So about your post that said the pyramids were built by hired workmen, how do Jewish/Hebrew people fit into Egyptian history? Cause I was told that they were slaves who later escaped (Moses, the whole shebang), but if Egyptians hired workers…?
Oh god, here comes the can of worms. Basically I will preface my answer with this: I make no challenges to anyone’s beliefs here. I am merely presenting the facts as I know them. If it goes against what you believe, then feel free to ignore it. I’m not here to tell you what you believe is wrong and this post isn’t about that. Also I’m an Egyptologist not a Biblical Scholar so forgive me if I get things wrong.
Jewish folk existed in Egypt. I make absolutely no dispute to this. There was a lovely little enclave at Elephantine, but this only started in the Late Period (c.403 BC) with a temple to Yahweh. They were a small group of mercenaries and their families, for whom we have what are known as the Elephantine Papyri which are written in Aramaic. The Elephantine Papyri are a much larger group consisting of texts in Aramaic, Middle Egyptian, Demotic, Latin, and Greek (Hebrew is in its earliest stages at this point as it formed somewhere between 1000BC and 400BC) and a few belong to the Jewish community at Elephantine.
Before this there’s what’s known as the Merenptah stele dating to around 1208-3BC which records the victories of Pharaoh Merenptah and apparently records the destruction of ysriAr; what Petrie translated as Israel. Here’s the full line concerned:
The original (which is badly damaged):
The transcription:
There is dispute as to whether this is the correct transcription of this word. The other civilisations on the stela are part of what the Egyptians referred to as the Nine Bows, a collection of nine enemies that changed over time but at this point included the Libyans (in Egyptian: Tjeḥenu), the Hitties (in Egyptian: Hatti), Xurru, Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yano’am. All these places at this point in time existed within the Egyptian Empire, and the stele even makes note of this. Each of these places on the stele is written with either the hilled land determinative (Gardiner’s N25) or the City determinative (O29). The ysriAr, as is evidenced above, is written with the throw stick (a determinative for Foreigners) and people determinatives (the determinatives for a group of people), indicating that they are not a city but a group of foreigners.
Now here’s where it gets tricky: We’re not even sure if this is the correct spelling of the word. The person who carved this stela has made numerous spelling and sign mistakes (a scribe would have written the inscription, but it would have been copied up by a stone mason who was relatively illiterate) including on words we know the spelling of, meaning that we can’t be certain that this is even the right word. The determinatives at the end of the word are typically used by the Egyptians to signify nomadic groups or peoples, without a fixed city-state home, thus implying a semi-nomadic or rural status for ‘Israel’ at that time. The phrase “wasted, bare of seed” is formulaic (the Egyptians do this a lot), and often used in reference to defeated nations – it implies that the grain-store of the nation in question has been destroyed, which would result in a famine the following year, incapacitating them as a military threat to Egypt. So if ‘ysriAr’ is the correct way to transcribe the word then it’s most likely that they are a nomadic group that had occasional incursions with the Egyptians and this time the Egyptians destroyed their food source. I cannot say that the ysriAr were Jewish, as beyond the name kinda sounding like Israel there’s absolutely no evidence to support it. We don’t even know whereabouts they are within the Syrio-Palestine region of the Egyptian Empire. All we know is that apparently Merenptah defeated a nomadic tribe pretty soundly.
Before this point there is no evidence of Egypt interacting with a significant group of Jewish folk. No papyri, no inscriptions, no temple or tomb images. If a large group of Jewish folk told Pharaoh where to get off and left Egypt with Moses then the Egyptians simply make no reference to it, which would be highly unusual for them, as with the Pharaoh needing to maintain Ma’at (cosmic order) he would need to counterbalance a large loss of people as a win for the Egyptians somehow. The Battle of Qadesh is a good example of this, as Ramesses II claims it as an overwhelming victory for Egypt, when the outcome of the battle was a bloody stalemate with heavy losses on each side. But because he had to maintain Ma’at, Ramesses II portrays it as a glorious victory. Propaganda is alive and well in the 13th Century BC and used by Ramesses II the Jackass.
