Most Egyptian inscriptions and reliefs concentrate on the activities of the Pharaonic state. They have little to say about ordinary commercial transactions and do little to set them in their Puntite perspective. Relations between the two countries, or regions, are thus depicted as a series of heroic achievements by Egyptian rulers, although these were in fact part of a two-way process involving trade on both sides. Egyptian evidence, though one-sided, is nevertheless of major importance, for it affords the first brief, but valuable, glimpses of foreign trade in this part of the ancient world.

The Ethiopian Borderlands
Essays in Regional History from Ancient Times to the End of the 18th Century
Copyright 1997 Richard Pankhurst