Beni Hasan Tomb Painting

Thirty-Seven Aamu, Painted On A Wall

Beni Hasan is a row of rock-cut tombs in the cliff above the east bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt. Tomb 3 belonged to Khnumhotep II, a Twelfth Dynasty provincial governor who served under Amenemhat II and Senwosret II and held, among other titles, the office of overseer of the Eastern Desert - the man responsible for the desert routes by which foreigners came and went. Its painted decoration is largely intact and still holds much of its colour.

On one wall, in the third register of a scene showing produce brought to the tomb owner, a procession of foreigners is led in by the royal scribe Neferhotep, who holds out a papyrus roll with the record written on it. The inscription on the roll, in P. E. Newberry's translation, reads: "The year vi. under the majesty of Horus, the guide of the two lands, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Usertsen II, the number of Aamu brought by the son of the Aa-prince, Chnemhotep, on account of the mesdemt, Aamu of Shu, number amounting to 37." A second line above the group adds: "arrival bringing kohl which 37 Aamu bring to him." Usertsen II is Senwosret II; mesdemt is galena, the dark lead ore ground to make black eye-paint. Behind the scribe walks Kheti, superintendent of the huntsmen, and behind him the party itself, headed by a man captioned with the title heka-khasut, ruler of a foreign land, and the name Newberry read as Abesha - usually written Abisha today.

Aamu is the ordinary Egyptian word for the West Semitic peoples of the Levant. So what is on the wall is a small, family-sized band of Semitic-speaking people, with their animals, arriving from the eastern desert at an Egyptian estate, carrying a traded mineral, and being counted by a scribe who wrote the number down: thirty-seven.

The World Behind Genesis 12 And 42

Genesis has traffic moving in both directions along exactly this road. Abram goes down into Egypt because the famine in Canaan is severe. A caravan of Ishmaelite traders comes through Gilead "with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt," and Joseph is sold into it. Jacob hears there is grain in Egypt and sends ten sons down to buy it, and on the second trip sends a present with them - "a little balm, a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts, and almonds." Small groups, family-sized, carrying valuable light goods, going down to Egypt because Egypt has what the hill country does not.

The Beni Hasan register is that same journey, from the Egyptian end, painted in colour and dated by regnal year. It is worth being clear about why that matters. The Genesis narratives are not corroborated by this painting and do not need to be. What the painting does is remove a certain kind of objection - the suspicion that the movement Genesis describes is a later writer's invention, a picture of trade and migration that nobody actually did. Egypt's own officials commissioned pictures of it happening, and had the people in them counted. The world of Genesis 12 and Genesis 42 is a world Egypt documented from the inside.

Not The Patriarchs, And Not Quite The Picture You Have Seen

Nobody in this scene is anyone in the Bible. Abisha is not Abraham, Jacob or Joseph; no biblical person is named, no biblical event is depicted, and Year 6 of Senwosret II is not the date of any episode in Genesis. The painting is atmospheric evidence, not evidential evidence, and it should be presented that way. Where it is reproduced under a caption suggesting that Egypt painted the patriarchs, the caption is wrong, and a reader who later learns this will be right to feel handled. Held at its own weight, the scene is still valuable, and the honest version is more interesting than the inflated one.

One detail gets over-read in particular. Abisha's title, heka-khasut, is the Egyptian phrase that Greek writers later turned into the word Hyksos, so the caption is regularly translated "Abisha the Hyksos." That is a literal rendering of the words and a misleading rendering of the man. The Hyksos rulers who took the Egyptian Delta did so more than two centuries after this wall was painted. Abisha carries a job description - the head of a foreign group - not a dynastic membership, and reading the later dynasty back into a Twelfth Dynasty trade caption imports a history the wall does not carry.

