The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The description in Egyptian texts of Punt as ‘the god’s land’ is reminiscent of the way Dilmun was described in Sumerian texts as ‘the abode of the Blessed’. These places had a mysterious aura to those who heard about them in the third millennium BC; and this is a constant feature of maritime history – the news of distant and wonderful lands where (as in Columbus’s Hispaniola many centuries later) neither food nor fresh water was lacking and paradise lay either here or not far away.9 And this sense of awe is abundantly present in the finely crafted ‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’ written on papyrus somewhere between about 2500 BC and 2200 BC, which tells of a remarkable voyage to the region of Punt, though the story is really a tale of a visit to another world entirely, the world of the spirits.10 Here, a sailor relates the story of his voyage to a royal courtier, who clearly regards him as an ancient mariner full of yarns, and attempts to brush him aside with the words ‘It is tiresome to speak to you.’ However, the courtier was being very unfair. The sailor had set out for the royal mines, probably gold mines, in a ship 120 cubits long and forty cubits wide, with 120 sailors ‘of the pick of Egypt’, for, ‘whether they looked at the sky or looked at the land, they were more courageous than lions’. It might have helped them more to look at the sea, because although the sailor praised them for their ability to foretell a storm, a wave of eight cubits smashed into the ship, which broke apart and sank with the loss of all lives apart from this sailor, who was cast upon an island rich in fruit and vegetables, fish and fowl, for ‘there was nothing that was not on it’. Indeed, his arms were soon so full of the rich produce of the land that he had to set some of what he had gathered on the ground. Just when he felt so safe and refreshed, a great serpent, with (oddly) a beard two cubits long, came upon him; his body glistened with gold and he had eyebrows of real lapis lazuli. This was a rather different beast to the serpent who led Adam and Eve astray; he wanted to know how the sailor had arrived: ‘Who brought you to the island, with water on all sides?’ He told his story and the serpent seemed satisfied, saying:

  ‘Fear not, fear not, young man! Do not turn pale, for you have reached me. Look, the god has let you live and has brought you to the island of the spirit. There is nothing that is not on it and it is full of all good things. You will spend month upon month until you have completed four months on this island. Then a boat will come from home with sailors whom you know and you will go home with them and die in your city … and you will embrace your children, kiss your wife, and see your house. This is better than anything.’

  In gratitude the sailor stretched out on the ground in obeisance and promised to bring word of the noble serpent to his ruler, who would certainly send fine presents of laudanum, malabathrum (cinnamon leaves), terebinth, balsam and incense. He said: ‘I shall have boats brought for you laden with all the wealth of Egypt’; and he would arrange sacrifices in honour of this divine snake. But the serpent was unimpressed, saying: ‘You don’t have much myrrh, or any form of incense. But I am the ruler of Punt, myrrh is mine. That malabathrum you said would be brought, a large quantity is from this island.’ And he gave the sailor a cargo of myrrh, malabathrum, terebinth, balsam and camphor, as well as black eye-paint (much in demand among noble Egyptian women, as contemporary paintings show), and a big lump of incense. He also gave him hunting dogs, apes and baboons, ‘and all kinds of riches’. Elephant ivory and giraffe tails were there too, the latter presumably used as fly-whisks. He was able to load all this on to the boat, which had duly arrived to pick him up as predicted; and he was told it would take two months to reach home, but when he did so he would feel like a young man again.

