The Merneptah Stele (Israel Stela)

The stele is a slab of grey granite a little over three metres high. It was first cut for Amenhotep III; Merneptah had its back inscribed and set it up in his own mortuary temple on the west bank at Thebes, where Flinders Petrie found it in 1896. A fragment of a second copy survives at Karnak. The object record linked above belongs to the Global Egyptian Museum, an online catalogue of Egyptian collections carried out under the International Committee for Egyptology of the International Council of Museums and hosted by Egypt’s Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage; the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is one of the contributing museums. It gives a photograph of the stele and the museum’s description.

The text is a hymn of praise, dated in its first line to the third day of the third month of the third season in Merneptah’s fifth year. Almost all of it celebrates his defeat of a Libyan invasion. The last three lines widen the boast to Egypt’s other neighbours and list Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer, Yanoam and Israel. The museum’s record notes that the name Israel refers to a people and not to a state, and Wilhelm Spiegelberg, who first published the text, rendered it “the people of Israel”. Breasted showed that “his seed is not” is a stock phrase which Egyptian inscriptions use of other defeated enemies as well. The line is therefore evidence that a people called Israel was in or near Canaan by about 1208 BC, and not a report of what became of it. The stele says nothing about where that people came from. See Israel Named on the Merneptah Stele.