Gums required for the temple service had hitherto reached the Theban priests solely by means of foreign intermediaries; so that in the slow transport across Africa they lost much of their freshness, besides being defiled by passing through impure hands. In addition to these drawbacks, the merchants confounded under the one term “Anîti” substances which differed considerably both in value and character, several of them, indeed, scarcely coming under the category of perfumes, and hence being unacceptable to the gods. One kind, however, found favour with them above all others, being that which still abounds in Somali-land at the present day—a gum secreted by the incense sycomore.*
* From the form of the trees depicted on the monument, it is
certain that the Egyptians went to Pûanît in search of the
Boswellia Thurifera Cart.; but they brought back with them
other products also, which they confounded together under
the name “incense.”
Drawn by Fauchon-Gudin,
from a photograph by Gayet.
It was accounted a pious work to send and obtain it direct from the locality in which it grew, and if possible to procure the plants themselves for acclimatisation in the Nile valley. But the relations maintained in former times with the people of these aromatic regions had been suspended for centuries. “None now climbed the ‘Ladders of Incense,’ none of the Egyptians; they knew of them from hearsay, from the stories of people of ancient times, for these products were brought to the kings of the Delta, thy fathers, to one or other of them, from the times of thy ancestors the kings of the Said who lived of yore.” All that could be recalled of this country was summed up in the facts, that it lay to the south or to the extreme east, that from thence many of the gods had come into Egypt, while from out of it the sun rose anew every morning. Amon, in his omniscience, took upon himself to describe it and give an exact account of its position. “The ‘Ladders of Incense’ is a secret province of Tonûtir, it is in truth a place of delight. I created it, and I thereto lead Thy Majesty, together with Mût, Hâthor, Uîrît, the Lady of Pûanît, Uîrît-hikaû, the magician and regent of the gods, that the aromatic gum may be gathered at will, that the vessels may be laden joyfully with living incense trees and with all the products of this earth.” Hâtshopsîtû chose out five well-built galleys, and manned them with picked crews. She caused them to be laden with such merchandise as would be most attractive to the barbarians, and placing the vessels under the command of a royal envoy, she sent them forth on the Bed Sea in quest of the incense.
We are not acquainted with the name of the port from which the fleet set sail, nor do we know the number of weeks it took to reach the land of Pûanît, neither is there any record of the incidents which befell it by the way. It sailed past the places frequented by the mariners of the XIIth dynasty—Suakîn, Massowah, and the islands of the Ked Sea; it touched at the country of the Ilîm which lay to the west of the Bab el-Mandeb, went safely through the Straits, and landed at last in the Land of Perfumes on the Somali coast.* There, between the bay of Zeîlah and Bas Hafun, stretched the Barbaric region, frequented in later times by the merchants of Myos Hormos and of Berenice.
* That part of Pûanît where the Egyptians landed was at
first located in Arabia by Brugsch, then transferred to
Somali-land by Mariette, whose opinion was accepted by most
Egyptologists. Dumichen, basing his hypothesis on a passage
where Pûanît is mentioned as “being on both sides of the
sea,” desired to apply the name to the Arabian as well as to
the African coast, to Yemen and Hadhramaut as well as to
Somali-land; this suggestion was adopted by Lieblein, and
subsequently by Ed. Meyer, who believed that its inhabitants
were the ancestors of the Sabseans. Since then Krall has
endeavoured to shorten the distance between this country and
Egypt, and he places the Pûanît of Hâtshopsîtû between
Suakin and Massowah. This was, indeed, the part of the
country known under the XIIth dynasty at the time when it
was believed that the Nile emptied itself thereabouts into
the Red Sea, in the vicinity of the Island of the Serpent
King, but I hold, with Mariette, that the Pûanît where the
Egyptians of Hâtshopsîtû’s time landed is the present
Somali-land—a view which is also shared by Navillo, but
which Brugsch, in the latter years of his life, abandoned.
The first stations which the latter encountered beyond Cape Direh—Avails, Malao, Mundos, and Mosylon—were merely open roadsteads offering no secure shelter; but beyond Mosylon, the classical navigators reported the existence of several wadys, the last of which, the Elephant River, lying between Bas el-Eîl and Cape Guardafui, appears to have been large enough not only to afford anchorage to several vessels of light draught, but to permit of their performing easily any evolutions required. During the Roman period, it was there, and there only, that the best kind of incense could be obtained, and it was probably at this point also that the Egyptians of Hâtshopsîtû’s time landed. The Egyptian vessels sailed up the river till they reached a place beyond the influence of the tide, and then dropped anchor in front of a village scattered along a bank fringed with sycomores and palms.*
* I have shown, from a careful examination of the bas-
reliefs, that the Egyptians must have landed, not on the
coast itself, as was at first believed, but in the estuary
of a river, and this observation has been accepted as
decisive by most Egyptologists; besides this, newly
discovered fragments show the presence of a hippopotamus.
Since then I have sought to identify the landing-place of
the Egyptians with the most important of the creeks
mentioned by the Græco-Roman merchants as accessible for
their vessels, viz. that which they called the Elephant
River, near to the present Ras el-Fîl.