Egyptians Map the Red Sea Route
Around 1470 BCE, during the reign of Hatshepsut, Egypt sent a seaborne expedition down the Red Sea to a land its records call Punt. The voyage is the best-documented example of Egyptian maritime trade in the Bronze Age, and it matters because it shows a state organizing long-distance exploration and commerce centuries before the better-known seafaring of later Mediterranean peoples. The date is approximate, since Hatshepsut's reign is itself dated only within a few years by modern chronologies.
Egypt's interest in Punt was far older. Inscriptions from the Old Kingdom, including reigns in the third millennium BCE, mention voyages to obtain incense, resins, and other luxuries. Egyptians needed myrrh and frankincense for temple ritual and embalming, and they also valued ebony, ivory, gold, and exotic animals. Earlier trade may have passed through intermediaries overland, and some expeditions had probably lapsed during periods of political instability. Hatshepsut's reign, a time of internal peace and prosperity, offered the resources to revive and showcase the route.
The main evidence is the set of painted reliefs in Hatshepsut's mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes. They show a fleet of ships with sails and many oars, laden with goods, arriving at a coastal community of pile-built houses among palms and incense trees. Egyptian envoys exchange gifts with the local ruler and his family, and the ships return carrying living incense trees in baskets, along with resin, wood, and animals. Ancient shipbuilding evidence from Red Sea port sites such as Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, where archaeologists have found ship timbers, anchors, and rope, supports the idea that expeditions were assembled in pieces, carried across the desert from the Nile, and launched from the coast.
Where Punt lay remains debated. Most scholars favor a region around the southern Red Sea, including parts of Eritrea, Sudan, and perhaps Ethiopia, partly because of the plants and animals depicted. Others have proposed locations across the strait in southwestern Arabia, and Punt may have been a broad trading zone rather than a single kingdom. Analysis of mummified baboons believed to come from Punt has pointed toward the Eritrea and Ethiopia region.
The consequences were both practical and political. The voyage secured supplies for religious life and demonstrated the queen's success, which she emphasized as a divine commission from the god Amun. It also reinforced a pattern of Red Sea contact that later Egyptian rulers, and eventually Ptolemaic Egypt, would continue. The expedition's legacy lies in the picture it gives of early exchange between northeastern Africa and the Horn, an old network that connected the Nile Valley with the incense-producing lands along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.