Those pharaohs of Old Kingdom Egypt conducted trade with the land of Punt, commonly acknowledged to be the region of Eritrea at the west side of the southern end of the Red Sea, by ship, because during the Ice Age, the wadi Tumilat of the Sinai flowed all of the time, a distributary of the Pelasaic distributary of the Nile which flowed eastward to where today are the Bitter Lakes and down to the Red Sea, but by the time of pharaoh Thutmose III’s reign circa 1200 b. c. (two centuries after the Ice Age had ended), the Egyptians’ trade with Punt was strictly overland from Coptos (25 miles north of Luxor), up the valley of the wadi Hammamat eastward to the land of Punt on the southwestern shore of the Red Sea.
