ADDENDUM Dans le n° 69 (2019) de la Revue d’Égyptologie a paru l’article de Filip TATERKA, « The Secretary Bird of Deir el-Bahari : One More Piece to the Puzzle of the Location of the Land of Punt », pp. 231-250. Dans cet article, l’auteur montre qu’un oiseau représenté sur un relief méconnu du Portique de Pount à Deir el-Bahari est un messager secrétaire (Sagittarius serpentarius), dont l’aire d’habitat est confinée à l’Afrique. C’est une preuve de plus de la localisation de Pount en Afrique (contre l’hypothèse d’une localisation dans la péninsule Arabique). Mais, surtout, Taterka montre que dans les reliefs du Portique de Pount, les produits de la Nubie et les produits de Pount sont étroitement associés ; cela suggère qu’une seule et même expédition les a rapportés à Thèbes. Selon moi, cela prouve que cette expédition a emprunté la voie fluviale. C’est par le Nil qu’elle a dû, en revenant de Pount, embarquer en Nubie des produits locaux. Taterka pense au contraire que l’expédition a navigué vers Pount par la mer Rouge et a abordé sur la côte est de l’Afrique. Mais il serait pour le moins étrange qu’elle ait ensuite poussé par voie terrestre jusqu’en Nubie (Soudan) pour revenir ensuite sur la côte érythréenne, reprendre le bateau. In the issue nr 69 (2019) of the Revue d'Égyptologie appeared the article of Filip TATERKA, "The Secretary Bird of Deir el-Bahari: One More Piece to the Puzzle of the Location of the Land of Punt", pp . 231-250. In this article, the author shows that a bird represented on an unknown relief of Punt’s Portico at Deir el-Bahari is a secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius), a species endemic to Africa. This is one more proof of the location of Punt in Africa (against the hypothesis of a location in the Arabian Peninsula). But, above all, Taterka shows that in the reliefs of the Portico, the products of Nubia and the products of Punt are closely associated; it suggests that one and the same expedition brought them back to Thebes. In my opinion, it’s a proof that this expedition took the waterway. It was by the Nile, on returning from Punt that expedition had embarked in Nubia local products. Taterka believes that the expedition sailed to Punt via the Red Sea and landed on the east coast of Africa. But it would be strange, to say the least, to have then pushed overland to Nubia (Sudan) and then returned to the Eritrean coast in order to re-embark. WADJ-WER, ‘THE GREAT GREENERY’ A BRIEF LOOK AT AN EGYPTOLOGICAL CONTROVERSY 1 Christian CANNUYER Université catholique de Lille, Faculty of Theology Chairman of the Royal Belgian Society of Oriental Studies For half a century now, the closely-knit community of the Egyptological village has been troubled by an at times spirited debate over the meaning of wadj wer ( transliterated wAD wr), literally the ‘great greenery’ or the ‘very green’, an expression which the ‘classical’ dictionaries of the Egyptian language translate primarily, if not exclusively, as the ‘sea’ 2. I wanted here to bring out what are the essences and the issues of a debate which, in my opinion, is a particularly interesting textbook case, revealing certain limits of our philological and historical disciplines. I will attempt to present the problematic as simply as possible, by not encumbering myself with fleshed out references to the very abundant literature on the subject, and restricting my references to the essential works, in which one will find all the additional bibliography one might wish for. Wadj wer, it is (first and foremost) the sea! Who is at fault? The Shipwrecked Sailor is to blame If the pioneers of Egyptology, in the 19th century, from the outset translated wadj wer by ‘sea’, it is in particular because the term appears in the Shipwrecked Sailor, the famous allegorical tale dating from the Middle Kingdom: onboard a boat returning from a voyage whose goal was doubtless to trade in the land of Wawat (Nubia), the narrator relates to the expedition’s backer, evidently disappointed by its outcome, a far more traumatic event he had himself experienced in the past, in other words the sinking of his craft, caught unawares by a sudden thunderstorm when it was navigating in the wadj wer. The impressive dimensions of the vessel described in the tale (120 cubits in length and 40 cubits wide), the power of the thunderstorm which leads to it capsizing and the fact that the hero washes ashore an island – on which he meets a divine snake, the ‘Sovereign of Punt’, which in turn narrates a cosmic cataclysm which the reptile had escaped – convinced the first translators that wadj wer had to be the sea. Insofar as the report of a real expedition to Punt dispatched by Queen Hatshepsut in Year 9 of her reign manifestly describes this enigmatic country as a land in Black Africa (Negroid population living in huts, typical wildlife: giraffes, rhinoceri), some were quickly steered towards situating it somewhere to the north of Erytrea; consequently, the sea (wadj wer) which was being navigated could be no other than the Red Sea. 1 This paper is an adapted and updated translation of Chr. CANNUYER, Ouadj-our, “le Grand Vert” pour les nuls. Bref regard sur une controverse égyptologique, dans ID. (dir.), La mer, les ports, les marins dans les civilisations orientales. Pauline Voûte et Robert Donceel in honorem (Acta Orientalia Belgica, XXXII), Bruxelles, 2019, pp.15-30. 2 Thus, the very standard reference Raymond O. FAULKNER, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian Oxford, 1962, p.56: ‘wAD-wr the sea.’ No other translation is given! More recent and supposedly more up to date in lexicographical terms, Rainer HANNIG, Die Sprache der Pharaonen. Großes Handwörterbuch Ägyptisch-Deutsch (2800-950 v. Chr.) (Kulturgeschichte der Antiken Welt, 64), Mainz, 1995, p.179, is equally reductive; in fact, he is more misleading in indicating: ‘‘Großer Grüner’, Meer (bes. Mittelmeer, Rotes Meer; Fayum-See), Ozean.’ He even suggests a clear distinction between wadj wer and the Nile by quoting this passage from the biography of Paheri, in his tomb at Elkab: mj Hapj Hr stA r wAD-wr, ‘wie der Nil, wenn er zum Meer fließt.’ The case seemed settled, wadj wer was first and foremost the ‘sea.’ Not just the Red Sea, for that matter. The Greek text of the celebrated ‘Rosetta Stone,’ in other words one of the examples of the Decree of Memphis, dating from 196 BCE, under the Lagid king Ptolemy V, renders the Egyptian wadj wer by Θάλασσα, ‘sea,’ doubtless the Mediterranean: the sovereign implements defensive measures against the possible attacks which may come from it. Consequently, the mysterious Hau-Nebut living in the ‘islands in the middle of wadj wer,’ who are mentioned in numerous documents, are in all likelihood, it was thought, the inhabitants of the Aegean Sea, in other words the Greeks. Wadj wer = the sea. A received idea shaken The first scholar to have raised doubts about the exclusive identification of wadj wer with the sea was Rolf Herzog. In a study published in 19683 in which he attempted to situate Punt, he concluded that one went there by the Nile and that wadj wer could therefore correspond to the latter. Four years later, Alessandra Nibbi would take an interest in the celebrated ‘sea peoples’, whose incursions into the Levant, around the end of the 13 th century BCE were reputed to have brought about the end of the Canaan city-states and the Hittite empire; 4 she concluded with the finding that this appellation drawn from Egyptian sources (principally the inscriptions of the pharaohs Merenptah and Ramesses III, who endeavoured to repel these invaders) was unwar-ranted and that the translation of wadj wer by ‘sea’ was never imperative.5 Despite the stubbornness which Alessandra Nibbi employed in espousing it in other publications, this opinion ran so contrary to a ‘dogma’ accepted by all that that it was almost unanimously rejected without further discussion and contributed to having its author passed off as an eccentric with little academic credit. It was then that she found unexpected support in the person of Claude Vandersleyen, who made a resounding statement going along with her arguments at the 4th Congress of the International Association of Egyptologists in Munich in 1985. 6 Interpellated by the objections à propos wadj wer = ‘the sea’ which Alessandra Nibbi had brought to his attention in 1973, Vandersleyen had gone back to the problem with completely fresh eyes, gathering together and rereading the whole of the available sources without preconceived ideas. From this he arrived at the same finding: wadj wer was not, was even never, ‘the sea’. It was the Nile, its verdant valley and the Delta. Vandersleyen delivered the detailed fruit of his research, providing all the impressive material collected and analysed (no less than 320 occurrences of wAD wr), in an initial book: Ouadj our, wAD wr. Un autre aspect de la vallée du Nil (Connaissance de l’Égypte ancienne, 7), Brussels, 1999, of which he almost ten years later published a version entirely reworked and enriched with some forty or so additional proofs: Le delta et la vallée du Nil. Le sens de ouadj our (wAD wr) (Connaissance de l’Égypte ancienne, 10), Brussels, 2008. R. HERZOG, Punt (ADAIK, 6), Glückstadt, 1968. See Manuel ROBBINS, Collapse of the Bronze Age: The Story of Greece, Troy, Israel, Egypt, and the Peoples of the Sea, Lincoln et al. loc., Authors Choice Press-Universe, 2001. 5 A. NIBBI, The Sea Peoples: A Re-examination of the Egyptian Sources, Oxford, 1972. 6 C. VANDERSLEYEN, Le sens de Ouadj-our (wAD wr), in Actes du 4e Congrès International des Égyptologues, Munich, 1985 (Beihefte SAK, 4), Hamburg, 1991, pp.345-352; see also ID., Ouadj-our ne signifie pas ‘la mer’: qu’on se le dise !, in Göttinger Miszellen, 103 (1986), pp.75-80, and Punt sur le Nil, in Discussions in Egyptology, 12 (1988), pp.75-80. 3 4 Wadj wer = the Nile, its verdant valley and the Delta Let us summarise the strong points of Claude Vandersleyen’s reasoning:7 1. The very name and the written form of wAD wr refers to fresh water. Serving to write the adjective wAD, ‘green’, the sign represents a papyrus stalk with its umbel blooming and clearly evokes the plant world as well as everything which could grow thanks to the life-giving water. 2. From the Old Kingdom onwards and up to the Roman era, the Nile gods represented as fleshy, semi-naked, the body filled with water, were called wadj wer or known as ‘porters’ of wadj wer. The oldest known representation of such a Wadj wer personified as a ‘Nile’ god is found in the sun temple of Sahure at Abousir (Fifth Dynasty, Museum of Cairo JE 39534). The caption above the divine figure reads: di=f anx wAD wr, ‘May he give life, Wadj wer!’ The link between wadj wer and the Nile as a vector of Egypt’s proverbial fertility could not be more confirmed. 3. Likewise, many major gods (Khnum, Ptah, Rê, Atum, Khonsu, Geb, Shu) and many major goddesses (Hathor, Séshat, Neith, Mut) of the Egyptian territory maintain an intimate link with wadj wer, very especially the crocodile god Sobek, Horus and Osiris. 4. Osiris, in effect, is himself Wadj wer. ‘You are green and great in your name of wAD wr’, it is already said of him in the Pyramid Texts (§ 628b, c). He is the ‘Great greenery’ which issues from the Flooding of the Nile. Hapi (the Flood), the Nile, Osiris and even the Nun (the primordial water) are Wadj wer. 5. Wadj wer often designates the Nile itself, on which one willingly sails. But it also corresponds to the verdant lands which the river nourishes and where human beings and animals live.8 It is the whole of the Nile’s green valley, its fields annually covered by the beneficial surges, its lowlands almost perpetually flooded (the pehou), its gardens adorned by ponds (the she). This valley which sprawls to the north of the country, coming into bloom with the Delta, wadj wer par excellence9, an area for the greater part aquatic in Antiquity, when there emerged the ‘islands which are in the middle of wadj wer’ (iw.w Hrj.w-ib wAD wr). And so, the sources reveal that wadj wer is constantly linked to a fluvial and terrestrial context which has strictly