The fact that the pharaoh Merenptah mentioned the name Israel on the stele in his mortuary temple at Thebes is well-known, for that is the earliest citation of that proper name, dating to the lat-ter part of the 13th century.7But it is sometimes forgotten that, from a literary point of view, this inscription cannot be regarded as simple narrative history. It was discovered in 1897 by Petrie, who correctly noted that it had been erected in celebration of the victories of the Pharaoh. His identification of the name Is-rael was fortunate, inasmuch as the nineteenth century excavator was being financed by funds raised by biblical archaeologists who were looking for proof of Israel’s sojourn in Egypt. In ANET it has not been included in the section devoted to Egyptian
his-7The most recent annotated translation of this document has been pre-pared by K.A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions: Translated and Annotated, vol. 4: Merenptah & Late Nineteenth Dynasty, Oxford 2003.
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torical inscriptions, but it is, quite correctly, placed under the section headed ‘Hymns and Prayers’. John A.Wilson, the trans-lator, notes in his introduction that ‘it is not historical in the same sense as two other records of that victory, but is rather a poetic eulogy of a universally victorious Pharaoh’.8 He explains that the text as a whole is primarily concerned not with any ex-pedition to Palestine, but with the famous victory of Merenptah over the th. nw, the Libyans.
For the biblical scholar these two points are of fundamental importance in assessing the significance of the mention of the name Israel. However interesting the conflicts with her western neighbour may be for the historian of Egypt, a reader of ANET is expected to be primarily interested in the name Israel right at the end. Nonetheless, Wilson has translated the text as a whole so that the reader can appreciate that the emphasis is almost always on Libya and the mention of Israel can be seen as some-thing of an afterthought. A significantly different treatment is given to the stele in ContS, where it is presented with all the other Egyptian royal monumental inscriptions of Dynasty xix.
Those were translated by our colleague K.A. Kitchen, but, for one reason or another, the translation of the Merenptah stele was left to James K. Hoffmeier, who decided that only the last two lines were worth translating for the readers of ContS.9 In his introductory paragraphs Hoffmeier shows that he is happy to accept that the hymnic nature of the text in no way implies that there is any elaboration of the historical facts. He forms the conclusion that ‘the king’s sortie into the Levant, in which the Israelites were encountered, must have occurred no earlier than year 2 and before the Libyan campaign (1211-1208 bce)’, and he asserts that the famous reference, ‘the earliest occurrence of Israel outside of the Bible’, counters the recent attempts of minimalists
‘to explain Israel’s origins in Canaan apart from the Bible’.10 There are one or two further points which must be remem-bered when considering the historical reliability of this text. The
8ANET, 376b, lines 1-4.
9ContS, vol. 2, 40-1; the editors had given Hoffmeier the responsibility of translating the inscriptions of Dynasty xviii; see pp. 5-23.
10Kitchen’s introductory paragraphs for the other texts in this section of the book, by contrast, have no trace of any such polemic, although his views on this question are well known; he has presumably thought that there are better times and places for such remarks to have the desired effect.
first is that this particular stele, now in the Cairo Museum, was discovered at Thebes, but the text is duplicated on a second stele, part of which was discovered earlier at Karnak, and this was supplemented later by two further fragments. It is one of those unfortunate accidents of fate that anyone seeking confirmation of the occurrence of the name of Israel on this duplicate stele will be disappointed, because that is just the point where the stele is broken.11In fact, this duplicate stele, despite its appalling state of preservation compared with the one from Thebes, could claim to have greater authority, in that the stone has been selected specifically for that inscription. By contrast, the Thebes stele was first used as the Great Stele of Amenhotep iii (1410-1372), and it is on the rough side of that stele that the inscription of Merenptah (1237-1226) was carved.12
That primary inscription records the great building activity Amenhotep iii undertook at Thebes as well as a commemoration of the previous restoration work undertaken by Seti after the de-struction brought about by Akhnaten. The eulogy to Horus with which that text begins includes the divine epithet ‘He who paci-fies both lands and conquers the Asiatics’. It continues system-atically to list the work undertaken at Thebes on the West Bank on the temple of Amenhotep iii, then on the temples at Luxor, Karnak and Soleb, and concludes with the majestic speech of Amun, in which he addresses Amenhotep as his son, who is hon-oured by the tribute of the nations from the four points of the compass (Ethiopia to the south, Asia to the north, Libya to the west, and Punt to the east: such instances of approximation in cartographical dimensions need not concern us here).
Undertakings such as these can be validated by secondary evidence, and this text is a marvellous example of the lyrical look at the achievements of the past coupled with a utopian view of the present that convinced the world of the splendour of Egypt
11The first fragment of this parallel text was published in 1867, before Petrie’s discovery, by D¨umichen; a second fragment, published by Legrain in 1901, has now disappeared; the rest of the text, together with a summary of previous work, can be found in C. Kuentz, ‘Le double de la st`ele d’Isra¨el `a Karnak’, BIFAO 21 (1923), 113-17.
12The dates for the rulership of Amenhotep and Merenptah are taken from D.B. Redford (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, New York 2001; these are a little earlier than the dates given for Merenptah in ContS (see p.41) by Hoffmeier, who gives 1213 for the beginning of his rule.
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in its Golden Age. It could well be that in re-using this ancient stele there was a deliberate attempt to perpetuate this idealism into the reign of Merenptah. No doubt he would, like his prede-cessors, have very much liked to make an expedition to terrorise the Asiatics, as he had terrorised the Libyans, but confirmation that he did undertake such an expedition will have to be based on more than a poetic listing of the names of territories and peoples reputed to live there. The glory of the victories of his predecessor Ramesses ii, including his Palestinian campaigning, may well have been longed for by Merenptah, but clearly he did not manage to rise to the same heights of power, even though his victory over the Libyans on the Western border of the Nile Delta was significant. It has now been proposed that the asso-ciated illustrations portraying his campaigns actually belong to a cycle of scenes depicting episodes from the campaigns under-taken earlier against the Asiatics by his predecesssor Ramesses ii (1304-1237).13 Even though clear evidence for an actual ex-pedition by Merenptah to Israel may be considered weak, the fact that he is able to list the name among other inhabitants of Western Palestine is sufficient confirmation that by the middle of the thirteenth century a people with this name was a recognised element of the local population.14