About the Book
Hatshepsut was an Egyptian queen who ruled in the Eighteenth Dynasty some 3,500 years ago. Her story, told at the start in her own words and pictures, follows her ships on their famous expedition to the legendary land of Punt. According to ancient Egyptian lore, this mysterious land - 'the land of the gods' to the Egyptians - was found to the south of Egypt, but informed opinion differs on its exact location. Punt was a source of many items precious to the Egyptians, but, although they journeyed thence frequently throughout their long history, Punt eventually disappears into the mists of time before the advent of the Christian Era.
Author and illustrator Eric Robson searches for the location and significance of Punt through a systematic study of the evidence available, particularly the precious products brought back from Punt, and provides a wealth of historical background concerning Ethiopia, Southern Arabia and Egypt. His life-long interest in Ethiopian history and archaeology and his love of the country and its culture have inspired him to publish In Search of Punt: Queen Hatshepsut's Land of Marvels. Intended for the reader with a general interest in the region, it is not an academic study - bibliographical references have been omitted from the text. However, sources of in-depth academic research can be found in the bibliography. Robson has presented his material in concise and accessible prose, and the precise captions for his sketches will draw both casual and technical interest from readers.
Little is known about this enigmatic land, including its precise location in the ancient world. In the end, the author leaves it to the reader to decide how to get there.
Eric Robson, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, has worked for some sixteen years in Ethiopia between 1964 and the present, first for the Ethiopian Ministry of Education on the production of school textbooks, and later for the British Council and UNICEF. He has also worked for the British Institute in East Africa (Cambridge University) in Aksum and assisted BBC television with filming Ethiopian wildlife. He has designed stamps for the Ministry of Posts, traveled widely, and explored and mapped the caves of Sof Omar in Bale region. |
Introduction
Some years ago I was trying out a recipe from a new Indian cookery book. The first stage was to dry-roast some cumin seed in a pan, which I did. No sooner had the beautiful aroma reached my nose, than I found myself back in Egypt. I could feel the bustle of the bazaar, hear the plaintive Arab music and even feel the warm sun on my back. It was only then that I realized that Egyptians must use cumin in their cooking - in my sojourns in Egypt at various times past I used to enjoy eating local food in the little back-street restaurants of Cairo. The aroma of thyme will transport me instantly to the highlands of Ethiopia, where one frequently tramples it underfoot when walking. Cinnamon to Sri Lanka, and so on; it was just one of the experiences that helped me to understand the ancient Egyptians.
The past holds an endless fascination for most of us, probably none more so than that of Egypt with all its mysteries. We may contemplate the reasons for this at leisure; the reasons will be personal but nevertheless touch a common chord deep in our collective psyche.
It is forty years since I first visited Queen Hatshepsut's temple at Der el-Bahri and felt the romantic urge to visit that 'land of marvels and all beautiful things', Punt, for myself. The mystery was that the area where it should have been seemed to be poor and desolate; did they know something I didn't? Was I searching the wrong way? Well, now I have achieved my goal, but as I have heard so many times, without the goal would not have been the journey, and it is obvious now that the journey was the goal, and I am thankful for what it taught me.
We should not think of the civilizations of the past as 'primitive', just stages on an evolutionary journey; the greatest were peaks of human achievement from which we have slipped back and will probably not achieve again, as the signs indicate that we are now in evolutionary regression. What we frequently notice is that spiritual development predominates and religion was of primary importance; this is particularly the case with the ancient Egyptians. Why was it that many of their deities manifested themselves in animal form? That they were so fond of animals? How was it that their lives were so well integrated with the natural order and so in tune with cosmic law?
Most of the higher animals have brains which, proportionate to body size, are on much the same scale as our own; however, the various sectors of the animal brain are allocated differently from those of the human brain, depending on the requirements necessary for their efficient functioning within their particular ecological niche.
Sight has a very large percentage allocated to it, particularly say in the eagle, which has greatly superior vision to our own, virtually telescopic; together with most animals, its visual range extends over a larger sector of the electromagnetic spectrum than does our own, into wavelengths invisible to us. Some have acute sensitivity to infra-red wavelengths that gives them heat and night 'vision'. The same is true of their sensitivity to the frequency range of sound - infinitely greater than our own.