nothing to do with the sea. Wadj wer is no other than the Nile valley and its Delta, the river, its banks and alluvial lands taken together, in other words the very essence of Egypt. And that is the case from the earliest periods up until Greco-Roman times, because this Nilotic reality of wadj wer is attested to without interruption in all the hieroglyphic documentation. Vandersleyen’s demonstration is, at this stage, incontrovertible. For the crushing majority of the some 360 attestations of wadj wer collected, the identification with the Nile and its valley, or with the Delta, which is merely its efflorescence, is ascertained with certainty or is the most likely. I will not oblige myself here to go back over all the occurrences of wAD wr justifying everything that follows; it would be too long and unnecessary because they will be found without difficulty in the two aforementioned books by Vandersleyen. 8 Hippopotamuses and crocodiles live there, as in the Myth of Horus and Seth, in which the latter suggests to his rival that they both metamorphose into hippopotamuses and dive into the wadj wer. Hippopotamuses have never been seen in the sea! 9 Alessandra Nibbi incidentally wished to restrict wadj wer being identified with the Delta only. 7 Reservations: wadj wer could also be the sea Few Egyptologists have welcomed his conclusions unreservedly. 10 Some admittedly concede that wadj wer sometimes or (more) often designates the Nile and its valley. But they maintain that, in certain cases, it concerns the sea, the Red Sea especially, sometimes the Mediterranean. The expression would appear to be polysemous – like the Arab al-baḥr, which, in Egypt, designates both the sea and the Nile11 – or became it from the Middle Kingdom onwards, when the first attestations of wadj wer = ‘Red Sea’ are reputed to have appeared. A number of colleagues have been even less receptive and, against the evidence, stand by the position of the dictionaries. When they come across wadj wer in a text, they don’t hesitate for an instant before translating is as ‘sea.’ Many have not read Vandersleyen, of course. But their certainty is unshakeable. And it rubs off on their readings and their disciplines. As evidence of this is this conversation between two ‘keen amateurs,’ heard by chance in a wellknown Paris bookshop, which specialises in Egyptology: ‘Ah, look! Here’s that book by that Belgian who claims that wadj wer is not the sea. Absurd, isn’t it? It’s obviously the sea: it’s clearly the case in the Shipwrecked Sailor. And for that matter, if it wasn’t the case, how did one say the sea in Egyptian?’ The Shipwrecked Sailor, a key text Why this resistance to the nevertheless sound conclusions of the file assembled by Vandersleyen in the wake of Nibbi? Concerning the most head-on opposition, the one which consists of maintaining that wadj wer is first and foremost the sea, I am persuaded that it is to a great extent motivated by the Shipwrecked Sailor. This is one of the best known ‘tales’ in Egyptian literature, and many Egyptologists have studied it during their hieroglyphic apprenticeship years. Yet, after an initial reading of the text, it is difficult not to come away with the sense that the Red Sea is the wadj wer on an island on which the hero is shipwrecked and on which lives the snake, termed the ‘sovereign of Punt’. A feeling strengthened by the fact that recent archaeological discoveries have definitively proven that one could reach Punt via the Red Sea, on whose littoral the Egyptians had set up sporadic ports during the Middle Kingdom12. One of the most favorable reception of Vandersleyen’s conclusions is certainly that of Jean-Pierre CORTEGin the entry Ouadj-our in L’Égypte ancienne et ses dieux. Dictionnaire illustré, Paris, 2007, pp.406-407. One can find a commentated overview of the positive, mixed or frankly negative reactions to Vandersleyen’s thesis in the latter’s book, Le delta et la vallée du Nil, pp.117-138. 11 Al-Beḥeria, ‘the maritime’ or ‘the Nilotic’, even ‘the Nordic,’ in our day designates a governorate of the Delta (capital: Damanhur). There is a kind of parallel with the denomination wadj wer attributed to the latter in Pharaonic antiquity. Vandersleyen insists on the strong link which joins wadj wer to the Delta, thus to the north; according to Nicolas GRIMAL, in Annuaire du Collège de France, 2001-2002, pp.713-715, leaning on the geographical organisation of the toponyms of the temple of Soleb, it is a question of an argument against the exclusive identification of wadj wer with the sea. For Grimal, if I understand him correctly, wadj wer may in fact be considered an indication of the north, the important factor being not ‘the presumed liquid element, but simply the position of the observer. With this in mind, if one goes over the some 400 [sic] attestations studied by Claude Vandersleyen, one realises that this reading suits all the uses, real or metaphorical, of the term. Without counting the times when wadj-wer actually designates the sea’ (p. 714). That’s an easy thing to say, and it remains to be proven case by case. On top of that, to me the affirmation does not seem of rock-solid clarity. 