Ancient Egypt was obsessed with Punt, a trading confederation active from roughly 2500 BCE to 980 BCE that supplied gold, ebony, ivory, exotic animals, and above all the myrrh and frankincense that made temple worship possible. The Egyptians called it Ta Netjer, the land of the god, and some scholars have argued they saw it as an ancestral homeland. Yet for centuries no one could say where it was. This episode follows the search from Fifth Dynasty expeditions to a modern laboratory drilling into the tooth enamel of a 3,300-year-old mummified baboon.

Along the way the episode explores how river-bound Egyptians pulled off Red Sea voyages by building cedar ships in the Nile Valley, taking them apart, and hauling the pieces across a hundred miles of desert to the port that Kathryn Bard uncovered at Mersa Gawasis in 2005. It examines Hatshepsut' ...