Also this is a map of the Egyptian Empire c.1500 BC which remained until the collapse of the New Kingdom in around 900 BC:
You might notice that the area we now know as Syria/Israel/Palestine is firmly under the control of the Egyptians, with Mesopotamia covering the rest of the area. If Moses and his followers wandered the desert looking for the promised land for 40 years then a) The Egyptians and Mesopotamians knew where they were the whole time, and b) They never left the Egyptian empire at all. At this point you’d have to wonder if the Egyptians were doing an absolute terrible job of keeping an eye on a large group of wandering people who suddenly turn up in an area they have already populated? I mean it doesn’t seem plausible to me, but as I said at the beginning I’m not here to challenge beliefs just present the historical facts as we have them.
Finally, the whole ‘Jewish Slaves Built the Pyramids’ thing. What’s happened here is a conflagration of two separate things:
Herodotus’ writings that Khufu enslaved a massive amount of people
The section of Exodus (1.13-15) which states that they toiled making mud bricks for Pharaoh. “The Egyptians compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously; 14and they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar and bricks and at all kinds of labor in the field, all their labors which they rigorously imposed on them.”
This comes in the form of the early Hollywood films on Egypt that basically merged these two points into one: that Jewish Slaves built the Pyramids. This has stuck in the consciousness of the general public for years, and tbh hasn’t been countered in any way by numerous school systems (often in schools which are religion bases). Exodus evidently doesn’t state that they built Pyramids, and Pyramids certainly aren’t made of mud brick (unless you’re talking about those reallllllly early Old Kingdom ones that were temples that were then converted into Pyramids).
Officials were sent out to all parts of Egypt to ask various single men to join the effort to build Pharaoh’s Pyramid (easier not to have families if you’re leaving for 20 years). This was considered an honour because Pharaoh was a literal god at this point in Egyptian history. Work for the god on his project? Excellent.
So the guys travelled to the Giza plateau and began building the Pyramid. Quarrying stone from the nearby limestone quarries, or quarrying it near the Red Sea and transporting it via canals to Giza. The workers were paid in bread and beer. Egypt was a non monetary economy, which means they don’t have coins so they barter with various commodities. Food is payment. They didn’t really ‘receive’ this payment in bulk form, what would happen is that they would be fed by the women who also came to the Pyramid building site. These folks lived in what we now know as the Giza Workers Village which held about 20,000 people (only 5000 were permanent salaried workers, the other 15,000 were seasonal and different workers turned up every year). Men would meet women while working there and they’d settle down and have a family who also lived in the village. We have their graves that show us that ailments were well looked after by an onsite doctor and not just hastily repaired or not allowed to heal. More on this can be found here, here, here, and here.
So to sum up, Jewish folk were absolutely part of Egyptian history, but from a much later period of history than most people think, and there’s definitely no evidence that they build the Pyramids. There are more Jewish folk in Egypt by the time we reach the Graeco Roman period but I don’t know anything about that time, so am not in a place to answer that.
As both a Christian and an Egyptologist the Jewish/Israelite presence in Egypt is something I was briefly interested in pursuing as a research interest, but there was precious little to go on as far as their presence in Pharaonic Egypt (my main time period of interest) goes, so I gave up on it. Before I did I came across some horrible early-days Egyptological works (talking 1800′s here) that, say, placed the Jewish presence in Egypt in the reign of Thutmose III in a really tenuous chronology based on the Bible as an absolute historical chronicle (long story short: the Bible is valuable in certain ways as a historical document, but not to the degree that you can indiscriminately take everything in it at face value). This subject is kind of a fine line to be walking, too, for various reasons.
There are some interesting parallels between The Tale of the Two Brothers and the story of Joseph in Egypt though (e.g. between Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, and Bata and Anpu’s wife), but I’m pretty sure most that can be written about it has already been written Redford and the like.
Correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been a long time since I picked the bible up, but didn’t they also attack a town when they arrived? Didn’t some lady help two dudes sneak in and out? Wouldn’t the Egyptians catch wind of this attack, and retaliate? It’d be weird if they didn’t since, according to the map, their attack would still be in the Egyptian territory. And I’m pretty sure they’d see that kind of attack as a threat. And I’m pretty sure it’s not just an attack, but a kill and pillage, and maybe keep the women folk kind of deal.
Goldnwulf 