  He and the sailors respectfully thanked the serpent-god and travelled north back home, where the ruler was delighted to see what he had brought and publicly expressed his thanks to this god; besides, he rewarded the sailor by making him a ‘follower’, meaning a feudal lord attached to his court.11 So it is a curious tale that addresses the relationship between the creature comforts of home and a world beyond everyday human experience. But the story also sets out clearly some important features of the land of Punt: what could be obtained there, how long one would need to stop over, how long it would take to return, and the simple fact that it lay to the south, which must mean down the Red Sea. Conceivably the island upon which the sailor was cast was Socotra, which was visited in the first few centuries AD by ships in search of resins and other luxury goods, and which stands 240 miles off Yemen.12

  III

  The existence of southward voyages is confirmed by the major expedition sent out by Queen Hatshepsut or Hashepsowe in the early fifteenth century BC, probably a few years before her death in 1458. She was one of a small and remarkable group of female pharaohs (having previously served as regent), and she aimed to restore the economic vitality of Egypt after the overthrow of the dynasty of the Hyksos, Asiatic rulers under whom political power had fragmented. She took great pride in rebuilding the temples in central Egypt, abandoned since the Hyksos had ruled Lower Egypt, ‘roving hordes of them overturning what had been made’. She won the deep, indeed passionate, devotion of her officials. Ineni, a much-favoured courtier and master of the royal works, proclaimed: ‘people worked for her, and Egypt bowed the head.’13 This was commemorated in reliefs and accompanying inscriptions within the queen’s magnificent funerary temple at Dair al-Bahri, close to Luxor in Upper Egypt. One of these inscriptions makes it plain that the history of trade with Punt was not a continuous one, as one could easily assume. The fantastic land of the serpent-god was only gradually coming into focus. For the god Amun-Ra makes a curious statement:

  No one trod these incense-terraces, which the people did not know; they were heard of from mouth to mouth by hearsay from our ancestors. The marvels brought from there under your fathers, the kings of Lower Egypt, were brought from hand to hand, and, since the time of the ancestors of the kings of Upper Egypt who lived in olden days, they were brought in return for numerous exchanges, and no one reached it except for your royal trading expedition.14

  It is reasonable to assume that, before Upper and Lower Egypt were united, fine luxury items such as spices and aromatics brought from further south would have passed through Upper Egypt first; and the same would apply to gold mined further south in Africa. The union of Upper and Lower Egypt to which the god referred must be the relatively recent restoration of native rule by her own dynasty, rather than the original unification of the two kingdoms that had occurred 1,500 years before. But the sense behind the inscription, even allowing for typical pharaonic exaggeration, is that Hatshepsut was in some way a pioneer – perhaps reviving the trade to Punt, and integrating its many stages into a single maritime route managed by royal, rather than private, fleets.15 This may also have meant that she was bypassing the straggly overland routes heading off from the Nile or leading down the west coast of Arabia that were at many times in the past an alternative to the sea route down the Red Sea. Her ambitious building plans and her determination to restore the glittering grandeur of pre-Hyksos days prompted her to look far afield for unguents such as myrrh, luxury materials such as ebony and ivory, exotic animals such as baboons and, of course, gold. That myrrh was a particular prize is clear from the use to which this ‘ntyw was put: it would anoint the limbs of the statue of the god Amun-Ra, which is a possible use for oil of myrrh; however, the inscriptions do not mention the burning of incense, which suggests that large quantities of frankincense were not brought from Punt.

  The presence of royal fleets in Punt was intended to make a powerful impression on its inhabitants. The reliefs even portray the ‘great men of Punt’, actually the chieftain Parekhou and his corpulent wife Jtj (vocalizing ancient Egyptian is often pure guesswork, so she is best left in this unpronounceable form). Although one distinguished Egyptologist described Jtj as ‘hideously deformed’, it is more likely that the distortion of her body was a crude attempt to contrast her primitive, servile condition with that of the true queen, the elegant and in some representatio
ns beautiful Pharaoh Hatshepsut. So too the portrayal of the people of Punt is hardly flattering; they lived in round huts and had to climb a ladder to go inside their houses. This was not the sophistication of courtly Luxor. The Puntite chieftains subject to this king and queen prostrated themselves before the royal standard, invoking her favour with the words: ‘Hail to you, king of Egypt, female sun who shines like the solar disc.’16 The inscriptions were intended to show that the dignitaries of Punt were Pharaoh’s subjects, even if until now contact had been intermittent or indirect; and therefore what was brought back was not commercial exchange but humble tribute – a common way to conduct trade with supposedly inferior peoples, widely practised throughout Chinese history as well. The tribute was paid over to Pharaoh’s messenger; and back in Egypt Pharaoh herself would appear under a special canopy, ‘the dais of the bringing of tribute’, to receive gifts sent from African peoples to the south of Egypt. Thus one inscription runs: ‘Arrival of the Great Chief of Punt laden with his gifts by the shore of Wadj Wer before the royal envoy.’17 But even Pharaoh bartered for tribute, and before they left Egypt the ships were loaded with gifts of beer, meat, fruit and wine to be sent down to Punt, and these, or supplies for the journey, were illustrated in the reliefs of Hatshepsut’s temple, which display a fleet of rather magnificent ships with billowing sails, oarsmen at the ready and long, heavy stern rudders; even the details of the long, taut ropes can be seen.18

