SYMHC Classics: Hatshepsut

This 2019 episode covers Hatshepsut, who sent a huge expedition to Punt in the 15th century B.C.E. The expedition to Punt is also an important and illustrative part of Hatshepsut’s reign.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. One of the finds on our recent installment
of on Earth was a pair of tombs that likely
belonged to Tutmos of the second Half, brother and husband
to Hodg Shepsit. Our episode on Hudge Shepsit and the
voyage to Punt that took place during her reign is
the subject of Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out
in July third, twenty nineteen in Joy Welcome to Stuff

(00:27):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frye. And it has been too long since
we've had any African history on the show. We know this.

(00:50):
It's one of those things where you look at the
recent archive and go, wow, that has been a while.
I really wanted to do an episode on the land
of Poot, which is a spelled pu in t so
sometimes you'll also hear people pronounce it punt, and sometimes
it's described as a kingdom, sometimes more of a massive
trading center. But there are some really really big holes
in our knowledge of Punch that make it hard to

(01:12):
do a whole episode on it. For example, we don't
know exactly where it was. There are references to Punt
in Egyptian writing that span about two thousand years, and
there's also mentions from elsewhere in the world, but it's
not totally clear whether all of these references are referring
to the same place. But one of our biggest sources
of information on Punt comes from hat Shepsuit, who sent

(01:35):
a huge expedition there in the fifteenth century BCE. This
expedition to Punt is also an important and illustrative part
of hat Shep's It's Rain. So today we're going to
go to Punt by way of hat Shepsuit and the
civilization that we call Ancient Egypt to expanded and contracted
in cycles for thousands of years, with periods of prospering

(01:57):
and flourishing divided by periods of decline instability. This is
part of why I have not jumped on any African
history recently, because I start delving in and then I
go whoa, oa, oh, this water's too deep, and I
back up. Each Gyptologists have roughly divided these prosperous eras
into the Old, Middle and New kingdoms, separated by intermediary periods.

(02:20):
These people knew their civilization by a number of names,
including the Two Lands, the Beloved Land, and Kemmitt, which
is usually translated as black land, often interpreted as a
reference to the fertile soil that sits along the Nile River.
Hat Shepsit was pharaoh near the start of the New Kingdom,
which started with the founding of the eighteenth ruling dynasty.

(02:42):
The Eighteenth dynasty also included some of Egypt's most well
known pharaohs, including i'm Ahotep, the Third, Akint, and Tutan
common these kings did not call themselves pharaohs, though that's
a Greek term that was coined a little later and
then kind of retroactively applied to all of the kings
of this ancient kingdom. The Eighteenth dynasty was founded by

(03:04):
Amosa in about fifteen thirty nine BCE, and after his
death in about fifteen fourteen BCE, Amosa was succeeded by
his son a Menhotep the First, But when a Menhotep
the First died in about fourteen ninety three BCE, he
did not have a male heir, so in that case,
one of his generals, Tutmosa, was next on the throne.

(03:24):
Tutmosa married a woman named Amosa, and it's not entirely
clear who her parents were. One of her titles was
king's sister, but it's not totally known whether that came
from being the sister of one of the previous kings
or Tutmosa's own sister. In the society, kings had a
primary wife known as the great royal wife, along with
other lesser wives and concubines, and for much of ancient

(03:48):
Egyptian history, it was typical for the king to take
his sister or half sister as his great royal wife,
and to marry his other sisters as well. The king
was the embodiment of the god Horus, and a marriage
to a sister or half sister hearkened back to the
Egyptian creation story. In this story, the first god a tomb,
had no partner, so he created the first pair of

(04:10):
deities by himself. This brother sister pair then produced another
brother sister pair, and so on. In the eighteenth dynasty,
in particular, it was required for royal sisters to marry
their brother kings, and then for daughters of that pair
to marry the next king. And in addition to the
religious aspect that connected back to this creation story. This

(04:30):
also really concentrated the power and the wealth within the
royal family, So whether Tutmosa was marrying his own sister
or the sister of one of the previous kings, his
doing this strengthened his claim to the throne, and it
preserved the idea of balance. When TUTMOSI died, he and
Amosa had one daughter, hot Shepsit had Shepsid had been

