Egyptian Geography of the Southern Red Sea: The Land of Wetenet

What is it about?

New discoveries are increasingly revealing the great lengths the ancient Egyptians went to in order to source exotic goods from the southern Red Sea, lands which were at the very limit of their geographic knowledge. One of the places they visited was called "Wetenet", a land of ebony and baboons. They visited this land since approximately 2000 BCE, and continued to visit it for almost a millennium. This research attempts to locate this semi-mythical landscape in the Sudan-Eritrea borderlands, while also demonstrating its connection to Egyptian myths of sunrise and the much more celebrated and famous location of "Punt", a land known from which Egyptians sourced their aromatics.

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