Q&A for History of Mankind (28)

A new paper settles the mystery of where the land of Punt was; and questions about the history of superstition, the role of the Parthians in classical history and Elamite origins

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

This is the twenty-eighth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

Before we get to subscribers’ questions, today we’re looking at a paper about baboon genetics that has finally solved a mystery that puzzled Egyptologists for generations: just where exactly the wonderful land of Punt was.

This is a bigger deal than it may appear. Punt was for centuries the main, and almost only, source of sea-borne foreign trade with Egypt, so commerce between the two lands is the first instance of regular, large-scale shipment of goods in history.

I wrote about Punt and Egypt over two years ago in The Golden Era of Egypt's Pyramids, referring to contacts first reported in the 24th century BC:

A new chapter in the search for state resources was opened during the reign of Sahura, Userkaf's son and second pharaoh of the 5th dynasty. It was then that the first Egyptian expedition to procure exotic goods (malachite, myrrh, and electrum, an alloy of gold and silver) from Punt, the rough equivalent of modern Ethiopia-Eritrea, is recorded.

Punt would remain a frequent destination for Egypt's trade missions over the next 1,500 years, when it remained famous for its “terraces of incense,” supplying not only incense trees (especially live myrrh shrubs, for replanting), but also ebony, ostrich plumes and eggs, perfume, baboons, monkeys, as well as leopard and cheetah skins.

In “Mummified baboons reveal the far reach of early Egyptian mariners,” a 2020 paper in eLife, Nathaniel J Dominy et argue that some baboon remains in Egyptian courts (from the 2nd millennium BC) indicate they came from present-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, and portions of Somalia and Yemen.  

This preliminary picture is now completed by a eLife paper (“Adulis and the transshipment of baboons during classical antiquity,” by Franziska Grathwol et al, confirming the assessment. The paper, using baboon genetics, centers trade from Punt in the city of Adulis in modern Eritrea:

Adulis, located on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea, was a bustling trading centre between the first and seventh centuries CE. Several classical geographers—Agatharchides of Cnidus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo—noted the value of Adulis to Greco-Roman Egypt, particularly as an emporium for living animals, including baboons (Papio spp.). Though fragmentary, these accounts predict the Adulite origins of mummified baboons in Ptolemaic catacombs, while inviting questions on the geoprovenance of older (Late Period) baboons recovered from Gabbanat el-Qurud (‘Valley of the Monkeys’), Egypt. Dated to ca. 800–540 BCE, these animals could extend the antiquity of Egyptian–Adulite trade by as much as five centuries. Previously, Dominy et al. (2020) used stable isotope analysis to show that two New Kingdom specimens of Papio hamadryas originate from the Horn of Africa. Here, we report the complete mitochondrial genomes from a mummified baboon from Gabbanat el-Qurud and 14 museum specimens with known provenance together with published georeferenced mitochondrial sequence data. Phylogenetic assignment connects the mummified baboon to modern populations of P. hamadryas in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and eastern Sudan. This result, assuming geographical stability of phylogenetic clades, corroborates Greco-Roman historiographies by pointing toward present-day Eritrea, and by extension Adulis, as a source of baboons for Late Period Egyptians. It also establishes geographic continuity with baboons from the fabled Land of Punt (Dominy et al., 2020), giving weight to speculation that Punt and Adulis were essentially the same trading centres separated by a thousand years of history.

This makes perfect sense. As the authors of the paper state, Adulis, now called Zula, was well-known a trading entrepot in Graeco-Roman antiquity, once part of the Proto-Ethiopian Kingdom of D’mt.

It served as the closest port to the rich Dahlak Archipelago, and is called “Alalaiou” in the Periplus, a Greek-language travelogue that contains a lot of information on long-distance trade in the decades either side of the start of the Christian era.

Tortoise shells were exported to the Mediterranean Basin from Adulis at the time. Other key exports items were frankincense, used in burials, and myrrh, with important medicinal properties, both obtained from the resin of the particular trees that grew mainly there and in southwest Arabia. It really is a great thing that, thanks to genetics, we can now ascertain the importance of a place that looks so insignificant in modern times. Make sure not to miss it if you ever visit Eritrea.

Let me comment on another point before we get to the questions. I would like to address a specific point that

Sol Hando

made in response to a Substack Note in which I referred to a post about Sparta’s demographic demise, and the effect that the higher social role of Spartan women may have had on the issue.

Sol Hando’s objection is valuable and worth quoting in full:

It was relatively common practice to essentially mortgage your wealth by adding someone else to your will in exchange for immediate favors, so the children of the parents who mortgaged their helots and state allotted land ended up not actually being Spartans but one of the lesser classes.

As you can imagine this led to decreasing numbers of citizens, and increasing numbers of disenfranchised people over time. Towards the end there were some major conspiracies by these children of Spartans who participated in the spartan way of life, but were socially inferior due to not having the state allowed land and Helots.

Xenophon also talked of the manpower shortage in Sparta, especially towards the end.

I’m not convinced this had anything to do with lower fertility in Spartan women, as any work I’ve read on the subject has blamed the Spartan citizenship system, not their fertility.

I disagree with this take but I don’t disagree completely. Sol Hando is right that Sparta’s concentration of land wealth was remarked upon by ancient historians, although it’s not clear to me that they connected this directly with the issue of fertility.

Xenophon, for example, in the most detailed account we have on the social arrangements of Sparta, doesn’t make any reference to this, but makes various references to the exalted position of Spartan women, compared with others in Greece.

Aristotle is the person who directly stated that “oliganthropia,” shortage of military-age men, was the cause of the Spartan demise, and he did focus his criticism on the Spartan system of land-tenure and inheritance, which favored the spread of estates through shared inheritance between sons and daughters. In Aristotle’s view, this may have limited the size of families (again pointing the finger, if indirectly, to the particular role of Sparta’s women).

There are problems with this view, however, notably that Italy’s similar inheritance customs didn’t stop demographic growth there — and property concentration, indeed, proceeded in Italy along the same lines as in Sparta or, in fact, even faster. If the concentration of land ownership had been Sparta’s sole oddity, chances are its demographic trends would have been better.

Now for the questions from paying subscribers, on the history of superstition and natural catastrophes, the role of the Parthians in classical history and the tangled issue of the Elamites’ origins.