In 1976, during the First International Conference of Egyptology in Cairo, I had the privilege to listen to Abdel Moneim A.H. Sayed (University of Alexandria, Egypt) announcing his discovery of a Middle Kingdom port at Wadi Gawasis on the Red Sea coast, and was fascinated by the evidence of a possible Egyptian navigation to Punt in the early 2nd millennium BCE he was collecting. At that time, I was just beginning my personal investigation in the northern Horn of Africa and the Egyptian trade with this Punt was already emerging in my mind as a crucial problem to understand better the social and economic development in the regions facing the southern Red Sea.