(04:51):
trained as a high priestess in the Temple of Ammon,
who was head of the Egyptian pantheon as well as
patron deity of the kings in the city of Thebes.
During the New Kingdom. Tutmosa and Amosa did not have
a son, but Tutmosa did have a son with one
of his lesser wives, and that son was Tutmosa the Second.
Tutmosa the Second followed his father on the throne and

(05:12):
about fourteen eighty two BCE, and he married his half sister,
hat Shepsit, who was about thirteen at the time. Because
the new king was very young, inexperienced, and chronically ill,
the king's great royal wife acted as his regent. But
Tutmosa the Second did not live long after becoming king.
He died in about fourteen seventy nine BCE, after he

(05:32):
had been on the throne for about three years. By
that point, he and huts Shepsit had one daughter, Nepherura,
and they did not have any sons. However, like his father,
Tutmosa the Second did have sons by other wives, including
one by a woman named Isis. This was Tutmosa the Third,
who was about two years old at the time of

(05:53):
his father's death. A marriage was planned between Tutmosa the
Third and his half sister Neperura, and this would similarly
strengthen his tie to the throne, although at the time
both of them were way too young to immediately get married,
so in the meantime, hot Shepsit, Tutmosi's the third stepmother
and aunt, was going to act as his regent because
his mother Isis wasn't of royal blood. Up until this point,

(06:16):
the line of succession in the eighteenth dynasty had progressed
in a way that was really pretty typical apart from
Tutmosa the First being a general who was not of
royal birth, and it was also pretty common for a
woman to act as regent if her husband died before
his heir was old enough to rule on his own.
It was more common for a woman to wind up
in such a position of power at the end of

(06:37):
the dynasty, though, when the late king had no male heir.
For the first few years after her husband's death, hot
Shepsit's conduct's regent was pretty typical for the time as well.
She built a memorial chapel to her late husband. She
was publicly dedicated to preserving his memory and looking after
the welfare of his sons. She took action on young

(06:58):
Tutmosa's behalf and guided him as he grew into the
divine king on his own. She ordered the renewal and
restorations of temples to honor the young king, and she
sent an expedition to Aswan to quarry a pair of
obelisks that would be dedicated to him. Writings about her
from this time referred to her as queen or with

(07:18):
her formal religious title as the kingdom's highest priestess, which
was God's Wife of Ahmen, and her depictions and carvings
were pretty typical for a woman in these positions, but
by the seventh year of her regency that had started
to change. She reported that the oracle of Ahman had
delivered a message from the God that she should be king,

(07:39):
becoming co ruler with her step son. In her account,
this happened at the temple of Karnak during a festival
when a statue of Ahman was supposed to perform an
oracle or miracle. At first, no message came, but when
it finally did, the statue moved around dramatically and delivered
a message to her that she was to be both
her majesty and the God's wife. She started to be

(08:02):
depicted in artwork with both masculine and feminine traits, and
after a while she was shown as a man with
the skirt and the decorative beard and the crown that
signified her being king. She wasn't disguising her gender, though
the language that was used to describe her was still
feminine most of the time, even as the artwork was
depicting her as progressively more masculine. This was really something

(08:26):
that happened over time, with some more masculine elements appearing
long before the seventh year of her regency, and then
with her depictions continuing to become more and more masculine
as time passed, and at some point she was formally
crowned in a series of rituals that took days to complete,
As was typical for Pharaoh, She took a new throne
name Mahatkare, which translates roughly to truth is the soul

(08:49):
of Ray. The idea of Maat or truth in this
context also connected to justice and order, and was a
trait that was established by the gods. The role of
the Pharaoh was to mediate between the gods of humanity,
preserving the god's mad There was also a goddess named
Mahat who was the personification of these traits. She also

(09:10):
banned construction of her mortuary temple, known as Jasara Jaseru
or Holy of Holies. This was built at the dear
Elbahari temple complex near what's now Luxor. This temple was
meant to guide her into the afterlife, where as Pharaoh,
she would transcend into a divine being, and it was
to make sure that she was well provided for there.

