Page 79 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

these goods All COTTIIHUIIUUU a mgii puce m me iLgypuan marKets.
They give us, too, the only indication we have of the location of
Punt. Frankincense must have come, as it comes to this day, from

the Hadramaut on the south coast of Arabia. Gold and ivory and
ebony must have come from central Africa. The dwarfs, too, to

judge by the pictures preserved on tomb paintings in Egypt, are
probably the pygmy bushmen of Africa. Yet the ordinary in­
habitants of Punt, who are also illustrated (with their hands

tied behind their backs) are not Negroes, but are painted in the
red color which by Egyptian convention is reserved for the
Hamitic races. It would seem that we are on the track of another

sea-trading emporium like Dilmun, a mercantile empire which,
centered somewhere near the outlet of the Red Sea on either the
African or the Arabian coast, sent its own ships to gather trade

goods from the coast of Arabia and far south into Africa. Its ships,
at this dawn of the Second Millennium b.c., may well have been

as numerous on the waters of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean
as those of Egypt, sailing the produce of the southlands to the
markets of Egypt and returning with the linen and manufactured

goods of the north.

Far to the north, across the isthmus of Suez and three days’
sail from the mouths of the Nile, lay the greatest mercantile na­
tion of them all, Crete. From its high limestone cliffs and head­

lands the inhabitants of the tiny villages could look out over the
blue Mediterranean and see no land in any direction. But the

white sails which dot the sea would tell of the lands below the
horizon: to the south, Egypt; to the east, Asia Minor; to the north,
Greece; and to the west, a whole world.

The men of Crete have been sailors as long as they have been
farmers. And that, though they can scarcely be aware of it, is

well over a thousand years. Their traditions do not tell them
where their ancestors came from, and even today we cannot sup­
ply the answer. But the earliest traces of man on Crete are of

stone-using farmers, farmers whose implements and pottery show
a bewildering mixture of Near Eastern and Egyptian characteris­

tics. These first farmers may therefore have come from two direc­
tions, but wherever they came from they must have come in ships.