Land of Punt
"When I hold my love close, and her arms steal around me, I'm like a man translated to Punt, or like someone out in the reedflats, when the world suddenly bursts into flower." So wrote an ancient Egyptian poet, reaching for the most intoxicating comparison imaginable: the Land of Punt. For millennia, Punt occupied a singular place in the Egyptian imagination -- part trading partner, part paradise, part ancestral homeland. The Egyptians called it Ta Netjer, God's Land, and sent royal expeditions to its shores. Then, after the fall of the New Kingdom, Punt vanished from the record, becoming what scholars describe as "an unreal and fabulous land of myths and legends." Its location has been debated for over a century. We are only now, through the chemistry of mummified baboon teeth, beginning to pin it down.
God's Land
The earliest mention of Punt dates to the 25th century BCE, and for the next two thousand years, Egyptian records described it with a reverence reserved for sacred places. The label Ta Netjer -- God's Land -- referred to its position in the direction of the sunrise, east of Egypt, in the regions of the Sun God. Its products were the stuff of temples: frankincense and myrrh for incense, ebony for sacred furniture, gold for adornment. Some scholars went further. W. M. Flinders Petrie argued that the Egyptians' own Dynastic Race came from or through Punt. E. A. Wallis Budge stated flatly that "Egyptian tradition of the Dynastic Period held that the aboriginal home of the Egyptians was Punt." Whether or not the Egyptians truly believed they originated there, the emotional and spiritual weight they attached to the place was unmistakable. Punt was not merely a source of goods. It was where the divine and the earthly intersected.
The Expedition of Hatshepsut
The most detailed surviving account of Punt comes from the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, built around 1470 BCE. The temple's murals depict a royal trading expedition: ships laden with goods sailing to a land of stilt houses, exotic trees, and abundant wildlife. The King and Queen of Punt are shown greeting the Egyptian delegation. The Queen attracted particular attention from later scholars due to her unusual physical appearance, sometimes hypothesized as steatopygia or elephantiasis. The goods brought back -- myrrh trees, frankincense, ebony, gold, baboons, leopards, giraffes -- provide the most important clues to Punt's location, since these products and animals were abundantly found in the Horn of Africa but were less common or absent in Arabia. In 2018, Polish archaeologists working at Deir el-Bahri since 1961 discovered the only known ancient Egyptian depiction of a secretary bird in the Punt reliefs, a species native to sub-Saharan Africa.
Following the Baboons
Modern science has brought the most compelling evidence to bear on Punt's location, and the key witnesses are baboons. In 2010, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, analyzed hair from two mummified baboons using oxygen isotope analysis. The isotope signatures did not match baboons from Somalia or Yemen but did match those from Eritrea and eastern Ethiopia. A 2020 Dartmouth College study examined tissues from mummified hamadryas baboons recovered from New Kingdom and Ptolemaic sites in Egypt. Strontium ratios in their tooth enamel confirmed the animals were born in an area stretching across present-day Eritrea, Ethiopia, and northwestern Somalia. Then in 2023, a German-led team extracted mitochondrial DNA from a mummified baboon and compared it to museum specimens with known origins, concluding that the baboon came from modern-day Eritrea. The researchers suggested -- but could not prove -- that Punt may correspond to the classical port city of Adulis. The majority scholarly opinion now places Punt somewhere in the Horn of Africa, most likely encompassing parts of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia.
A Mystery That Endures
Despite the convergence of genetic, isotopic, and archaeological evidence, Punt's exact boundaries remain unresolved. Ian Shaw argued in 2003 for southern Sudan or the Eritrean region of Ethiopia. Simon Najovits pointed to the arc of Somalia, Djibouti, and the Red Sea coast of Eritrea and Sudan. Others have suggested the Gash Group sites in eastern Sudan and western Eritrea, where Egyptian pottery and faience beads from roughly 3000 to 1800 BCE indicate deep contact. Tanzanian archaeologist Felix A. Chami maintained that the cultural relationship between Egypt and Punt remains an area of ongoing debate. What is certain is this: for thousands of years, a civilization on the Horn of Africa was wealthy enough, sophisticated enough, and connected enough to trade with the most powerful empire of the ancient world as a peer. That the Egyptians composed love poems comparing ecstasy to the feeling of being in Punt tells us something about what was lost when that connection was severed -- a place so extraordinary that its memory outlasted the civilization that cherished it.
From the Air
The proposed location of Punt spans the Horn of Africa, centered approximately at 9.5°N, 48.0°E. From altitude, the Red Sea coast of Eritrea, the Gulf of Aden shoreline, and the Somali Peninsula are all visible -- the likely region encompassing the ancient land. Key airports in the area include Djibouti-Ambouli (HDAM), Berbera International (HCMI), and Asmara International (HHAS). The ancient Egyptian port of Mersa/Wadi Gawasis on the Egyptian Red Sea coast, where expedition ships were launched, lies far to the north.