Put (Hastings' Dictionary)

Name of an African nation ; b?s, LXX <l>oi;5 in Gn, Ch (A in Ch <J>our, Genes. Cotton, ioiid), in the Prophets Ai/3ues (except Nah 3', where the render- ing tpvyri appears, with a false division of the verse) ; the marginal additions of Q (Marchali- anus) twice explain the name fancifully as o-ri/io ; Vulg. Phuth, Phut (Ch), in the Prophets Libyes, Libya (Ezk 30' — so AV in Jer and Ezk). In Gn W, 1 Ch 1», Put is the third son of Ham. In the Prophets, warriors from Put are principally associated with the armies of Egypt as auxiliaries. Jer 46" ' Cush and Put, that handle the shield, and the Ludim, that handle and bend the bow,' are among ' tlie mighty men ' of Efjypt. In Ezk 30 we have a similar enumeration of auxiliaries beginning with Cush and Put. In Nah 3' Thebes (No-amon)hasEthioplaandEgypta3 'her strength,' Put and Lubim as her ' helpers.' A distinction seems to be made here between the subjects of the Ethiopian, Egyptian empire and the inde- pendent tribes, living farther off, who appear to nave served the Pharaohs only as mercenaries. In Ezk 27'" Tyrus is said to have had Persia and Lud and Put in her army. An employment of E. African mercenaries in Tyrus is strange, although it does not present greater difficulties than tlie connexion with various other remote nations, like Persia (but see below). In Eck 38', however, the circumstance that in the army of the Northern prince Gog from Magog ' Persia, Cush, and Put ' appear among the various barbarians from Asia Minor, is very surprising. If we do not wish to accuse the prophet of senselessly accumulating here all obscure names of remote nations known • Thie blunder seema to be one of the rare instances where the Egj-ptian tongue influenced the Alexandrian translators. D1S does not exist iQ Uebrew, nor does it mean ' to flee ' in the Semitic languages, but Coptic hae wmt to run, to flee.' Some MSS read iiCi also in Ezk 2710 ; see Field, Uexapla. PUT PUT 177 to him, it is most natural to assume a corruption of the text, due to a reader's having enlarged it from other passages (from 27'"?). A blunder of the scholarly Ezekiel, who displays such a wide knowledge of geography, espeeially in ch. 27, is not very probable. Otherwise, Put would be another country than the one usually designated (see below). The passage must certainlj' be used with caution. On the other hand, Is 6(i" seems to come in here : ' Pul and Lud, that draw the bow,' as the most remote nations. The reading ■t'oiJS for Pul in the LXX (x 'i'oOO) contirms the evident emendation to Put. These biblical passages are insufficient to deter- mine the situation of the country. However, apart from the ditiicult and doubtful name Lud, we see the Libyans repeatedly distinguished from Put, e.i;. in Gn IC (see Lkhabim) and Nah S-> (see LuuiM), also in Ezk SO, where we must read Lub instead of Cub, after the LXX. Therefore the guess of the LXX at the Libyans has little probability. We have rather to look to the east of Africa. The best interpretation of the name, which is now being more and more generally accepted, is the idtntilication with the country Pintt (or rather Puent ?) of the Egyptian inscriptions. The Per- sian list of tributary countries in Naksh-i-Kustara (Spiegel, Pers. Kcihnschr.^ 119) enumerates Kush- iya, Putiya, and Masiya (Babylonian translation Puta, Kiiiu, Maxsii), coiilirming the view that Put (with assimilation of the n) was the form of the name used b_y all Semites, and that it signified a part of N. Eastern Africa. The Egyptians pro- nounced t after n regularly with a sound which the Greeks translated by S (cf. <l>oi;S with the correct rendering, not of the Hebrew, but of the Egyptian pronunciation), the Semit-js by B. So Put stands for Pu(n)t, quite regularly. The Egj'ptian inscriptions mention this country of P\int (later form Pune) very frequently after c. 3uOO B.C. According to the latest investigations, it comprised the whole African coast of the Ked Sea from the desert E. of Upper Egj'jit to the modern Somali country.t Parts of it, evidently only those in the north (lietween SouaWin and Massoua ?), were tributary to the great conquering Pharaohs of the I8th dynn-sty. Whether the masters of Egj'pt in projihetic time extended their power so far sontli is uncertain. But at all times there was intercourse and commerce between Egypt and the southern rich parts of Punt both by land, through the Nubian desert, and by water. We have various inscriptions referring to commercial naval expeditions sent by the Pharaohs, especially in the I2th, 18th, and 20th dynasties, of whieli that in the time of queen 'lfa't-sheps{o)ut has become most famous by the line pictures illus- trating it upon the walls of the temple of Dcir el-Bahri in Western Thebes. Already in the 5th djTiasty king Assa received a member of the African dwarf-tribes from Punt. The treasures of Punt were : slaves, cattle, gold (from a region called 'Amau), ivory, ebony, ostrich- feathers and -eggs, rare live animals (especially monkeys), grey- hounds for hunting, gum, and a number of fra- grant substances from various trees or shrubs. The • Due to O. Eljcre in his Aegppten und <h'e Duchrr ifoce'g, p. 84, iccepU-d, e.g., tjy Stode (d« lia. vat. jl'.th.). On the weak att«nipt at contradiction by Dilimann, Bee the present writer's Aficn, p. 116. t A great nuus of earlier lltemture on the much diBcuBsed situation of this country is ariti(|uatcd. Formerly scholarB tried to identify Punt with Soutlurn Arabia, then (after Mas- pcro) they located it on both sides of the Ked .Sea. Tlie latest literature will be found in Krall, Dot Land I'uiil ('.Silzun|{8- bericlite Altad. Vienna,' cicxi. 