Stela Fragment of Shoshenq I from Megiddo
A piece of a large Egyptian monument bearing the cartouches of Shoshenq I, found at Megiddo by the Oriental Institute expedition. It shows that the pharaoh set up an inscription in the northern kingdom of Israel.
The University of Chicago’s expedition to Megiddo recovered this fragment in its first season, 1925–1926. Workmen picked it out of a spoil heap left by the German excavation of 1903–1905, so its original position in the city is unknown, and Fisher notes that it cannot date any building. James Henry Breasted read the name of Shoshenq I on it in the spring of 1926.
Breasted took the fragment for part of the rounded top of a stela, which he estimated at about five feet wide and ten feet high. Only the royal names and part of a title are preserved; whatever text stood below them is lost. Shirly Ben-Dor Evian and Israel Finkelstein, “The Sheshonq Fragment from Megiddo: A New Interpretation”, Bulletin of ASOR 390 (2023), pp. 97–111, argue from its thickness and unsmoothed sides that the block came from an inscription built into a wall and not from a free-standing stela. The piece agrees with the relief on the Bubastite Portal at Karnak (Triumphal Relief of Shoshenq I), which lists Megiddo among the towns Shoshenq claimed, and so bears on Shishak Invades Judah. Megiddo lay in the kingdom of Jeroboam I, a region the biblical accounts of the invasion do not mention.
Cited in
- about 925 BC, estimated date