Artefact in focus: Merneptah Stele

Josh Meynell takes a look at an Egyptian inscription from 1200 BC, which contains one of the earliest mentions of Israel in extra-biblical documents.

14th June 2024

The Old Testament is our greatest source for learning about the ancient Israelites. Sometimes, however, texts from Egypt or elsewhere can be drawn upon too.

Consider the Merneptah Stele, a granite slab three metres tall documenting the military victories of Pharaoh Merneptah (successor to the more famous Ramesses II) from around 1200 BC. It was discovered in Merneptah’s destroyed funerary temple (a huge construction dedicated to the worship of the deified Pharaoh) by the legendary Egyptologist and archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1896.

What sets this stele apart from other Egyptian victory stelae is an emphatically clear mention of the name Israel. Upon learning of the text’s translation, Petrie declared that ‘this stele will be better known in the world than anything else I have found.’

The dating of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is widely debated, largely because of scholars ascribing different lengths of time to the book of Judges. But all the mainstream views would agree that, by the time of Merneptah, the Israelites were already in Canaan. They were either making their first inroads following the forty years of wandering (as recorded in the book of Joshua), or were already a more established presence in the land (corresponding to the middle of the Judges period). Thus, history’s first mention of Israel comes at the point we would most expect it.

Egyptian Pharaohs often wrote texts like these so that, after their death, worshippers could listen to the text and honour the deceased king. Such texts therefore tended to glamorise the Pharaoh and exaggerate his achievements. After twenty-five of the twenty-eight lines of text detailing Merneptah’s defeat of the Libyan people on Egypt’s western front, the last three lines are a little poem about his campaigns to the east (my translation):

 The princes are prostrate, saying ‘Shalom!’

Not one of the Nine Bows [foreigners] raises his head:

Seized is Libya, Hatti pacified,

Plundered is The Canaan, entirely woe.

Carried off is Ashkelon, captured is Gezer,

Yanoam is made as nothing,

Israel is desolate, its seed is no more,

Syria now a widow because of Egypt.

All lands together are pacified.

Notice that some of the names listed refer to nations, and others to cities. ‘The Canaan’ is how the Egyptians sometimes referred to Gaza, since it was the administrative centre for Egyptian control in the area. Thus, the four cities – Gaza, Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yanoam – are listed in order from south to north. Yanoam has not been found, but we can guess from other texts that it is somewhere in the Transjordan area (east of the Jordan River), and so Israel seems not to be a continuation of this list, since that would break the pattern.

Instead, these lines of Merneptah’s text seem to be chiastic – that is, there is a symmetry to them (as shown in the way the text is laid out above). Read like this, we find three layers. The outer ring makes general statements about peoples and lands. Within that are the four nations of Libya and Hatti, then Israel and Syria. In the centre are the four cities. The Egyptians are presenting Israel in association with three other major national powers.

We can go deeper still. Because of the system of Egyptian hieroglyphs, in one single word the stele corroborates this claim to nationhood. The Egyptians wrote words by using ‘signs’ in various ways. For example, the sign , a mouth, could mean the word ‘mouth’ at a basic level. But, since the Egyptian word for mouth is simply the sound r, this sign could be used to spell out words containing the sound r which might otherwise be hard to depict. Indeed, the word ‘to’ in Egyptian is also r and so the mouth sign can be used with this meaning. Longer words were often written with a combination of these signs, in which it is the sound of the word which is relevant rather than the thing depicted (we call these ‘phonograms’), followed by a sign at the end of the word that clarified the meaning (‘determinatives’).

If English were written with hieroglyphs, one could use a picture of a bee both to write a bee itself, or for words related to ‘to be’.  Perhaps we would write the word ‘beer’ with a bee and then an ear, followed by, say, a bottle to clarify the word. In this example the bee and the ear would be phonograms (bees and ears have nothing to do with beer; the words just have similar sounds), and the bottle a determinative.

On the Merneptah Stele, Israel is written (from right to left) as:

This is incredibly close to the Hebrew ישראל, transliterated as ysr’l (pronounced with vowels as ‘yisra’el’).

Consider the following details:

• The mouth sign is always labelled with r in transcription, but in fact represented two different sounds similar to r and l.
• The vulture sign (transliterated by a symbol that looks almost like a 3) had, by this period, come to represent a glottal stop (heard in the Cockney pronunciation of ‘bottle of water’: bo’ul uh wa’eh), frequently mapping onto a Hebrew aleph.
• The single reed leaf represents quite a weak sound, often simply marking that a syllable begins with a vowel, or being itself a half-vowel. It can indicate various values including a.
• While there are extra stroke symbols, these are somewhat inconsequential for our analysis.

Other interpretations of this name have been offered, such as ‘Jezreel’ or ‘Asriel’, but these haven’t been taken up by mainstream scholarship. We evidently have Israel, written in close conformity with standard practices of Egyptian transcription of Semitic names.

After spelling out the pronunciation of the name with phonograms, the Egyptians added determinatives to designate what kind of word it was. The throw stick is the symbol used for foreigners and is employed in every single nation and city in our text. The seated man and woman, and the three strokes are also very typical determinatives, used together to indicate something like ‘large group of people’.

These signs become particularly interesting when compared with all the other names in our text. Where Israel has the seated man and woman, every single other name is followed by a different sign: three hills, which is used to designate a foreign land. See the picture of Ashkelon, for example (you might recognise a couple of the signs from Israel, including r representing l), with the throw stick and the three hills, following the phonograms.