster among the saltwater species, and tilapia, catfish, and turtles among the freshwater species. All the saltwater species are common to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, while the freshwater species are known in East Africa but not in the Arabian Peninsula. (A recent suggestion that Punt lay east of the Gulf of Aqaba is not widely accepted.)
The Punt reliefs can be divided into several sections, each illustrating a different stage of the expedition. The lower registers on the left (south) end wall show the landscape of Punt and the reception of the Egyptians by local officials.
The houses of Punt are beehive-shaped grass huts, mounted on stilts to protect them from damaging floods, wild animals or insects, or perhaps to keep them cool in summer. A ladder gives access to the living platform. Several such houses are scattered throughout a grove of dom- and date-palms. Long- and short-horned cattle graze nearby.
Birds flutter in the trees; a dog sits before its master’s hut. More exotic animals can also be seen: a giraffe, a panther, primates, and what may be a rhinoceros.The Egyptian army has pitched tents “in the myrrh-terraces of Punt on the side of the sea,” and the king’s messenger is presenting jewelry, beads, daggers, and metal axes in exchange for the raw materials of Punt that they will load onto their ships. Egyptian traders had visited Punt before.
We know this from several different sources. Yet the Puntite officials express surprise at seeing them. Above the scene they ask, “Why have you come here into this land, which the people [of Egypt] know not? Did you come down upon the ways of heaven, or did you sail upon the waters, upon the sea of God’s-Land?” No answer is recorded. Among the Puntite officials their chief, Perehu, stands with his morbidly obese wife, Ity, known to Egyptologists as the Queen of Punt. Originally, they were also accompanied by two sons and a daughter as obese as her mother, but these figures have been destroyed. Singled out for special mention, and perhaps intended as a wry comment on the size of queen, is “the donkey which carried his wife.” A plaster cast has replaced the original carving of the Queen of Punt, which is now on display in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Medical historians have written numerous articles about the cause of the queen’s obesity, but none of the diagnoses they have proposed (most commonly elephantiasis or steatopygy) is widely accepted. In contrast to the women, Puntite men seem almost Egyptian in their physique, facial features, and costume. Even their skin is the red color of Egyptian males, not the black of Nubians.
In the upper registers, Egyptian sailors load their ships with incense and other raw materials. The cargo includes “all goodly fragrant woods of God’s-Land, heaps of myrrh resin, with fresh myrrh trees, with ebony and pure ivory...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 since the beginning.” The men strain as they lift the heavy bundles into the holds. Men carry carefully bundled myrrh trees and one of them cries, “Watch your feet! Behold! The load is very heavy!” A couple of men remark that the trees are to be planted at Dayr al-Bahari, and their mates seem excited at the prospect of bringing such delights back to the Theban court. Around the corner, at the left (south) end of the rear (west) wall, the Egyptian fleet is shown in the lower registers arriving in Punt and, at right, returning to Egypt. Once the ships have returned to Thebes their cargo is weighed and measured by Horus and a Nubian god, Dedun. “Thoth records them in writing, Sefkhet counts the numbers. Her majesty herself is acting with her two hands, the best of myrrh is upon all her limbs, her fragrance is divine dew, her odor is mingled with Punt, her skin is gilded with electrum, shining as to the stars in the midst of the festival hall, before the whole land.” Further right, Hatshepsut announces the success of the voyage and offers its cargo to Amen. The incense-trees are shown already thriving in the gardens of Amen’s temple at Karnak.There were five ships in Hatshepsut’s fleet (five are shown arriving, 160 DETAILS OF THE PUNT RELIEFS SHOWING AN EGYPTIAN BOAT.
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five departing). The drawings of the ships are detailed and have been carefully studied by marine historians, who consider them among the best nautical representations from the New Kingdom. They calculate that the boats were about 25 meters (81 feet) long and narrow, perhaps with only a 7-meter (23-foot) beam and a 2-meter (6-foot) draft, designed to cut quickly through the dangerous waters of the Red Sea. Prevailing winds on the Red Sea generally blow from north to south from June through September and from south to north from November through March. The rest of the year, they are unpredictable. The sailors would have had to row into the wind for a fair part of the journey.
The alternative, tacking, could have added another 800 kilometers (480 miles) to the already 1500 kilometer (900 mile) long journey.
Assuming that the boats sailed eight or nine hours a day, stopping in inlets and coves along the way, and assuming that they could sail or be rowed at about 5 kilometers (3 miles) an hour, the one-way trip would have taken between forty and fifty days. Perhaps they spent three or four months in Punt negotiating, assembling, and loading their cargo. There may also have been marching time ashore, for we know from other documents that it rained in Punt, and that suggests that the country may have lay in the interior.
Unless the Puntites had prepared in advance for the Egyptians’ arrival and assembled their goods at one seaside location, the Egyptians may have had to hike into the highlands to collect the raw materials they wanted. How long, then, did the trip take? Consider this: the boats were probably constructed at Coptos (modern Qift) at the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Thebes. They were taken apart and they and their cargo carried overland in donkey caravans 200 kilometers (120 miles) through the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea hills to the port of Qusayr. There they were reassembled. That arduous, hot and dusty journey through rugged desert terrain probably took two months. Sailing south to Punt took another six to eight weeks. Allow at least three months in Punt, then three months to sail back to Qusayr. From there, the crew traveled overland to the Nile, then on to Thebes. This would have taken another two months. The total elapsed time would have been nearly a year.
The logistics of such an expedition were complex. Each of the five ships had places for thirty oarsmen and there would have been a back-up crew plus laborers, officials, scribes, and translators—say 250–300 men in all. They would have had to leave Qusayr with enough provisions and fresh water for the journey. On the return, they would have to carry an equal supply of food and water plus the cargo from Punt. Little wonder that Hatshepsut devoted an entire wall of her temple to its story.
From" The Illustrated Guide to Luxor" by kent R.Weeks ,published by the American University in Cairo Press. Copyright © 2005 White Star S.p.a