Overview
Amenhotep III's temple of Amun-Ra at Soleb in Nubia has columns carved with bound foreign prisoners, each over a fortified name-ring naming a subject people or land. Column IV N4 in the hypostyle hall carries four names of Shasu (Egyptian šꜣsw, 'nomads') groups. The second, N4 a2, reads tꜣ šꜣsw yhwꜣ, 'the land of the Shasu of Yhwꜣ'.
The same phrase appears on a fragmentary wall block (SB 69) from the temple's second court, and again in a later list at Amara West (Ramesside, early 13th century BCE), which appears to copy part of the Soleb list. The column is still standing at Soleb; the drawing is published in the excavation volume Soleb V (1998).
The name is spelled y-h-w-ꜣ. Kennedy (2019), photographing the column, reported that the last sign is the vulture/aleph (G1), not the quail-chick w (G43) printed in the excavation report. No text accompanies the name beyond the list formula: it says nothing about who these Shasu worshipped or where exactly they lived.
What the text says (summary)
tꜣ šꜣsw yhwꜣ - 'land of the Shasu (nomads) of Yhwꜣ'Literal translation (this encyclopedia) of the transliteration published by T. Kennedy, Dotawo 6 (2019) 184 (column IV N4 a2)
What the evidence shows
- Column IV N4 names four Shasu groups: twr byl, yhwꜣ, smt, bt ꜥn[...] (Kennedy 2019, citing Leclant, Les Fouilles de Soleb, p. 214).
- Sign sequence of N4 a2: N16 (land) + šꜣ-sw (nomads) + M17-O4-V4-G1 (y-h-wꜣ-ꜣ) (Kennedy 2019, p. 184).
- The name carries no city/foreign-land classifier and no 'god' sign (Kennedy 2019).
- A second Soleb occurrence is on wall block SB 69, 2nd court, R38 (Soleb III pp. 179-180; Soleb V pls. 206-207, as cited by Kennedy).
- The prisoner figure on N4 is headless; the ethnic dress of this particular captive is not preserved (Kennedy 2019).
- Amenhotep III's only recorded military campaign is the Year 5 Kush campaign; the Asiatic names in the list are not tied to a recorded campaign (Kennedy 2019, citing Urk. IV 1665-1666).
Open questions
- Is yhwꜣ the divine name YHWH? T. Kennedy (Dotawo 6, 2019) says yes: the name is unique, is not a known place-name, lacks a land classifier, and sits beside other Shasu names he reads as divine (twr byl = 'Bull Baal'; bt ꜥnt = 'house of Anat'); he concludes these Shasu 'could be identified with the early Israelites'. F. Adrom and M. Müller (in The Origins of Yahwism, de Gruyter 2017, 93-114) hold that the sequence cannot be shown to be a tribe, a place or a deity, and caution against tying it to Israelite or proto-Israelite groups. The inscription itself settles the spelling, not the referent.
- Where were these Shasu? Egyptian texts of Ramesses II-III place Shasu in the Seir/Edom region; D. B. Redford (Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times, 1992, pp. 269-273, as cited by Kennedy) uses this to locate the Yhw Shasu in the south, in or near Edom. Kennedy widens the field to Sinai, Edom, Moab, Transjordan or Canaan. The Soleb column gives no geography of its own beyond grouping these names as Shasu.
- Last sign: the excavation report (Soleb III pp. 122-123) transcribed the final bird as w (G43); Kennedy (2019), from new photographs, reads aleph (G1), matching the Amara West copy. Adrom & Müller (2017) follow the older reading, per Kennedy n. 30.
- Date: Kennedy dates the lists 1409-1385 BCE on a high chronology; on the lower chronologies common in Egyptological handbooks Amenhotep III's jubilee falls in the 1360s BCE. The absolute date moves with the chronology chosen, not with anything on the column.
Sources
- M. Schiff Giorgini, C. Robichon, J. Leclant, ed. N. Beaux, Soleb V: Le temple. Bas-reliefs et inscriptions (Cairo: IFAO, Bibliothèque générale 19, 1998) link excavation report
- T. Kennedy, 'The Land of the šꜣsw (Nomads) of yhwꜣ at Soleb,' Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies 6 (2019) 175-192, DOI 10.5070/D66146256 link study
- F. Adrom and M. Müller, 'The Tetragrammaton in Egyptian Sources - Facts and Fiction,' in J. van Oorschot and M. Witte (eds.), The Origins of Yahwism (BZAW 484; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017) 93-114, DOI 10.1515/9783110448221-005 link study
- D. B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton University Press, 1992) link study
Corrected from the earlier edition of this page
- Old entry: 'discovered ... during the 19th century.' The temple was known from 1813, but the Yhw column and block were uncovered and published by the Schiff Giorgini mission's 1957-1963 excavations (Kennedy 2019, citing Soleb III and V).
- Old entry: 'carved into a stone monument ... approximately 2 meters tall.' It is a name-ring on a hypostyle-hall column (IV N4), 42 x 15 cm, plus a second occurrence on wall block SB 69.
- Old entry: the term reads 'Shasu-Yhw'. Published sign-by-sign reading is tꜣ šꜣsw yhwꜣ, 'land of the Shasu of Yhwꜣ', with a final aleph per Kennedy's collation.
- Old entry: 'the term Shasu is often associated with nomadic groups in the biblical narrative.' Shasu is an Egyptian word; it does not occur in the Hebrew Bible.
- Old entry biblical links (Exodus 12, Genesis 46, Numbers 33) have nothing in the inscription to correspond to; the only direct link is the name itself.
- Old entry 'Date: c. 1400 BCE' without basis: the date is the reign of Amenhotep III and depends on the chronology used (c. 1409-1385 on Kennedy's high chronology).
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