Page 78 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

guarded by two of the more trusted members of the crew while
the heavily laden vessel beat northward against the wind, back

to the security of Failaka and the waiting capitalists of Ur.

A thousand miles away to the west, across the breadth of

Arabia, other ships were sailing the Red Sea, on another of the
important trading routes of the world of 2000 b.c. We know lit­

tle of this route, but that is more by the accident of circumstance
than because the route was unimportant. We know it only from
the records of the kings and of the upper civil servants of Egypt,

and it was only on occasion and as an exception that they were
interested in recording overseas commerce. The records of the
independent merchants, if such existed, would be written on pa­

pyrus and have perished, unlike the records of the Dilmun traf­
fic, which are stamped on imperishable baked clay. And no seri­
ous archaeological investigations have yet been made along the

line of the route, or at its destination.
The destination of these ships was the land of Punt. And the

location of the land of Punt is anybody’s guess. Yet Punt was
well known by hearsay to the Egyptian of 2000 b.c. He himself
had no doubt as to where it lay. Far longer than tradition could

record (we know that it was well over a thousand years) goods
from Punt had been reaching Egypt, and for at least as long as
three hundred years Egyptian ships had been sailing the route

thither.
They sailed from the point on the Red Sea coast closest to the
Egyptian capital, Thebes—and it can hardly be accidental that

Thebes lay on the great bend of the Nile, where the river ap­
proaches within a hundred miles of the Red Sea coast. From there

they sailed south, for an indefinite distance. The state records tell
us only of the state-sponsored expeditions to Punt, but surely
there were also private merchant adventurers, here as in the Per­

sian Gulf, who would make the journey for the profit to be won
from the merchandise they could bring back. For the merchan­

dise brought back by the royal convoys is rich enough in all con­
science. Gold and ivory and ebony, frankincense and myrrh, apes
and leopards and slaves, particularly dwarfs, are listed; and