Olfactory development, however, is probably the animal's supreme evolutionary achievement. Humans think verbally because we have developed language - our memory recall is verbal, whereas the animal's is visual /olfactory. Their world is constructed upon the nuances of scent, which governs memory; they know their place in the world, where they belong and what belongs to them. They can virtually travel in time depending on olfactory stimulation.
They are therefore sensitive to and work within the laws and forces of nature, of the cosmos, that is to say, they are responsive to the spiritual dimension, they are psychic as it were; this is their 'sixth sense'.
The Egyptians were aware of this as the dimension in which the whole of creation is interconnected. They were physically and spiritually sensitive people and submitted joyfully to the natural law. They acknowledged the sun as father of all life on earth, realizing at the same time that he was subject to the same laws of creation as was the whole of the cosmos, the natural world, and they themselves. It was manifest throughout life, with the daily decline and resurrection of the sun, night and day, dark and light; birth, growth, decline and death; the cycle of the - seasons, and of plants, growing from seed to leaf and flower, to death and decay and destruction and from seed again to fresh growth. A perpetual cycle of creation and destruction, continuous through life and death to eternity. They understood that eternity is not an endless extension of time but, as it were, the moment is eternal. It could only be comprehended and become real when one was released from the constraints of mortality. That life was really the illusion and the spiritual dimension was true life. Their religion and their spiritual insights manifest through the attributes of their animal deities were devoted to negotiating the transitional phase, that is, 'death'.
It was this ethos which constituted the dynamic of’ ancient Egyptian society and gave it its balanced, holistic quality. It gave the Egyptians their love of all that is natural, sensual and spiritual, which they were constantly seeking out. Of course the priests embellished the philosophy with their own particular magic, creating a religion with all due ceremonial and festive components in which the people could participate.
I found the following written in a diary of some thirty years ago when I was travelling in the desert: 'In the stillness and silence of the desert, dawn is the most enchanting time; it comes like a spiritual awakening, a rebirth, a renewal of life. The dark night sky is illuminated slowly by an orange glow over the eastern horizon, and by six o-clock it is fully light but still comfortably cool. No cloud is to be seen and the atmosphere is perfectly clear; the sky is grayish-pink towards the horizon. After fifteen minutes or so the vast crimson rim of the sun appears on the horizon and the whole of the sky is flooded with a golden-pink glow. The brilliant orb ascends majestically, like some primeval deity awakening -from slumber to breathe life again into the dead earth. His presence is overawing; it strikes some elemental chord deep in the soul. The very air reverberates as he rises slowly behind horizontal violet-grey streaks of vapor. One of two small clouds are seen to develop above the disc, violet-pink against the golden glow; the rays of sunlight piercing the atmosphere cast shadows from these clouds far into the clear void, and a bright aura surrounds his whole presence. Soon however, the few tiny clouds are dispersed and the fiery disc changes quickly as it rises, into an all-enveloping colorless blaze which fills the sky with its merciless power. By eight o-clocks the air has become the searing hot breath of the desert furnace. One ceases to wonder at the pre-eminent position which the sun has occupied in the religions of ancient times'.
In our society today we have become dislocated from all that is natural; sunset and sunrise are almost irrelevant to us; we have little contact with the earth; we cocoon ourselves in artificial environments cut off from all that is natural and nurturing. We forget that we are born of the cosmos; we are the same substance as that of the stars and the earth. We are creating machines to do our intellectual work for us, we are undermining our biological resilience by over-use of synthetic drugs; strange new drug- resistant epidemics are developing. We are polluting and destroying our natural environment and compromising its biological diversity. The century just ended has been one of unparalleled bloodshed and mutual destruction. Psychological disturbance is proliferating.
Punt may be a land embellished by legend and fable, now one of the world's poorest areas in dollar-blind western eyes, but in reality it is immensely rich. In the countryside its biological diversity is virtually intact, pollution is minimal, people's natural immunity is largely uncompromising, many natural resources remain intact, their air is clean and fresh, and their land beautiful to the eye. Their pace of life is more natural, they still know the space and silence essential to spiritual health, and they still live largely within the natural law. The time will come again for this 'glorious region of God's Land ... source of marvels and all beautiful things.' |
