First Sight

"Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe . . . Israel is laid waste and his seed is not." In 1207 B.C., in the fifth year of his reign, the Egyptian Pharaoh Merenptah used these words to herald the victorious campaign he had waged two years earlier against Canaan, to the north of Egypt. In the process, the Pharaoh may have given the world its first recorded mention of the people of Israel. Merenptah's account of his military exploits is inscribed on a granite monolith 7 1/2 ft. high and 3 1/4 ft. wide. The stone was recovered in 1896 from the Pharaoh's funerary temple at Thebes, and is currently in the Cairo museum.

Now there may be pictures to accompany Merenptah's text. In an article appearing in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Frank Yurco, an expert in ancient Egyptian inscriptions, who works at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, says he found representations of the Pharaoh's Canaanite campaign chiseled into stone blocks at the Karnak temple in Luxor, Egypt. According to Yurco, the figures dressed in ankle-length clothes at the upper left corner of the top slab are the defeated Israelites; more Israelites lie in a confused jumble at the slab's bottom edge. If Yurco's theory is correct, these images would predate the earliest known depiction of the Israelites by six centuries. The figures in the bottom slab depict Merenptah's defeat of the Canaanite city of Ashkelon.