1890); Naviilc, Deir etiltihari. Hi. ; W. M. Miiller in MittheiL vorderat. Getelts. lii. ls«^, 148 (cf. Ari^n UTul Kuropa, ch. 7)l Olaser (MUthrit. vonleras. OetdlH. iv. etc.) unfortunately uses some very antiquated sources. VOL. IV. — 12 incense needed by the Egyptians for the divine worship and for cosmetics lormed the must im- portant product of the country. The parts of Punt producing it were called ' the incense- terraces ' (or ' stairs '), apparently situated on the Aljyssiniau coast (incense in sutiicient quan- tity -TOWS only E. of Bab el-Mandeb), but it would be wrong to limit Punt to these regions. The inhabitants were rude nomadic shepherds, some of them negroes or mixed with negroes, but mostly of the pure Hamitic race, i.e. near relativea of the Egyptians and the other white Africans. Consequently their descendants are the desert tribes called Troijlodj/tce (better Trogoclytce) or Icltthyoplmgi by the Greeks, Bcdja by the Arabs in the north, Saho and Afar (Uanakil) on the Abyssinian coast. They can hardly have fonned a larj'e contingent of the Egy|itian armies, because the desert regions north of Abyssinia were too thinly jiopulated. Only the archers of the region Mnza (Masiya of the Persians, see above), more inland, i.e. nearly in the modern province of Taqa, were as popular as policemen and guards as the Nubas are in modern Egypt ; this country of the Mazoyu is frequently separated from Punt. But the prophets speaking of Put- Punt evidently did not consider the scanty population of this country. To them it represented all Africa east of Eg3'pt and Ethiopia (i.e. the Nubian Nile valley, not modern Ethiopia or ^abesh), an en<lless and luystcrious part of the world. The Phoenicians (ci. Ezk 27'°) may have extended their commercial connexions to what the Greeks called the ' coasts of the aromata,' after the completion of Necho's canal between the Nile and the Ked Sea ;t before that time the difficulties must have been too great to allow a direct contact. Commentators who wished to follow the trans- lation of the LXX, compared the Coptic name (JiAiAT ' Liljya (especially the western part of the Helta), Libyan' (thus Knobcl and, following him, Dillmann). The hieroglyphic equivalent of Phnint has not yet been found, but the word looks like a (plural ?) denominative from a feminine noun ending in -ct. This would not at all a^ee with the I (ts) of the Semites, unless an n liad been assimilated (see above). The Greek translators of the prophets may have thought of this name, nevertheless. See, however, above, the objections from the biblical passages and the (•onlirmation of the reading PAt from the Persian inscription. Some Eg}'ptologi.sts compare the Egyptian ex- pression for ' foreign warriors,' which they errone- ously read pet, pite, etc. But the Amania tablets have shown that this expression ' bowmen ' was pcdnte (singtilar 'a troop of bowmen' ])cditc{t), derived from pide{t) ' bow '). Consequently neither the Coptic (Jjaiat nor the Semitic Put agrees with these formations. How the com- parison of 'a river Phut in Mauretania' (i.e. Morocco, which was never even known to the Egyptians !) in Josephus (^n<. I. vi. 2); was seri- ously considered by modem commentators, re- mains a mystery.§ W. Max MCller. • If we have a ripht ttt compare the tribea more to the south- eaflt, we might Kpt-iili also of tlie (Jfilla.'. Tiie frequent com- parison of tiie Soinalis with the 'I'unli' is erroneous. Tlie .Sotnalia lived originally only on the eastern coast of modern Sonmliland, i.e. at too great a distance. Some writers have tried to find in I'unt tlie original African Beat of the ' rim, nicians.' But this idea rest.s only on the accidental Biniilarit*' of a Latin pronunciation (Punicus for Phiunicus). No ethno- logic connexion lieLwecn those African savages and the higlily cultured Asiatic nation can be found. The position of the rluunicians in Gn 10 among the llaniites seems to be due to other reasons than tlioso of ethnology. f See Miilheil. vordera: Ge»:'Ut. iii. 16!, on the completion of the cjinal. t Called Phthutli Ptol. Ir. 1, 8 ; Fut Plln. t. 1, and known thtis also to Jerome. fi Winckler (Forechuvgen, I. 613) has raised the qucntii'n n PUTEOLI PYTHON