12 See, recently, Claude OBSOMER, Les ports de la mer Rouge et l’expédition de Sésostris Ier vers Pount, in C. CANNUYER (dir.), La mer, les ports, les marins dans les civilisations orientales, op. Cit., pp.31-58 ; ID., Mersa Gaouasis sur la mer Rouge et les expéditions vers Pount au Moyen Empire, in Babelao, 8 (2019), pp.7-66 (with previous bibliography). Babelao is online : https://cdn.uclouvain.be/groups/cms-editors-ciol/babelao/2019/03 10 GIANI That is why, for my part convinced by the fundamental correctness of the thesis wadj wer = the Nile valley and Delta, I have devoted three studies to the Shipwrecked Sailor, including one in the Acta Orientalia Belgica XXV, presented to Claude Vandersleyen.13 My conclusions can be summarised in three primary points, to which one could add other secondary arguments I will dispense with here: 1. The tale of the shipwreck locates it in the Sudanese Nile, on an expedition to Punt. In fact, in the preamble, the narrator congratulates his counterpart: having passed the island of Senenmut, in other words the island which today goes by the name of Bigeh, opposite Philae, a little to the south of Elephantine and Aswan, to the southern port of Egypt, the vessel returns home without mishap, and there is great reason to rejoice at this. Incontestably, the navigation thus took place on the Nile, upstream of Egypt, in Lower Nubia (the country of Wawat), as the text incidentally explicitly specifies. To soothe the anguish of his companion, unhappy with the fruits of the expedition, the narrator recounts for him a voyage he had participated in earlier and which had been immeasurably more disastrous: ‘I will tell you – he says to him – something identical to that (mit.t irj) which happened to me when I went to the Sovereign’s mines and I went down the wadj wer on a boat, etc.’ The turn of phrase mit.t irj, ‘identical to that,’ certainly does not relate to the tribulations encountered by either of the expeditions (they are incomparable), but to their nature, to their context. If they had had such different contexts as the Nubian Nile for one and the Red Sea for the other, it is unlikely that the narrator would have expressed himself in such a way. 2. There is in the tale a manifest full-blown numerical symbolism (the insistence on the number 120 – which is that of sailors and the cubits of a ship’s length – over the four months that the shipwreck victim stays on the island of the divine snake, itself 30 cubits length), which can only be explained convincingly in relation to the calendar and cycle of the flooding of the Nile.14 As has been magnificently shown by a study by Maria Theresia DERCHAIN-URTEL, the shipwrecked sailor is himself a kind of allegory of the Nile-Osiris saved by the solicitude of the Snake, in which must certainly be recognised the God Atum15. In this allegorical context, wadj wer can only be the Nile. For that matter, if the Snake’s island was a maritime island and not a Nilotic one, how could it be named the Sovereign of Punt? The island was situated on the Nile, doubtless at the entrance to Puntite territory. 3. Storms capable of sinking vessels as imposing as that found within the tale are not rare and they are often as unpredictable as in the story. There are abundant accounts of it. It does not therefore necessarily concern a storm at sea, as is ordinarily believed. As for the islands, they are come across in great numbers on the Nile’s watercourses, notably in Sudan, some emerging only temporarily, as does that of the tale. I therefore espouse with some certainty the idea that the tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor has the Nile as a framework. But I admit that it is very difficult to get across, due to what C. CANNUYER, Encore le naufrage du Naufragé, in BSEG, 14 (1990), pp.15-21; ID., Le voyage comme tension eschatologique dans l’Égypte ancienne. Les leçons du Naufragé, in Julien RIES and Aloïs VAN TONGERLOO (ed.), Les voyages dans les civilisations orientales (Acta Orientalia Belgica, 11), 1988, pp.28-42; ID., Tempête en Nil! Nouvelle note sur le grain qui fit sombrer le navire du Naufragé, in ID. and Nadine CHERPION (ed.), Regards sur l’orientalisme belge suivis d’études égyptologiques et orientales. Mélanges offerts à Claude Vandersleyen (Acta Orientalia Belgica, 25), 2012, pp.175-184. 14 Cf. Christiane DESROCHES NOBLECOURT, Égypte ancienne: le conte du Naufragé, in Christian BUCHET and Claude THOMASSET (ed.), Le Naufrage. Actes du Colloque tenu à l’Institut Catholique de Paris (28-30 janvier 1998), Paris, 1999, pp.155-162, spec. 160-161. 15 Maria Theresia DERCHAIN-URTEL, Die Schlange des ‘Schiffbrüchigen’, in Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, 1 (1974), pp.84-104. 13 Vandersleyen aptly calls ‘the obsession with the sea,’ first and foremost the Red Sea and the secrets of Punt. Voyages to Punt by wadj wer For Punt is an indispensable element in the file. Besides the overwhelming attestations of wadj wer gathered together by Vandersleyen of which it can be demonstrated that they probably or certainly concern the Nile, or of which it cannot be absolutely proven that they talk of the sea, only four documents from the Pharaonic era (in other words a little over 1%) seem to show that wadj wer may also designate the Red Sea. And all four of them have a link with the navigation to Punt. Three of them have been the subject of a very detailed re-examination by Yves DUHOUX, Des Minoens en Égypte? ‘Keftiou’ et les ‘îles au milieu du Grand Vert’ (Publications de l’Institut Orientaliste de Louvain, 52), Louvain-la-Neuve, 2003. For this specialist in Greek and Mycenaean studies it consisted of returning to the whole of the wadj wer file in order to determine the real dwelling place of the Minoans represented in several Theban tombs of the XVIIIth dynasty, in which they are designated as coming from the ‘islands at the heart of wadj wer’ (iw.w Hry.w-ib wAD wr), islands which have generally been identified with the islands of the Aegean sea but which Vandersleyen places in the Nile Delta. As an improvised Egyptologist, Duhoux has carried out a remarkable undertaking, casting an open yet critical eye over the work of Vandersleyen. It must be said from the onset that he accepts the majority of the latter’s conclusions: the ‘Great Greenery’ of the Egyptian sources is originally and very predominantly the Nile, and the ‘islands in the middle of the Great Greenery’ are correctly to be positioned in the Delta, which enables him to build a whole series of hypotheses concerning the Minoan colonies established in Egypt around the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, doubtless following the eruption of Santorini, which had destroyed their original Aegean lands. Duhoux also favourably accepts the idea, dear to Vandersleyen, that an end needs to be made to the mirage of the ‘peoples of the sea’, these invaders from the end of the 13th century BCE, whom it would be better to term ‘peoples of the north.’ Yves Duhoux thus agrees very widely with Vandersleyen, apart from three documents we will now turn to and where he thinks wadj wer indeed designates the Red Sea, via which one sailed to Punt. In chronological order, these three documents (to which I will add a fourth) are: 1. The inscription of the intendant Henu, dating from year 8 of Mentuhotep III (XIIIth dynasty), around 2006 BCE, found in the Wadi Hammamat, a valley where the Arab desert enters the Nile and the Red Sea is at its narrowest. It constituted an ideal traffic corridor to reach the river port of Qift on the littoral (see the map at the end of this article, Fig.2). Henu was placed in charge by the pharaoh of expediting the sending of ships to Punt. He left Qift with several thousand men and, after a long march requiring the replacement of shoes and the digging of no less than 15 wells, he reached wadj wer. The inscription subsequently has not a word to say about the navigation to and the sojourn at Punt. Henu settles for mentioning that after the return from wadj wer, loaded with precious products, he passed by the Wadi Hammamat and there extracted stones. Duhoux considers that the wadj wer Henu ended up at after departing from Qift is surely the Red Sea, that the royal intendant may or may not have himself there embarked for the expedition to Punt, of which he seems to know none of the details.16 This constitutes a refutation of Vandersleyen’s hypothesis according to which Henu’s troops instead marched southwards from Qift in order to reach wadj wer, in other words the banks of the Nile around the 5th cataract, where he is thought to have constructed the ships in order to continue his journey to Punt by river. Duhoux stresses the hardly plausible character and the enormous logistical difficulties which such a long journey by land would entail (at least 900km). Vandersleyen’s hypothesis all the same has two arguments for it which are not lacking power: the text indeed describes a very arduous pedestrian venture, requiring the replacement of shoes and the digging of 15 wells; two of them are situated in localities whose names have an ‘African’ sound, IdhAt and IAhtb, with the latter very probably corresponding to the Ihtb on a list of peoples of the South found in Soleb and dating from Amenhotep III. Vandersleyen again points out that Henu, having constructed his boats on the bank of wadj wer and having loaded them, makes a great offering of gazelles and oxen, which, according to him, is difficult to understand, concerning the oxen, if he is situated on the desolate littoral of the Red Sea. But to all of that Duhoux puts up a devastating counter-argument for Vandersleyen’s scenario: why did Henu, after having agreed to such a gruelling land route, go to the trouble of constructing crafts for a voyage which should no longer be very long? 17 And what of the return journey? A detour via Wadi Hammamat seems implausible when they must have gone beyond Thebes, where Mentuhotep III was doubtless impatiently awaiting the arrival of the products from ‘God’s land’ Even if there remain some vague points in the tale of Henu, I am inclined to consider, with Duhoux and many others, that wadj wer here has every chance of designating the Red Sea. 18 2. The second document in which wadj wer must assuredly designate the Red Sea is the inscription of Ameny, a contemporary of Senusret I, found in Wadi Gawasis, close to the intermittent port, which we now know with certainty was a departure point for the navigation to Punt in the Middle Kingdom. Claude Obsomer (see above, footnote 12) looks into this at great length and offers the arguments in favour of the identification of wadj wer with the Red The question is controversial. Duhoux sooner leans towards the hypothesis which has Henu not taking part in the maritime expedition and settling for waiting for the return, which would explain his silence whilst he is verbose on the rest of the mission. 17 In any case one can situate Punt in the region stretching around the 5 th and 6th cataracts and to their east to the Red Sea: see DUHOUX , op. cit., pp.54 and 104-105, and OBSOMER, Les ports de la mer Rouge et l’expédition de Sésostris Ier vers Pount, pp. 47-49, who nevertheless underlines that some argue for a more southern location or on the arabian coast, in particular Yemen (see Dimitri MEEKS, Locating Punt, in David B. O’CONNOR & Stephen G.J. QUIRKE, Mysterious Lands (Encounters with Ancient Egypt, 5), London, 2003, pp. 53–80; ID., A-t-on enfin trouvé le pays de Pount ?, in OLZ, 113 [2018], pp. 283-292 ; ID., in OLZ, 114 [2019], pp. 297-304 [review of Kathryn A. BARD & Rodolfo FATTOVICH, Seafearing Expeditions to Punt in Middle Kingdom. Excavations at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Egypt, Leiden, 2018]); but, no matter what one says of it, neither the giraffe nor the rhinoceros, visible on the reliefs representing Punt in the temple of Deir el-Bahari, have ever seemed to have been a part of Yemenite fauna. See, for a good synthesis on the various hypotheses in contention, the recent book of Francis BREYER, Punt. Die Suche nach dem ‘‘Gottesland’’ (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, 80), Leiden-Boston, 2016. 18 Recently, Ogden GOELET, wAD-wr, Punt and Wadi Hammamat: The Implication of Verbs of Motion Describing Travel, in Abgadiyat, 11/1 (2016), pp.51-56, has provided a further argument in favour of identifying wadj wer with the Red Sea in Henu’s text, in pointing out that the verbs describing the outward journey from Qift to wadj wer and the return via the Wadi Hammamat, in other words pri (going up) and hAi (going down), were incompatible with a north-south journey advocated by Vandersleyen, which would have been written by means of the pair xnti (‘go southwards’) and xdi (‘go northwards’). If I have understood properly, it is also the use of the verb pri to allude to the trip from the Nile valley to BiA Pwnt, which leads Filip Taterka to identify this toponym with a mining region in the Red Sea littoral (cf. F. TATERKA, Les expéditions au pays de Pount sous la XVIIe dynastie égyptienne, unpublished PhD, Poznan and Paris, 2018, p. 411-412, quoted by OBSOMER, Les ports de la mer Rouge et l’expédition de Sésostris Ier vers Pount, p.50). 