Egypt's Trading Partners by Land

All Egypt's missions abroad, both the peaceful ones and the battle-ready, journeyed through the eastern wing of the Nile Delta on a coastal road called the “Ways of Horus.” The route was studded with forts and customs houses controlling access to the Near Eastern lands beyond. One of these was a fort at Tell el Borg near what is now the Suez Canal. A cartouche of Queen Tiy has been found there as well as ceramics dating to this period. Another six miles to the west was the fortress at Tjel (Tjaru) by modern Qantara. Its commandant, Thutmose, gained enough wealth to afford sending eight signed gift jars to Malkata during the jubilee years.

The Ways of Horus led across the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula to Palestine and Canaan, not a unified nation but a series of city-states, some in the lowlands along the Mediterranean Sea (Ashdod) and some in the highlands (Jerusalem), with large areas of unsettled and undesirable land between them. Each city-state had its own governor or mayor, but there was no overall ruler during the fourteenth century B.C., except for Egypt's pharaoh, who was represented here not by a viceroy, as in Nubia, but by overseers with military backgrounds who maintained Egyptian authority with the assistance of manpower from Egyptian garrison towns.