Hatshepsut's Expedition to Punt, Told on the Walls at Deir el-Bahari

Most visitors to Deir el-Bahari photograph the terraces from the approach, walk up, look at the colonnades and leave. The reliefs on the south side of the middle colonnade are worth stopping at, because they are something genuinely unusual in Egyptian art: an illustrated expedition report.

What Was Sent, and When

In roughly the ninth year of her reign — around 1470 BC — Hatshepsut dispatched a fleet of five ships to the land the Egyptians called Punt. Egypt had traded with Punt on and off for centuries by then; what makes this voyage exceptional is not that it happened but that Hatshepsut had the entire thing carved onto the walls of her mortuary temple in narrative sequence.

What the Walls Show

• The ships themselves — rigging, oars, steering gear — in enough detail that naval historians still use the reliefs as a source on Egyptian seagoing vessels
• Punt's houses, shown raised on stilts and reached by ladders, among palms
• The ruler of Punt, named as Parahu, and his wife Ati, whose distinctive physique is one of the most discussed depictions in Egyptian art
• The cargo being loaded: ebony, ivory, gold, animal skins, live baboons, and above all myrrh
• Living incense trees, roots balled and carried in baskets slung on poles, being brought back to be planted at the temple

Where Was Punt?

This is the part nobody can close. Punt lay south and east of Egypt, reached by sea, and the goods that came from it — myrrh, ebony, ivory, gold, exotic animals — point to the southern Red Sea region. The main candidates are the coast of modern Eritrea and eastern Sudan, and the Horn of Africa more broadly. Analysis of mummified baboons from Egyptian contexts has been used to argue for particular regions, and the question remains genuinely open.

What is not in doubt is the seamanship. This was a round trip down the Red Sea and back, with cargo, in vessels built for it — launched from a Red Sea port after the ships were carried in pieces across the desert from the Nile.

Seeing the Reliefs

• They are on the middle terrace, south colonnade — ask your guide directly, because it is easy to walk past on the way to the upper level
• Go early. Deir el-Bahari sits in a natural amphitheatre of rock that holds heat brutally by late morning
• The temple is normally combined with the Valley of the Kings and the Colossi of Memnon in one West Bank morning

A queen sent five ships into waters her scribes could barely describe, and when they came back she had the whole voyage carved on her temple — the boats, the houses, the trees, the people. Three and a half thousand years later we can still read the shipping manifest but cannot agree on the destination.