16 Sea. I have come round to this opinion resolutely, but I would nevertheless wish to point out that the mention of ‘Osiris of Wadj wer’ on stele No.28 discovered in the Wadi Gawasis must doubtless not be added to the file. This wadj wer can only be the Nile: it is unthinkable that Osiris would be associated with the sea. It is an Osiris of the valley which is alluded to. Obsomer for that matter notes that an Osiris of Wadj-wer was known in the Fayoum at a certainly much later period. 3. Third document: the reliefs and the texts in the temple of Deir el-Bahari describing the expedition to Punt commanded by the queen-pharaoh Hatshepsut, circa 1471 BCE. The ships go to Punt by navigating on wadj wer southwards (sqdi).19 When they reach God’s land, the Egyptians set up their camp on the two sides (r gs.wy) of wadj wer, which can only designate, according to Vandersleyen, the two banks of the Nile, and immediately come across indigenous peoples, whose village of huts is very close by, which seems to announce that we are in inland territories. On the return journey it is at Thebes that they land. Nothing indicates that there was a change of ships between the royal city and Punt. From this Vandersleyen concludes, following Herzog, that the journey took place entirely on the Nile. Major objection: the fish represented under the ships are nearly all sea fish, more specifically from the Red Sea. The argument seems insurmountable, but Vandersleyen notes that there are also a handful of freshwater creatures, including two tortoises and perhaps some catfish. Furthermore, all of these animals are strangely arranged in single file, and not as if they were swimming feely in all directions, but in the manner of an ichtyological atlas, or even of a fishmonger’s stall. Their representation seems to fulfil a quasi-encyclopaedic aim. It concerns not creatures glimpsed during the navigation, but specimens which have been observed, even captured, some in the river and the majority in an exploration which would have extended as far as the coast of the Red Sea. Because if the heart of Punt was doubtless to the south of Egypt and Nilotic – which is proven by the inscription of the tomb of Sobeknakht at Elkab 20 – nothing rules out thinking that the country extended as far as the Erythraean sea. Here as well Duhoux means to dismantle Vandersleyen’s reasoning point by point, but for me his objections seem far less decisive. First of all he duly notes that, no matter the interpretation given to the curious portrayal of the fish, the majority of them are indeed sea fish. The ships must thus have navigated via the Red Sea. The presence of some freshwater fish would correspond to the short section of the voyage which took place on the Nile, between Thebes and Qift. Because for Duhoux, the expedition, on its outward journey, would have gone down from the royal city to Qift, then advanced as far as the littoral of the Red Sea and navigated, finally, to Punt by a maritime route. The return journey would have taken the same route in reverse. To provide basis for this reconstruction, he notes that the oracle of Ammon, An analysis of the Punt portico shows that it maintains, as is the case for the whole of the temple of Deir elBahari, a very strong symbolic relationship with the south and the myth of ‘the Distant Goddess’, as has been very well interpreted by Luc DELVAUX, Hatshepsout et le Gebel el-Silsileh: les carrières d’une reine dangereuse, in Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Egyptologists (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 82), Leuven, 1998, pp.317-324. 20 Vivian DAVIES, Kush in Egypt: a new historical inscription, in Sudan & Nubia, 7 (2003), p. 52-54 ; ID., Kouch en Égypte : Une nouvelle inscription historique à El-Kab, in Bulletin de la Société Française d’Égyptologie, 157 (2003), p. 38-44. 19 having demanded that the queen organise the expedition, specifies that it journeyed to Punt ‘by Fig. 1. The ships of Hatsheput’s expedition to Punt, based on Auguste Mariette, Deir-el-Bahari. Documents topographiques, historiques et ethnographiques..., Leipzig, 1877, pl. 6. sea and by land.’ Here he unduly forces the text, which talks of a journey ‘by water (mw) and by land.’ This could also just as well be compatible with Vandersleyen’s hypothesis, postulating a river navigation as far as Punt and an exploration on foot of the country as far as the shores of the Red Sea! The text of the oracle for that matter seems to allude to this exploratory dimension, when it talks of ‘opening up mysterious paths’ (Urk. IV, 345). The journey ‘by land’ thus does not concern a well-known route (such as that from Qift to the Red Sea). 21 Duhoux finally contests the use Vandersleyen makes of the composed preposition r-gs.wj, ‘on the two sides’ to prove that the Egyptians’ berthing site at Punt was situated on the river and not on the littoral. This expression, retorts Duhoux, could just as well mean ‘on both sides of’ as ‘besides,’ and it would be absurd if the text were to say that the prince of Punt advances before the royal envoy and his gifts r-gs.wj wadj wer (Urk. IV, 326, 6) if it is the literal meaning which applies (how could a man advance on both sides of a river?). This comment is legitimate, but it does not prove that wadj wer is the sea nor that one is on the littoral. One can just as well say that one finds oneself ‘on the bank’ or ‘on the banks’ of a river. It will by now have become clear: the texts and reliefs of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari seem to me to indeed bear witness to an expedition to Punt by the Nile. Exactly as was the case of the Shipwrecked Sailor (cf. above). The major objection to this idea is evidently the portrayal of Red Sea fish under the keels of boats having reached land on the distant African territory. Its refutation by Vandersleyen may seem