Hatshepsut's Expedition to Punt
Overview
In the ninth year of her reign, the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut (c. 1478-1457 B.C.) sent a number of ships on a trading expedition to the distant land of Punt, located to the south of Egypt. The Egyptians were fascinated by the exotic people, plants, and animals that they encountered in Punt, and proud of making the difficult journey to this mysterious, remote land. Hatshepsut commemorated the expedition in a series of sculptured reliefs, which decorated the walls of her magnificent mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri. Hatshepsut's account of the trip and the Deir el-Bahri reliefs provide an unparalleled record of Egyptian trade practices, the type of boats they used for commercial voyages, flora and fauna of foreign lands, and the culture of the Puntites. Not only did the exotic land of Punt capture the Egyptian imagination, but the Punt trade also provided goods that were essential to Egypt's internal economic development and to its other international markets.
Background
Hatshepsut was not the first pharaoh to trade with Punt. The Egyptians had commercial relations with Punt as early as the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2470-2350 B.C.), and maintained trade sporadically for over 1,000 years, until trade lapsed in the Twentieth Dynasty (c.
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