History of the Ancient Near East · Part 12 · The age of the great kings · B1–B2
The Merneptah Stele
Part 12 of History of the Ancient Near East: around 1208 BCE, Pharaoh Merneptah set up a granite stone to celebrate his victories. Almost at the end, in one short line, appears a name: Israel. It is the oldest mention of Israel outside the Bible. The passive (Ashkelon is carried off; the stone was found in 1896), the earliest known, and boasts that, claims to have, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, one line on one stone. It is only five words long in Egyptian, but scholars have written whole libraries about it.
A pharaoh says that Israel is finished. And yet here I am, reading his stone. That is already a lesson about boasting.
Merneptah was the son of Ramesses II. He became pharaoh as an old man, around 1213 BCE, and ruled for about ten years. In his fifth year he defeated a great invasion of Libyans and their allies from the sea, and he celebrated with a stele, a tall stone slab carved with a hymn of victory.
Almost all of the hymn is about the Libyans. Only the last lines turn to Canaan, still ruled by Egypt, and list places that the pharaoh claims to have punished: the cities of Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam, and Israel. The city names are written with a sign meaning “foreign land or city”; Israel is written with a sign meaning “people”. So most scholars think that around 1208 BCE, Israel was a group of people living in Canaan, not yet a…
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