(09:30):
The tomb to actually hold her mummy was built in
another location. Hatshepsu's mortuary temple was a massive three tier
temple made from sandstone, full of statuary, including statues of
hat Shepsit as the god of Cyrus. The structure itself
still stands today. Relief carvings on the temple walls documented
hat Shepsuit's biography and her rule as king. This included

(09:55):
a new story documenting her birth that the god Ahman
had disguised himself as Tutman the First and impregnated hot
Shepster's mother. Both her throne name and her new origin
story reinforced the idea that she had a legitimate claim
to be king and that she was connected directly to
the god Amen, who had authorized her to do it.
Although she was technically co ruler with Tetmosa the Third,

(10:18):
for the rest of his life she acted as the
soul monarch. She also changed his throne name from one
that meant the manifestation of Ray is enduring to one
that meant the manifestation of the soul of Ray is enduring,
kind of adding a degree of separation between him and
being a direct manifestation of the God. And it's not

(10:39):
entirely clear what motivated her to do this. When archaeologists
first unearthed her tomb in the nineteenth century, they concluded
that she was power hungry and conniving and had stolen
the throne from her step son for her own selfish reasons,
and we're going to talk about why they came to
that conclusion in just a bit. Her recent scholars have
pretty much dismissed that idea, though while simple ambition might

(11:02):
have been involved, it's also possible that there was some
kind of threat to Tutmos of the third and that
hat Shepster was protecting him by becoming the king herself.
It might have been just that he had been king
under a regency for about seven years and he still
wasn't old enough to father an heir. It would probably
be another seven or so years before he could actually

(11:22):
rule the kingdom on his own. That was a lot
of time to get through in a world where early
deaths were really common. And it's also possible that her
doing this wasn't actually her idea, that it was something
that advisers or the priesthood thought was necessary for some reason. Regardless,
she could not have done this without significant support among

(11:43):
the ruling class. She had carefully cultivated relationships and alliances
for years as regent before taking on the role of king.
What she did was unprecedented, but the elite in thebes
allowed her to do it, and the fact that they
did suggest that she was admired and respected as elite
or before she took the throne. It's clear that regardless

(12:03):
of what the motivations were, she was incredibly savvy to
do this, and she also proved herself to be a
capable ruler, which we will talk about after a sponsor break.
We nalked before the break about how before hatcheps It

(12:24):
became king, the line of succession had unfolded in the
eighteenth dynasty in a pretty typical way, but hatcheps It's
ascension to the throne wasn't typical at all. There were
other women who had held positions of power in Egyptian history,
but for one to take the throne in this way
was really unprecedented. So, in addition to her throne name

(12:45):
and the revised story of her birth, she got to
work immediately taking steps to try to reinforce the idea
that she was a legitimate ruler. She commissioned hundreds of
statues and other artwork depicting her as king, along with
statues and structures honoring the God Amen. She expanded the
priesthood and constructed temples all over Thebes and beyond including

(13:07):
a bark chapel that French archaeologist named the Chapel Rouge
after unearthing the blocks used to build it in the
nineteen twenties. The chapel's original location is unknown. It was
dismantled after Hutchepsi's death, and its blocks were used for
a pylon in Karnak. She employed craftspeople associated with some
of the kingdom's most prominent families to do all of this,

(13:29):
building up her base of support. Hat Shepsit launched two
military expeditions into Nubia, one of which she reportedly led herself.
She also sent expeditions to mine gold in Nubia and
in the eastern Desert. She strengthened trading relationships with other
parts of Africa and with the Levant, possibly as far
west as what's now Afghanistan. Shortly after taking the throne,

(13:52):
she also dispatched a massive trading expedition to punt which
we'll be talking about in more detail in a bit.
And throughout all of this she favors to prominent men
whose support she needed to stay in power, but she
also made appointments to political newcomers which gave her support
that did not come with as many strings attached. In
the fifteenth year of her rule, had Shepsit sent another

(14:13):
expedition to Aswan to quarry a second set of obelisks,
with this pair being inscribed to her. A year later,
she held a jubilee festival known as Said, something that
was typically done in the thirtieth year of a king's
rule to rejuvenate his power. It's possible that she chose
this earlier date because it was about thirty years since
her father had died, at which point she had become

(14:36):
her husband's queen, so in a way that marked the
beginning of her time on the throne. At some point
she had her father's mummy moved to a tomb near
her mortuary temple, again reinforcing her connection to the dynastic line.
She also increasingly focused on her right to rule as
coming from being her father's daughter, rather than her having

(14:56):
been married to Tutmosa the Second. During her time on
the throne, had shep's It's most powerful advisor was a
man named Sennenmut. We don't know all that much about
him as a person. He started out as the overseer
of the large hall at the palace in Thebes, starting
at the very beginning of tutmost of the second's reign.
He soon took on an increasing number of political appointments

