This is the first of a series of posts about historic travels. I will try to find interesting historical travel-related stories.

People have been traveling ever since there have been people. According to theory, people evolved in Africa and migrated to all other parts of the world. Trade occurred between people living in different parts of the world. People waged war against each other, sometimes having to travel long distances to do so. And I’m sure there were people who just decided to explore other places. And much of this happened before people developed a written language.

The first record of travel is from an Egyptian noble who went on a trading expedition for the pharaoh Mentuhotep III (Sankhkara) around 2750 B.C. The reason we know about him is because he was so proud of his accomplishment that he had an account of his travels carved in stone in the valley of Hammamat.

His name was Hannu and he is buried in a tomb in Deir el-Bahri, in Theban Necropolis (catalogued as TT313.)

Travels

With a three thousand man army for protection, Hannu set out in the eighth year of the reign of Mentuhotep III. It seems that the Egyptians had had dealings with people of Arabia previously, but Hannu revived this trade, which ultimately revived the fortunes of Egypt.
Hannu’s goal was to conduct ships to the land of Punt to fetch sweet-smelling spices for the king, who financed the expedition.

Hannu started out from the city of Coptos and traveled overland, over hills and across desserts, to a port he calls “Seba” somewhere along the Red Sea. This may have been at or near the current port city of Quseer (or Kosseir.) The description of this part of the journey includes a description of how they carried water with them and reservoirs he had built along the way to contain water.

Once they arrived at Seba, he had ships built and offered animal sacrifices. At this point, he either sent the ships off to the Land of Punt or probably commanded them himself. They sailed south to get to the Land of Punt, which would have been somewhere around the Horn of Africa.

On his return from Seba, he brought with him 80,000 measures of myrrh, 6,000 weight of precious metal (gold-silver alloy) and 2,600 staves of precious wood, probably ebony. His inscription states that he returned “by the road of Uak and Rohan” and brought with him precious stones for the statues of the temples.

The trip that Hannu took was somewhere around 5,000 KM each way, around 3,000 miles. Not really a lot to us these days. The last trip I took to Europe included a flight from Philadelphia to Milan, about 6,600 KM or 4,000 miles each way. But his inscription goes on to boast that nothing like this had happened since the time of the sun-god RA, essentially meaning that nothing like this had ever happened before.

It’s quite possible that his boast was true.