The legends which
seem to bring the ancestors of the Egyptians from the Red Sea coast have
already been mentioned. They are closely connected with the worship
of the Sky and Sun god Horus of Edfu. Hathor, his nurse, the "House of
Horus," the centre of whose worship was at Dendera, immediately opposite
the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat, was said to have come from Ta-neter,
"The Holy Land," i.e. Abyssinia or the Red Sea coast, with the company
or _paut_ of the gods. Now the Egyptians always seem to have had some
idea that they were connected racially with the inhabitants of the Land
of Punt or Puenet, the modern Abyssinia and Somaliland. In the time of
the XVIIIth Dynasty they depicted the inhabitants of Punt as greatly
resembling themselves in form, feature, and dress, and as wearing the
little turned-up beard which was worn by the Egyptians of the earliest
times, but even as early as the IVth Dynasty was reserved for the
gods. Further, the word _Punt_ is always written without the hieroglyph
determinative of a foreign country, thus showing that the Egyptians did
not regard the Punites as foreigners. This certainly looks as if the
Punites were a portion of the great migration from Arabia, left behind
on the African shore when the rest of the wandering people pressed on
northwards to the Wadi Hammamat and the Nile.
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