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Trading Expeditions
The Egyptians launched by land and sea both
military and commercial expeditions; the latter included trading
ventures and/or mining and quarrying projects. Inscriptional
accounts of these expeditions provide interesting details of how
they were organized and of the hardships that the participants
endured. Major expeditions were initiated by the king and placed
under the leadership of princes or important officials such as royal
seal bearers. If the route was by sea there were naval captains, and
other officials included scribes and interpreters. There was also a
considerable workforce that consisted of soldiers, conscripted
laborers, and, in the New Kingdom, prisoners of war. Some
expeditions went to the Sinai Peninsula to mine turquoise and
copper. It seems likely that while there, they also met with
merchants who had traveled from Sippar in Mesopotamia and brought
lapis lazuli, which had reached them via other trading routes; they
probably traded this with the Egyptians for the turquoise that was
obtained locally. Thus, this part of Sinai was a center for the
exchange of precious stones as well as a mining area.
Expeditions to Punt Expeditions were also sent to Nubia, Byblos, and Punt to obtain resources that the Egyptians lacked. Sometimes accounts of these expeditions provide details about the Egyptian views of foreign peoples and places. Punt, in particular, was regarded as a semimythical country and was used as an exotic setting for Egyptian stories and love songs. In Dynasty 11 the treasurer Henenu was sent by the king to reestablish the trade with Punt that had lapsed at the end of the Old Kingdom. Details of this expedition, preserved in an inscription in the Wadi Hammamat, are interesting. They state that Henenu was given royal instructions to go to Punt to obtain fresh incense and to fit out a Byblos ship for the journey. He led 3,000 men from Coptos to the port of Quseir on the Red Sea, following a route that was to be used regularly in the Middle and New Kingdoms. The exact route taken from Coptos is not clear, but the journey was obviously well organized. Men were sent ahead across the desert to clear a ninety-mile route and subdue the nomads: They were also required to dig fifteen wells to provide a water supply. The expedition included soldiers and artisans who were each equipped with a staff and a leather canteen and had a daily ration of two jars of water and twenty biscuits. A donkey train accompanied them, carrying spare sandals to replace their worn footwear. The expedition marched from one water hole to the next and eventually reached the Red Sea, where the Byblos ship had been built to take the men along the coast to Punt. No details are given of this voyage, but when they returned they had to disembark and load the produce of Punt onto donkeys to take the overland route back to the Nile Valley (at this time, there was no navigable waterway between the Nile and the Red Sea). The best documented expedition to Punt occurred in year 9 of Queen Hatshepsut’s reign; this journey from a Red Sea harbor to Punt may have taken about a month. Scenes of this expedition in the temple at Deir el-Bahri provide information about the landscape of Punt and give an almost caricatured representation of its queen. The Puntites evidently lived near the shore where their villages were partly hidden among palm, ebony, and incense trees. Their dwellings—semiconical huts— were built on piles and were reached by ladders, a device perhaps designed to protect them from wild animals and other attackers. Animals in this landscape included cattle, dogs, apes, giraffes, and hippopotamuses as well as donkeys. As the Egyptians disembarked the queen of Punt and a chieftain are shown coming to meet them. The chieftain wears a kilt and false beard, but the queen is strangely depicted; she is very large and has such physical abnormalities that her corpulence may have been due to a disease such as elephantiasis. Another major expedition to Punt occurred in the reign of Ramesses III and is recorded in the Great Papyrus Harris. This fleet, composed of heavy transport ships and escort vessels, was apparently built and launched in Mesopotamia and sailed down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. It then traveled around the Arabian peninsula to Punt. Loaded up with cargo, the ships eventually sailed back through the Red Sea, landing at Quseir. At Quseir the expedition disembarked and traveled across the desert to Coptos, where it boarded other boats. These carried the men and their baggage by river northward to Pi-Ramesse, the Delta capital city. .
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Circumnavigation of Africa
This last expedition is the longest voyage recorded by the Egyptians before Necho II of Dynasty 26 ordered the circumnavigation of Africa. According to the king’s main chronicler, Herodotus, he was responsible for initiating the canal that was constructed to provide a waterway between the Nile and the Red Sea. This increased trade and commerce, but with the advanced knowledge and naval skills of his Phoenician mercenaries, he was also able to build a fleet of triremes. The Phoenicians sailed these for him around Africa on a three-year voyage, departing from the Red Sea, going around the Cape, and then returning by Gibraltar. .
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The Story of Wenamun
Sometimes, however, Egyptian journeys were not so successful. The Story of Wenamun dates to the beginning of Dynasty 21 (c.1100 BC), and provides a report of a journey undertaken by the author at the end of Dynasty 20. The papyrus, purchased in Cairo in AD 1891 and now in Moscow, preserves the story almost in its entirety and provides a major literary source demonstrating the decline of Egyptian influence in Syria and Palestine at the end of the New Kingdom. The account may in fact be based on an actual report and certainly describes the geographical background with considerable accuracy. It relates Wenamun’s travels and trading experiences in the eastern Mediterranean. Wenamun was a temple official who was sent on a mission by Herihor, high priest of Amun at Thebes, to buy cedarwood from Byblos to restore the sacred bark of Amun in which the god’s statue was paraded during festivals. The expedition’s context was of an Egypt that no longer enjoyed great prestige abroad and that at home was suffering a nominal rulership by Ramesses XI—in reality it was controlled by Herihor in the south and by Smendes, prince of Tanis, in the north. Wenamun took an image of his god— “Amun of the Road”—with him to enhance his prestige with foreign rulers, but the difficulties he encountered with princes and officials demonstrated that Egypt was no longer held in high esteem by other countries of the Near East. Egypt’s loss of empire is reflected in this story; in earlier times any request made by an Egyptian envoy would have been readily granted. Whereas in the Story of Sinuhe, the classic literary piece set in the Middle Kingdom, Sinuhe met with great success in his travels and encounters because he came from a country that had political and economic power, Wenamun had to suffer considerable difficulties to obtain the wood, which the king of Byblos would only sell to him at a fixed price. .
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Trading Expeditions
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