  Such ropes actually survive. Admittedly, those that have been found are earlier than Hatshepsut’s expedition, which may have been one of several or many in the period of the so-called New Kingdom. The ups and downs of trade between Egypt and Punt are unknown; the picture is much more blurred than in the case of Dilmun. But, as with Dilmun and Meluḫḫa, there are some basic questions that have to be answered: where Punt was and what route was taken to reach it. And as with Dilmun and Meluḫḫa, a consensus has only slowly come into being, largely as a result of major archaeological discoveries, though they have been made closer to the Egyptian than the Puntite end of the route. For the coast of the Red Sea has yielded more and more fresh evidence for how trade between Egypt and the Indian Ocean operated at key moments in its development: Roman remains at Bereniké; medieval ones at Qusayr al-Qadim; and now Bronze Age ones at Wadi and Mersa Gawasis. All these sites lie relatively close to one another; Qusayr is only fifty kilometres to the south of Wadi Gawasis.19 Their proximity is easily explained: to reach the Red Sea from the Egyptian desert there were a number of overland routes that linked the coast to Nile ports, where goods were reloaded on to freighters for passage downriver. There is good evidence that a channel was dug that would enable boats to sail from the Lower Nile through the eastern arms of the delta into the lakes above Suez, and then down into the Red Sea; but it is unlikely that it was used for the large ships that Queen Hatshepsut launched, and the best option remained a short trip overland from the Nile to the coast of the Red Sea. One of the most important Nile stations was at Koptos near Luxor, which gave relatively easy access to Wadi Gawasis because it lay in a bend that carried the river a little way eastwards, and reduced the distance between sea and river, as well as granting access through low passes through the desert. In the Middle Ages it still functioned as the departure point for merchants bound for the Red Sea; medieval Qos was one of the largest towns along the Nile. Koptos–Qos was also well supplied with local timber, which was relatively rare in Egypt. The harbour at Wadi Gawasis (technically known as Mersa Gawasis) was in use between 2000 and 1600 BC, to judge from Carbon 14 dating and from some fragments of pottery from Minoan Crete of around that time, though there are earlier and later dates as well, so it was evidently one of the major trans-shipment stations on the route down the Red Sea.20 But the Egyptians also, at one or two points, left a pile of rubbish in the local caves (or, some think, dedicated some of their equipment to the gods in sealed caverns). The extraordinary dryness of the Red Sea environment has preserved forty-three wooden boxes in which cargo would have been transported, as well as about thirty coils of rope woven from papyrus plants that are still in excellent condition; these date from the Twelfth Dynasty (Middle Kingdom period), c.2000–c.1800 BC. There are also discarded timbers from ships built out of cedar, pine and oak, including the blades of ships’ rudders, for barnacles and worms that had been gathered on the open sea often made heavy repairs necessary; and there were limestone anchors too.21