(15:17):
and became tutor to hat sheps It's daughter. By the
time hat sheps It took the throne, he had become
incredibly powerful and a very important figure. He ultimately amassed
ninety three different official titles and became chief architect of
hat sheps It's mortuary temple. He oversaw treasuries and craftspeople
all over the kingdom. There's been some speculation that the

(15:40):
two of them were linked romantically. Some of it stems
from the fact that he was very close to hat
Sheps's daughter, leading people to wonder whether he was actually
her father. He also built his burial temple near hat
sheps It's mortuary temple. Also, Sennenmutt was a powerful man
in the court of a woman, which is frequently caused
for suspicion. Although it's likely that Hatchepsid had other relationships

(16:03):
after her husband's death, she would have had to have
been really careful about one involving Senenmut. Senninmut disappears from
the historical record in the nineteenth year of hat Shepsid's rule,
although he might have survived after her death. She died
in her early forties after having ruled as king for
about fifteen years and as tutmost of the Third's regent

(16:24):
for about seven years before that. This makes her the
longest reigning female monarch in ancient Egyptian history, and possibly
the first to rule as a king rather than a
regent or other interim ruler. As we noted earlier, there
were other women who served as regents or who grew
into having a lot of power as queens, and there's
some debate about whether any of these earlier women became

(16:46):
kings in their own right. After Hatshepsud's death, tutmost of
the Third became the sole ruler. It's clear from his
time as king that hat Shepsid had prepared him to
be a skilled leader from both a military and a
political perspective. He had begun marrying and fathering children by
his late teens, and by the time he was twenty
he was commander of the military. After hat Shepsud's death,

(17:09):
he conquered much of what is now Syria, as well
as parts of Sudan and Iraq. The first of these
expeditions took place almost immediately after he became the sole monarch.
It seems as though hat Shepsit had started making preparations
for it before her death. Like hat Shepsit had done,
Tutmos of the Third also undertook huge building projects, constructing

(17:29):
temples and having obelisks quarried in Oswan. He also completed
monuments to her that were already under way when she died.
But then about twenty years into his reign, Tutmost of
the Third started construction of a new temple, which was
next to hat Shepsit's mortuary temple, and at about this
time people started removing all references to hat Shepsit as

(17:50):
king from temples and other buildings all over the kingdom.
Statues depicting her as king were smashed, relief carvings were defaced.
Her name was chiseled out of the reliefs at Jasair
Jeseru and replaced with the names of Tutmosa the First,
the Second, and the third. Her mortuary temple was reconsecrated,
and her obelisks at Karnak were walled in. Her name

(18:13):
was also removed from the official lists of kings. It
is generally concluded that Tutmosa the third ordered this purge,
but it's not clear how much he was encouraged to
do so by the priesthood or his advisers. She wasn't
entirely obliterated from the record, though. This destruction went on
for the rest of Tutmosa the Third's life, which was

(18:33):
for about another decade. But there were so many statues
and other depictions of hat Shepsuit that some of them
were still intact by the time he died. With so
much of her record destroyed, hat Shepsuit soon fell into
complete obscurity. The people who remembered and supported her eventually died,
and without her name in the lists of kings, she
seems to have been forgotten within a few generations. When

(18:57):
her mortuary temple was unearthed in the nineteenth century, no
one knew how to read hieroglyphics yet, so all of
the smash statues and other defacements were interpreted as simple
vandalism or the work of grave robbers. Then, in the
eighteen twenties, John Francois Champollion built on earlier work by
Thomas Young to decipher the hieroglyphic text on the Rosetta stone,

(19:18):
and then that paved the way for modern people to
be able to read hieroglyphics. Champollion personally visited hutcheps It's
temple and was deeply confused by what he found there.
In addition to all these replaced names, there were pictures
of two kings standing side by side that was incredibly unusual.
There was also writing that just didn't make sense, that

(19:39):
had feminine word forms when they expected masculine ones. Eventually,
archaeologists pieced together what had happened. That hud Shepsit had
been Tutmosa the Third's region, but had taken the throne herself,
but they erroneously concluded that Tutmosa had immediately removed hutch
Shepsit's name from the record as soon as she died,

(20:00):
that Tutmosa was angry at having had his kingship stolen
from him for more than a decade, and that his
removal of his stepmother's name was evidence of both his
outrage and her character. Based on this assumption, they concluded
that hat Shepsuit was a stereotypical evil stepmother right out
of a Disney movie, wicked and conniving and only interested

