Atlas Outtake #6: Land of Punt

The pharaoh's ships traveled to the Land of Punt to barter for frankincense and myrrh. They returned with elephant tusks, mummified baboons, photos of the queen and epic tales of shipwrecks. The sailors called the Land of Punt the holy land and the place where the sun was born. It's not clear how many of the stories the Egyptians returned with were true. Traveling has a way of making liars out of people.

The Land of Punt might have been in modern-day Ethiopia, Somaliland, Somalia, or even across the Red Sea in Yemen. Egyptian maps are unreliable on this point. The one thing we are certain of is that the Egyptians were not good sailors and could not have gone far.