  Once again it is not always the glossy discoveries that really explain the past. Some of the most eloquent evidence about where Punt actually was comes from fragments of smashed pottery: ceramics from Nubia, Eritrea and Sudan, but also from the area around Yemen on the other side of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Enough ebony survives to show that it was a favourite export, and it was even prepared before export, because some of the finds consist of wooden rods already fashioned in their place of origin, which, again, was Eritrea.22 Gold was mined in an area known as Bia-Punt, which explains the reference to the ‘royal mines’ in the ‘Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor’. This too seems to have lain in the highlands of what is now Eritrea. But the most important exports leave few traces other than occasional blocks of resin: the perfumes and aromatics carried up the Red Sea which were intended not just for the living, if they were wealthy enough to afford them, but for the dead, if they were of high enough status to be properly embalmed.

  Taken as a whole, the discoveries at Wadi Gawasis confirm the suspicion of many Egyptologists that Punt was a broad region encompassing the southern shores of the Red Sea on both sides, the Eritrean and the Yemeni. Where the Punt fleet tied up when it reached Punt is still a mystery; it does not seem that there was a place called Punt in the way that there was a place called Dilmun, but rather there was an extensive ‘land of Punt’. There must have been roadsteads similar to Mersa Gawasis that provided the facilities any seagoing fleet would require if, as once again the shipwrecked sailor makes plain, a layover of several months was needed before winds and currents made the return journey safe. Some ships may have penetrated further south still, reaching what is now Somalia, but there is no evidence that Egyptian fleets turned east at Aden and encountered vessels from the Persian Gulf. The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were still separate worlds, and the role of the Red Sea as the principal funnel through which goods from much further east reached the Mediterranean lay long in the future. Indeed, the Egyptian Red Sea trade went into recession around 1100 BC, and the reasons are not hard to guess: the pharaohs were preoccupied with attacks attributed to ‘Sea Peoples’ who came overland from Libya and Syria and from the waters of the Mediterranean; in addition, their control over the Nile Delta was undermined by local separatists. As their power weakened, their ability to fund lavish expeditions to Punt, or to maintain quite such luxurious courts, also faltered.23 This does not mean that the trade in perfumes and resins vanished; over many centuries others, including the Nabataeans of Petra, would maintain the connection by sea and by land.24 For the creation of this route marked an important moment in the expansion of the trade not just of the Red Sea but of a much vaster world.

  IV

  What happened to the Red Sea trade following the crisis in Egypt has to be reconstructed out of very short references in the Bible that speak of the trade not to Punt but to Ophir, which seems to have been more or less the same place, since it lay in a similar direction and produced similar goods. Curiously, though, the Bible speaks of gold from Ophir but seems uninterested in incense, even though vast quantities of it were burned in the Temple; rituals requiring the waving of censers containing incense by the High Priest Aaron and his successors are described in some detail in the books of Exodus and Leviticus, which it is now generally agreed took their current shape around 500 BC. Since these texts, at least in the form we have them, are so late, archaeology provides the best clues to the use of incense in the area inhabited by the Canaanites and Israelites at the end of the second millennium BC. Incense stands or vessels have been found at sites in modern Israel such a
s Hazor (from the fourteenth century BC) and Megiddo (from the eleventh century BC). But the incense may well have been made out of substances other than frankincense. Sumerian and Assyrian incense was not made from frankincense (which is further proof that there was no contact with south-western, as opposed to south-eastern, Arabia); aromatic wood from the cedar, cypress, fir or juniper tree was favoured instead; some myrrh was used, but probably a lesser grade of Indian origin.25 According to the Talmud, the incense used in the Jewish Temple was very carefully mixed from a great variety of ingredients, beaten fine: eleven spices, including frankincense, balm, myrrh, cassia, saffron, cinnamon and Cyprus wine; ‘he who omitted any one of the ingredients was liable to the penalty of death’, though there is no evidence anyone ever committed such carelessness.26 Even if this is an elaboration of what was actually used, it is a reminder that the creation of incense, like that of modern perfume, was a complex art and that no single ingredient was likely to be used on its own.