outrageously forced. But it holds water because, in truth, these fish – both sea and freshwater – lined up in single file, bring to mind more a collection that a natural environment; it is perhaps, as Vandersleyen suggests, the report of an investigation into Punt’s aquatic fauna, both riverine and maritime. The luxuriance of the ‘ethnological’, ‘zoological’ and ‘botanical’ details on the Punt portico represents, all the evidence suggests, an 21 Contrary to what Duhoux maintains in his footnote 257, where he claims that the expression ‘by land’ absolutely cannot designate expeditions on foot once people have arrived at their destination. encyclopaedic intention. The botanical garden of Thutmosis III in Karnak participates in the same encyclopaedic concern22. To these three documents in which one is tempted to identify wadj wer with the Red Sea, I would add one which is not discussed by Duhoux and which is judged ‘obscure’ by Vandersleyen: the inscription of the scribe Amenmesse, known as May, found in the Sinai, at Serabit el-Khadim, which is a kind of report of a mission sent into this region by Amenhotep III. In it Amenmesse says: ‘I followed my master into this mountainous country’ (xAs.t tn = the Sinai, thus) [...] and I climbed onto the bank (or onto both banks, Hr gs.wj) of wadj wer to distribute (sr)23 the marvellous products of Punt (biA.wt nw Pwn.t) and to receive the aromatic resins brought by the princes in their vast ships, tributes from the country we did not know.’ Given the location of the inscription and the comments made by Goelet (cf. above, footnote 18) on the use of the verb pri to describe the expedition on the banks of wadj wer, the latter can only be the Red Sea.24 Wadj wer is indeed the Nile, but this name has also been bestowed (sporadically?) on the Red Sea At the end of this paper, I will conclude in maintaining that we must rally round the essentials of the conclusions of Claude Vandersleyen’s works: in the immense majority of the Egyptian texts in which it appears,25 the expression wadj wer has nothing to do with the sea. It is the Nile and the Delta. And when one travelled to Punt via wadj wer, that could have been done, in my opinion, by going up the Nile, as is demonstrated by the report of Deir el-Bahari and the tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. Nevertheless, there are around 1% of the attestations of wadj wer preserved – three rather isolated texts (Henu, Ameny, Amenmesse) – where the Red Sea is (almost) incontestably concerned. In the Middle Kingdom, the latter must have thus been equated to the Nile. On account of, as some think,26 an evolution which led to wadj wer becoming polysemous, designating both a stretch of freshwater and a stretch of saltwater? I think not, because up until the end of the ‘Pharaonic’ civilisation, all the documentation insisted massively on the link between wadj wer and fertilising water, the flood, Osiris…Why then this transfer? Maybe because the Egyptians had noticed troubling analogies between the Nile valley and the Red Sea: the latter has in fact an often pronounced blue-greenish colour; it traces a north-south transport Cf. Nathalie BEAUX, Le cabinet de curiosités de Thoutmosis III : plantes et animaux du « Jardin botanique » de Karnak (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 36), Leuven, 1990. 23 On this meaning of sr in this text, see CANNUYER, La girafe dans l’Égypte ancienne et le verbe (Acta Orientalia Belgica, Subsidia 4), Bruxelles, 2010, pp. 373-376, where I study the inscription of Amenmesse. 24 Did Amenmesse journey to Punt to collect ‘the marvellous products’ there or where they brought to him – like the aromatic resin – by a Puntite fleet, as the text would appear to suggest? The latter is too elliptical to come to a firm decision. Unless these biaut nu Punt are rather ores from Bia Punt, the mining region from the eastern desert stretching over the Egyptian littoral of the Red Sea in the region of Mersa Gawasis, as Filip Taterka suggests it should be identified (cf. OBSOMER , Les ports de la mer Rouge et l’expédition de Sésostris Ier vers Pount, p. 50)? 25 And not, as OBSOMER says a little too half-heartedly, Les ports de la mer Rouge et l’expédition de Sésostris Ier vers Pount, p. 51, ‘in a certain number of occurrences,’ a wording suggesting that it is rather a question of exceptions. On the contrary, it is the norm. 26 Thus GOELET, op. cit., p. 51, or, in a way, DUHOUX, op. cit., pp.118 sq., and a number of other authors, for example Louise BRADBURY, Traveling to ‘God’s’ Land and Punt in the Middle Kingdom, in Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 33 (1996), pp.37- 60. 22 axis, like the Nile, and, like the river, it enables Punt to be reached; the tides there are of a low amplitude for a sea...27 The fact remains that the documents in which the equation wadj wer = Red Sea is attested are astonishingly few in number, extremely rare even: three out of the around 360 occurrences inventoried. One can understand why that was judged impossible by Vandersleyen. From which stems the hardening of his position, his obstinacy in hammering on that ‘Wadj wer is never the sea!’, which harmed the reception of his excellent conclusions. But how can one not think, in fact, that wadj wer is never the sea, in light of the great consistency of a documentation which ceaselessly shows that it is the Nile and its valley? Other explanations had to be found for the few unfortunate occurrences where wadj wer seems to be the Red Sea. That is Vandersleyen’s understandable conviction. It must be recognised that it is disavowed by an objective and critical examination of these documents: wadj wer is indeed the Red Sea in at least three inscriptions. But it is a very specific semantic extension (until proven otherwise), which must have developed in the region of Mersa Gawasis, from where one could embark for Punt, as one also did from the Nile, for example from Thebes or from Elephantine. In fact, it is an anomaly…deep down, it is a heresy committed by the Egyptians who frequented the