(20:23):
in her own power, But Today, we know that about
twenty years passed between hat Shepsit's death and the defacement
of her tomb and all the other destruction, and the
interpretation of what led to that defacement as much different.
That's largely thanks to the work of egyptologist Charles Nims
in nineteen sixty six, who was the first person to
pinpoint the date of the defacement as being the forty

(20:45):
second year of tutmost of the second's reign, according to
some research as it was even later than that, so
it's more likely that the ruling class became interested in
preserving the idea that the dynastic line had continued without
any kind of interruption through Tutmosis the first, second, and
the third. It's also possible that there was some concern
about Tutmosa the third successor a Menhotep the Second. Tutmosa

(21:09):
did eventually marry hat Shepsit's daughter, Nepherrera, and he had
a son either with her or with another royal wife,
but both of them died, so his successor was a
Menhotep the Second, whose mother had no royal lineage and
no connection back to hut Shepsit. It seems that Tutmosa
the third was concerned enough about the line of succession
that he had a Menhotep crowned while he was still living,

(21:32):
with the two of them acting as co monarchs. So
this removal of hat Shepsit from the record might have
been connected to all this uncertainty, and it's also possible
that the purge wouldn't have been considered necessary if hot
Shepsit's daughter had survived and she had become the mother
to the next king rather than the king's wife. Coming

(21:52):
from this totally disconnected lineage, the idea of a female
king is also an affront to the concept of maat
that we talked about earlier. The king was supposed to
be an intermediary with the gods and a living embodiment
of Horus, keeping everything in balance, So having a woman
in this role was basically the opposite of this idea
of ordered justice. The fact that a woman had a

(22:15):
relatively peaceful and prosperous rain in spite of this affront,
tumah Aunt may have raised unwelcome questions about that divine
order and the rule of other kings. Hatsheps That's mummy
wasn't placed in the tomb where she intended it to
be or if it was, it was later moved, but
a mummy from a tomb that was found in the
Valley of the Kings in nineteen oh two might be hers.

(22:37):
That tomb was fully excavated starting in nineteen twenty. During
the excavation, archaeologists found the mummies of two women, one
of which was on the floor. One of these was
later identified as Hatshepsit's wet nurse. The other one, the
one that had been on the floor, was positioned in
a way that was often used for Royal women. A
CT scan found that it was missing a tooth. Meanwhile,

(23:01):
a box marked with hot Shepsit's cartouche had been unearthed
as well in a cache of Royal mummies. A scan
of that box revealed that it contained a tooth, and
this tooth appears to be a match for the mummies
missing one. So it's likely that this was had Sheepsit's mummy,
although that is still not one hundred percent proven. Yeah,
there is discussion of using DNA to try to confirm everything.

(23:24):
Back when these initial analyzes happened, I don't know what
the results of that were. I could not find reference
to it anywhere. But it's also incredibly difficult to get
good DNA out of mummified samples that are this old anyway.
This finally brings us to the voyage to Punch that

(23:45):
I wanted to focus on from the beginning, and we
will get to that after a sponsor break. The first
reference to Punt and ancient Egyptian writing is from the
Palermo Stone, which dates back to about twenty five hundred BCE.

(24:06):
That was more than a thousand years before hatsheps It
became king. According to the Palermo Stone, King Sahara sent
an expedition to Punt, which returned with eighty thousand measures
of a substance that's generally written as NTYW, sometimes preceded
by an apostrophe. Some sources translate this word as frankincense

(24:27):
and others translate it as myrr. Both that these are
made from aromatic tree resins and are used to make
perfumes an incense, as well as spices and medicine. This
expedition also brought back wood in the form of rods
or staves, which were probably used to make spears and
other weapons. Because the Egyptian kingdom's territory at that time

(24:47):
didn't include trees that yielded wood that was good for
that purpose. There are periodic references to Punt, also known
as God's Land in Egyptian writing. After that, all of
the documented expeditions were associated with kings who were known
for exceptional leadership and good fortune. There are also fictional references,
including the Tail of the Shipwrecked Sailor. This story dates

(25:09):
back to the Middle Kingdom, and in it, a sailor
washes up on an island in the Red Sea and
meets the Lord of Punt. The Lord of Punt is
a serpent who gives him all kinds of gifts, including
mrr eye paint, baboons, and elephant tusks. Egyptian documents described
two different routes to Punt. One of them is along
the Red Sea and one is along the Nile. Both

