* That part of Pûanît where the Egyptians landed was at first located in Arabia by Brugsch, then transferred to Somali-land by Mariette, whose opinion was accepted by most Egyptologists. Dumichen, basing his hypothesis on a passage where Pûanît is mentioned as being on both sides of the sea, desired to apply the name to the Arabian as well as to the African coast, to Yemen and Hadhramaut as well as to Somali-land; this suggestion was adopted by Lieblein, and subsequently by Ed. Meyer, who believed that its inhabitants were the ancestors of the Sabseans. Since then Krall has endeavoured to shorten the distance between this country and Egypt, and he places the Pûanît of Hâtshopsîtû between Suakin and Massowah. This was, indeed, the part of the country known under the XIIth dynasty at the time when it was believed that the Nile emptied itself thereabouts into the Red Sea, in the vicinity of the Island of the Serpent King, but I hold, with Mariette, that the Pûanît where the Egyptians of Hâtshopsîtûs time landed is the present Somali-land--a view which is also shared by Navillo, but which Brugsch, in the latter years of his life, abandoned.
[Illustration: 361.jpg AN INHABITANT OF THE LAND OF PÛANÎT]
Drawn by Fauchon-Gudin, from a photograph by Gayet.
The first stations which the latter encountered beyond Cape Direh--Avails, Malao, Mundos, and Mosylon--were merely open roadsteads offering no secure shelter; but beyond Mosylon, the classical navigators reported the existence of several wadys, the last of which, the Elephant River, lying between Bas el-Eîl and Cape Guardafui, appears to have been large enough not only to afford anchorage to several vessels of light draught, but to permit of their performing easily any evolutions required. During the Roman period, it was there, and there only, that the best kind of incense could be obtained, and it was probably at this point also that the Egyptians of Hâtshopsîtûs time landed. The Egyptian vessels sailed up the river till they reached a place beyond the influence of the tide, and then dropped anchor in front of a village scattered along a bank fringed with sycomores and palms.
* I have shown, from a careful examination of the bas- reliefs, that the Egyptians must have landed, not on the coast itself, as was at first believed, but in the estuary of a river, and this observation has been accepted as decisive by most Egyptologists; besides this, newly discovered fragments show the presence of a hippopotamus. Since then I have sought to identify the landing-place of the Egyptians with the most important of the creeks mentioned by the Græco-Roman merchants as accessible for their vessels, viz. that which they called the Elephant River, near to the present Ras el-Fîl.