There is a second limit, and it is about the image itself. The tomb has never been lost, so it was never found: it was described by E. Jomard's team for the Napoleonic survey in 1798, copied by J. Burton in 1826, by the Franco-Tuscan expedition under J.-F. Champollion and I. Rosellini in 1828, by R. Hay in the same year with his copies coloured by Dupuy in 1833, by J. G. Wilkinson in 1838 and by K. R. Lepsius in 1842, before P. E. Newberry published it for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1893. Newberry recorded that by his own survey the paintings had faded badly, partly because of the preparations earlier copyists had used to bring the colours out, and that in 1888 or 1889 a thief had mutilated the tomb's Great Inscription to remove the royal names. His plate of the Aamu group is credited in his own list of plates as drawn after Hay - a redrawing of a copy made sixty-five years earlier, not a record of the wall as it then stood. The Australian Centre for Egyptology re-recorded the tomb and published it in 2014 under N. Kanawati and L. Evans, and reported that the older records of Lepsius and Newberry are frequently inaccurate, that some material was deliberately omitted, and that Newberry's line drawings render figures, hieroglyphs and objects in solid black in a way that obscures significant detail. The scene is real and its inscription is secure. The famous colour image of it is a Victorian interpretation of a wall that has been deteriorating for two hundred years, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

Scripture references

• Genesis 12:10 — Abram goes down into Egypt because of famine
• Genesis 37:25 — A trading caravan carrying spices, balm and myrrh down to Egypt
• Genesis 42:1-3 — Jacob sends ten sons down to Egypt to buy grain
• Genesis 43:11 — The light, valuable goods a small party carried into Egypt

Sources

• Primary textP. E. Newberry, Beni Hasan, Part I (Archaeological Survey of Egypt) — Percy E. Newberry for the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1893 · Public domain, full text at the Internet Archive. Pages 69-70 carry the scene description and the translation of both inscriptions; the tomb's list of former descriptions and copies is on the pages introducing Tomb No. 3; the plate list credits the Aamu group plate as drawn after HaySupports: The wording of both inscriptions, the number 37, the commodity mesdemt, the names Neferhotep, Kheti and Abesha, the title heka-khasut, the recording history from 1798 to 1842 — including Burton's copy, which Newberry dates to 1826 and published in 1830 — the fading of the paintings, the 1888-89 mutilation of the Great Inscription, and the fact that the Aamu group plate is a redrawing of Hay's copy
• ScholarshipJ. Kamrin, The Aamu of Shu in the Tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hassan — Janice Kamrin · Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 1(3), July 2009, 22-36. The linked page carries the abstract and citation; the full text is distributed separatelySupports: The dating of the scene to Year 6 of Senusret II, and the range of scholarly proposals about where the foreigners came from and why they came
• ScholarshipN. Kanawati and L. Evans, Beni Hassan Volume I: The Tomb of Khnumhotep II — Naguib Kanawati and Linda Evans, Australian Centre for Egyptology · ACE Reports 36, 2014. The modern re-recording of the tomb, with photographs and new line drawings. Print onlySupports: That the earlier records of Lepsius and Newberry are frequently inaccurate and in places deliberately incomplete, and that Newberry's solid-black rendering obscures detail
• Holding institutionMetropolitan Museum of Art: Leaders of the Aamu of Shu (facsimile, acc. 33.8.17) — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Facsimile painted by Norman de Garis Davies on the museum's graphic expedition of 1931 · Tempera on paper, 1:1 scale, 63.5 x 81.5 cm; dated by the museum to c. 1887-1878 BC, Dynasty 12, reign of Senwosret II. The museum's web page rate-limits automated requests; the same record was read through the museum's own public collection APISupports: The existence, date and authorship of the standard modern facsimile, and the museum's own dating of the original
• Referencedigital EPIGRAPHY: The tomb of Khnumhotep II (Tomb 3) at Beni Hassan — Precis and commentary by Julia Schmied, quoting the Beni Hassan @ Macquarie project · Quotes the Australian Centre for Egyptology's own account of Khnumhotep II's titles and of the inadequacy of the earlier recordsSupports: Khnumhotep II's titles and reigns served, and the ACE's published assessment of the Lepsius and Newberry records

Reflect

An Egyptian scribe wrote down the number thirty-seven, and four thousand years later it is still on the wall. What small, unremarkable record of your own life might outlast everything you think of as important?