path from Qift to Mersa Gawasis. Horresco referens! Osiris must have been scandalised! The Mediterranean, a Ptolemaic wadj wer with a doubtful label Much, much later in the Ptolemaic era, a similar semantic extension doubtless led to wadj wer designating the Mediterranean due to the maritime extension of the Lagid kingdom, which became almost a thalassocracy. But, just as in extending its empire over the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt left Egypt, so wadj wer escaped wadj wer: the Great greenery became the Great Blue. Notwithstanding, attestations of it could also not be more restricted, two all in all: The Decree of Canopus and The Decree of Memphis. Vandersleyen once again, with arguments which must not be too quickly underestimated, contests that wadj wer there is anything other than the Nile. And Duhoux only considers the identification of wadj wer with the Mediterranean as beyond doubt in The Decree of Memphis.28 In the same period, a number of texts, especially in the temples, do not cease singing the praises of the freshwater of wadj wer, that of the Nile and that of its gods...Thus, at Philae, where a text dating from Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II alludes to ‘Hapi of Upper Egypt, who lives in Bigeh, the father of the gods, pouring out the divine fresh water on the wadj wer.’29 How far away we are from the sea and its salt water! Wadj wer is almost never the sea Plutarch, in his On Isis and Orisis, 32, had indeed stressed the hatred the Egyptians had for the sea. If wadj wer had, in their language, habitually designated the sea, why was the Coptic language, the last avatar of Ancient Egyptian, obliged to borrow the word thalassa from the Greek? Herodotus had noted (II, 43) that the Egyptians did not know the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri and had never numbered them among their divinities. Vandersleyen delights in noting this because it goes along with his thesis: there is no original name for ‘the sea’ in Ancient All reasons thought of by DUHOUX op. cit., pp.123-129, who imagines others as well... See, for the detailed discussion, over which I do not linger here, the excellent comments made by DUHOUX, op. cit., pp.107-116 and 129-130. 29 On the basis of index 3417 of Wb.; cf. VANDERSLEYEN, Wadj wer, p.319, doc. 262. 27 28 Egyptian, as strange as that may seem, and certainly no divine name, just as Wadj wer sometimes is, equated with Osiris or to Hapi, the Flood. But, because nothing is simple, Vandersleyen perhaps did not see that immediately after the affirmation I have just hearkened back to, the same Herodotus adds that the Egyptians should nonetheless have known the sea gods, because they had navigated the seas before the Greeks (εἴ περ καὶ τότε ναυτιλίῃσι ἐχρέωντο καὶ ἦσαν Ἑλλήνων τινὲς ναυτίλοι). They were thus all the same obliged to name it, the sea, despite their reluctance. And, whilst they were at it, when these flood tides led to Punt, as did those of the Nile, why not call it wadj wer? The inscriptions of Henu, of Ameny and of Amenmesse show this was the case, in any event in the Middle and the New Kingdom...a little bit out of distraction, almost out of impiety. A little like once upon a time, in French, one called ‘sky’ that which was no more than a scarcely aerial piece of cloth deployed above the bed where a certain activity transported bodies to an illusory and ephemeral Empyrean. But the sky is the sky and wadj wer is the Nile valley. Always, or as near as makes no difference. Fig. 2. Map (in French) enabling the principal toponyms referred to in this article to be placed. Taken from DUHOUX, op. cit., p. 55. ADDENDUM Dans le n° 69 (2019) de la Revue d’Égyptologie a paru l’article de Filip TATERKA, « The Secretary Bird of Deir el-Bahari : One More Piece to the Puzzle of the Location of the Land of Punt », pp. 231-250. Dans cet article, l’auteur montre qu’un oiseau représenté sur un relief méconnu du Portique de Pount à Deir el-Bahari est un messager secrétaire (Sagittarius serpentarius), dont l’aire d’habitat est confinée à l’Afrique. C’est une preuve de plus de la localisation de Pount en Afrique (contre l’hypothèse d’une localisation dans la péninsule Arabique). Mais, surtout, Taterka montre que dans les reliefs du Portique de Pount, les produits de la Nubie et les produits de Pount sont étroitement associés ; cela suggère qu’une seule et même expédition les a rapportés à Thèbes. Selon moi, cela prouve que cette expédition a emprunté la voie fluviale. C’est par le Nil qu’elle a dû, en revenant de Pount, embarquer en Nubie des produits locaux. Taterka pense au contraire que l’expédition a navigué vers Pount par la mer Rouge et a abordé sur la côte est de l’Afrique. Mais il serait pour le moins étrange qu’elle ait ensuite poussé par voie terrestre jusqu’en Nubie (Soudan) pour revenir ensuite sur la côte érythréenne, reprendre le bateau. In the issue nr 69 (2019) of the Revue d'Égyptologie appeared the article of Filip TATERKA, "The Secretary Bird of Deir el-Bahari: One More Piece to the Puzzle of the Location of the Land of Punt", pp . 231-250. In this article, the author shows that a bird represented on an unknown relief of Punt’s Portico at Deir el-Bahari is a secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius), a species endemic to Africa. This is one more proof of the location of Punt in Africa (against the hypothesis of a location in the Arabian Peninsula). But, above all, Taterka shows that in the reliefs of the Portico, the products of Nubia and the products of Punt are closely associated; it suggests that one and the same expedition brought them back to Thebes. In my opinion, it’s a proof that this expedition took the waterway. It was by the Nile, on returning from Punt that expedition had embarked in Nubia local products. Taterka believes that the expedition sailed to Punt via the Red Sea and landed on the east coast of Africa. But it would be strange, to say the least, to have then pushed overland to Nubia (Sudan) and then returned to the Eritrean coast in order to re-embark.