(25:32):
of them involved some time on the Nile as well
as travel over land. For the Red Sea route, ships
were probably built on the Nile and then they sailed
to Koptos. From there they were disassembled and then carried
along a dry river bed called the Wadi Hammamat, and
that went all the way to the Red Sea, which
was one hundred and twenty miles or one hundred and

(25:53):
ninety three kilometers away. Then on the return trip, the
goods probably would have been loaded onto pack animals to
be carried back across the Wadi Hummamat, and then they
would have been loaded into different ships on the Nile,
rather than deconstructing the ships and carrying them again. It
was an involved process. You would only want to go
to this place if it took that much effort. If

(26:14):
you were going to get some really good trade goods
out of it, you really had to want to do it.
To travel along the Nile, ships would have used rowers
and sails to travel south against the current, and then
followed the current back, but it's not clear exactly where
the overland portion was headed after getting off of the ships.
Whether an expedition traveled along the Red Sea or stuck

(26:37):
mostly to the Nile might have been a matter of practicality,
with the Egyptians traveling farther down the Nile when they
had friendly relationships with the kingdoms and empires in that area,
but then crossing over the land and traveling down the
Red Sea when they didn't. Or it could have been
that Punt was very large and stretched all the way
from the Red Sea to the Nile, and the Egyptians

(26:58):
visited different parts of it at different times. Like we
mentioned at the top of the show, had Shepsy's expedition
to Punt was one of the most notable acts in
her time as king, and a lot of what we
know about Punt comes from her documentation of those expeditions.
According to the account in the relief carvings in Hodshepsu's
mortuary temple, this voyage restored trade with Punt after an

(27:20):
interruption of more than two hundred years. She had several
probable reasons for wanting to embark on this expedition. One
was simply access to luxury goods and aromatic resins. The resins,
in particular were really important for religious purposes. This might
have been a reward for her supporters when she ascended
to the throne, like they helped her get on the throne,

(27:41):
and in return she was going to give them access
to all of this good trade. It was probably also
a way to keep the army busy. Although it does
appear that Hotchpsit led a couple of small military campaigns
into Nubia, it wasn't generally considered appropriate for a woman
to personally lead an army into battle. On top of that,
there it was just a lot more risk for her

(28:02):
than there would be for a man in her position.
It would have been just catastrophic for an unprecedented female
king to lead a military campaign that then failed. So
Hot Shepsit needed some other way to reinforce the idea
that she was competent and accomplished and capable as king,
and she needed something to do to keep the soldiers occupied,

(28:23):
like having them go all the way to Punt. And
as was the case with her ascension to the throne,
Hat Shepsit's relief carving show that this was divinely ordered,
saying that the oracle had delivered a command that quote
the highways to the mer terraces should be opened. This
is a slightly different framing from how other pharaohs documented
their expeditions to Punt, which more focused on Amun or

(28:46):
Amonray causing Punt to send their goods or causing the
way to Punt to be opened. The buy reliefs in
Hot sheps It's temple depict large sailed ships crewed with
thirty rowers each carrying goods from Egypt, including fruit, meat, bread, beer,
and wine. They sail across the water, and based on
the aquatic life that shown in the carvings, that water

(29:08):
is probably meant to be the Red Sea. Once they
arrive in punt there are carvings of the region's trees,
which might be the trees used to produce ebony, frankincense,
or myrrh. There are also some fig trees. There are
also depictions of huts with domed roofs on stilts, which
might have been houses or grainaries. From there, the reliefs
show all kinds of goods being loaded back onto the ships,

(29:31):
including herbs, wood, resins, gold, incense, and animal skins. There
are also lots of live animals, including baboons, monkeys, cattle,
and hounds. Enslaved people and their children are loaded into
the ships as well, and cross sections of the loaded
ships show them just packed to the gills with goods.

(29:52):
Once the goods arrived safely at Karnak temple and thieves,
the Egyptians and the Puntite dignitaries who are returned with
them are shown presenting hapshets with the goods that they
had brought. This includes live resin trees in baskets, meant
for transplanting, and hatcheps It did transplant them around her
mortuary temple and the carvings. Hatcheps It also consecrates the

(30:14):
best of all these goods to the God Amen. The
people have Punt appear in these depictions as well. They
have dark reddish skin with long hair and goateee like beards.
The only ones whose names are mentioned are King Parahu
and his queen Atti. The queen is depicted as being
very strikingly large, something that has led to a lot
of commentary about her body, and a lot of it

(30:37):
has started with the assumption that there was a pathological
explanation for her body shape and size, but it may
have just been how she was built, or a mark
of status and wealth in her culture. By the way,
if you look her up, be prepared to read some
really gross and insulting things about her body. In almost
every single article, including articles that are brand new, almost

(30:57):
no one had nothing ugly to say about what the
Queen of Punt looked like. These reliefs are very detailed,
so it's likely that Hatcheps had sent artists with the
expedition and ordered them to make very careful observations for
the sake of these reliefs when they returned, and the
reliefs are definitely our biggest single source of information about Punt,

(31:19):
but there is still so much that we don't know.
For one thing, we really don't know how the people
of Punt referred to themselves. Punt is what is in
Egyptian writing, but it's also echoed in things that came later,
like Herodotus's history, which was written in the fifth century PCE.
And we also don't know exactly where it was. That's
something people have been trying to figure out for more

(31:40):
than one hundred and fifty years. At first, researchers focused
on the Arabian Peninsula, but as archaeologists unearthed more and
more descriptions of Punt being to the south rather than
to the east of the Egyptian Kingdom, and more references
of the goods being traded, they started focusing more on
the stretch of the continent between Egyptian territory and the
Horn of Africa. Many of the goods described as coming

(32:03):
from Punt were native to this part of the African continent,
but there's still a lot of room for speculation. This
is especially true since the ancient Egyptians were certainly not
Punt's only trading partner, so the goods that were available
in Punt probably came from other parts of the world
as well, both on the continent of Africa and elsewhere. Also,
the domed huts and the stilt houses that are shown

(32:25):
in the reliefs are more associated with central and western
Africa than with the parts of the continent that were
most likely to be accessed via the Red Sea, and
which archaeologists and other researchers have mostly focused on in
this search. Most, but not all, researchers have concluded that
Punt was probably located somewhere along the Red Sea, but

(32:45):
exactly where is still a mystery. Researchers have certainly put
forth a lot of ideas, a lot of them simultaneously
contradictory and well supported, most place punched somewhere in what's
now Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Somalia. In an article in the
Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Stanley Balanda

(33:05):
explores descriptions of Punt as on the Twin shores of
the sea, and he interprets the account's description of where
the expedition pitched their tents as on both sides of
the Red Sea. Based on that, he concludes that Punt
lay along the Bal Almandab Strait, with modern Jibouti on
one side and Yemen on the other, in both Eastern
Africa and the Western Arabian Peninsula. And twenty ten researchers

(33:30):
even tried to use oxygen isotope analysis to try to
confirm Punt's location by studying the mummy of a baboon
that had presumably been brought back from Punt. That research
suggested that this baboon was from what's now Eritrea or
eastern Ethiopia, and so they concluded that Punt might have
covered all of that general area. A major archaeological discovery

(33:53):
could clear all this up, but right now, the biggest
archaeological finds related to Punt are from the Egyptian harbor
of Mrsagoasis, known at the time as Saw would show
evidence of trade with Punch regardless, though Punt seems to
have existed as an important and thriving trading partner from
roughly twenty five hundred BCE to about six hundred BCE.

(34:15):
The last Egyptian expedition that we know about took place
under Ramsey's third in the twelfth century BCE. Ah Elusive Punt. Yeah,
I'm very you will. Also if you go poking around
on the internet, you will also find some more far
fetched and less well supported ideas about it being in

(34:36):
many far flung places that are not in the immediate
vicinity of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, which aren't really
supported so much by what we know in terms of
what's documented about Egyptian relationships with Punt and about what
we know about Egyptian's seafaring capabilities, which weren't amazing. They

(34:59):
could get up and down the Nile pretty well, but
they really tended to stick very closely along the shore
of the Red Sea. They were not nearly as good
as like getting out into the water. Away from that
safety of land. They were focusing more on architecture and
that is fine. Yeah. We should also note that in
the modern era, there is a place called Puntland which
is a part of Somalia, and we know that that

(35:22):
was named after the land of Punt, but it's not
clear that that was the same physical location. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive. If you heard an email
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(35:44):
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(36:05):
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