Bubastite Portal

Champollion Reads a Wall

Nobody discovered the Bubastite Portal. It is a gateway in the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak, between the temple of Ramesses III and the second pylon, and it has stood above ground and visible since the Twenty-Second Dynasty put it there. What has a date is the reading. In 1828, six years after the Rosetta breakthrough, Jean-Francois Champollion visited Karnak on his Egyptian expedition and connected the Sheshonq of the relief with the Sesonchis of the Egyptian historian Manetho and with the Shishak of 1 Kings 14 — and wrote, in a letter from Thebes dated 24 November 1828, that the identity was thereby confirmed in the most satisfactory manner.

That connection has held for nearly two centuries and is the mainstream position of Egyptology. A second reading of Champollion's has not held, and it matters more than it looks; it is dealt with in the third section below. The standard modern record of the relief is not Champollion's but the Epigraphic Survey's, published as Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak, Volume III: The Bubastite Portal in 1954 — a full set of measured line drawings that anyone can consult, free, today.

The One Place a Pharaoh and 1 Kings Line Up

The relief shows Sheshonq I before Amun, who holds ropes attached to rows of name-rings — about a hundred and fifty of them, each an oval containing a place name and topped with a bound captive's head. It is the standard Egyptian way of saying "these places are mine". The towns named cluster in the Negev, the Shephelah and the coastal plain, the Jezreel valley and the north.

1 Kings 14:25-26 says that in Rehoboam's fifth year Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem and took away the treasures of the temple and the palace, including Solomon's gold shields; 2 Chronicles 12 tells the same story at more length, with chariots and horsemen and the fortified cities of Judah taken first. Shishak is in Kings before that, too: he is the pharaoh who gives Jeroboam asylum when Solomon tries to kill him. So there is an Egyptian king campaigning in the land in the right generation, from both sides. One further piece of evidence anchors the campaign archaeologically: a fragment of a victory stele of Sheshonq I was picked up at Megiddo in 1925, on a spoil heap left by the earlier German excavation. It is a surface find with no stratigraphy, so it shows that a monument of this king once stood at Megiddo — not that any particular destruction layer there is his.

Jerusalem Is Not on the List, and Ring 29 Is Not Judah

Champollion read name-ring 29 as a kingdom rather than a town: writing from Thebes on 24 November 1828 he reported finding among Sheshonq's captives, in so many words, "Ioudahamalek, le royaume des Juifs ou de Juda" — Judah as a nation. That reading is rejected. The letters are now read as a place name — commonly Yad hammelek, "Hand of the King", or Juttah of the King — and the ring is one town among many, not a nation. More importantly, Jerusalem does not appear anywhere in the preserved list. The rings run through the lowlands and the north and pass over the central hill country of Judah as though it were not there. This is stated the wrong way round in a great deal of popular writing, and a reader who has been told that Karnak mentions Jerusalem has been told something false.

Four explanations are on offer and all four deserve naming. Kenneth Kitchen and others point out that the list is damaged and parts of it are lost, so Jerusalem may have stood in a missing section. A second explanation takes the biblical account at its word: 1 Kings 14 has Rehoboam buying the city off with the temple treasure, so Jerusalem submitted rather than being stormed, and a town that paid would not appear in a list of towns taken. Finkelstein argues that the omission is real and telling, and that Judah at this date was a marginal highland chiefdom not worth a pharaoh's detour. Frank Clancy has argued that the route simply avoided the hill country and Transjordan altogether. None of these has carried the field.

Where the app stands. The relief and 1 Kings agree that a pharaoh whose name is Sheshonq campaigned in the land in Rehoboam's generation, and that agreement is worth something: two independent sources, one Egyptian and monumental, one Judean and literary, converging on one event. They do not confirm each other's details, and the absence of Jerusalem from the list is a real fact that needs an explanation rather than a fact to be explained away — the tribute reading is a good explanation, but it is a reading, and it should be offered as one. One thing that is not a live alternative: the New Chronology associated with D. M. Rohl, which identifies the biblical Shishak with Ramesses II instead. It is rejected by Egyptology, and presenting the Sheshonq identification as contested would misrepresent the state of the field.

Scripture references

• 1 Kings 14:25-26 — Shishak takes the treasures of the temple and the palace in Rehoboam's fifth year
• 2 Chronicles 12:2-4 — The same campaign at length — the fortified cities of Judah taken first
• 2 Chronicles 12:9 — The gold shields Solomon made, carried off
• 1 Kings 11:40 — Jeroboam flees to Shishak and stays until Solomon dies

Sources

• Primary textJ.-F. Champollion, Lettres écrites d'Égypte et de Nubie en 1828 et 1829 — septième lettre — Jean-François Champollion le Jeune; collected edition, Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1833 · Public domain, read at the Internet Archive. The seventh letter is headed "Thèbes, le 24 novembre 1828", and p. 99 carries both of this article's Champollion claims in his own French: the name-ring read as "Ioudahamalek, le royaume des Juifs ou de Juda", and the identity "entre le Scheschonk égyptien, le Sésonchis de Manéthon et le Sésac ou Schéschok de la Bible" pronounced "confirmée de la manière la plus satisfaisante". The English wording in this article glosses that French rather than quoting himSupports: What Champollion himself wrote about the Shishak identification and about name-ring 29
• Holding institutionReliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak, Volume III: The Bubastite Portal (OIP 74) — The Epigraphic Survey, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute), University of Chicago · Oriental Institute Publications 74, Chicago, 1954. The standard measured record of the relief and the name-rings, available as a free PDFSupports: The content of the relief and the topographical list
• ScholarshipI. Finkelstein, "The Campaign of Shoshenq I to Palestine: A Guide to the 10th Century BCE Polity" — Israel Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University · Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palastina-Vereins 118 (2002), 109-135. Print onlySupports: The reading of the omission of Jerusalem as historically significant
• ReferenceBible and Interpretation: "The Campaign of Pharaoh Shoshenq I in Palestine" — Bible and Interpretation, University of ArizonaSupports: The route of the campaign and the contents of the name-ring list
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Bubastite Portal

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Bubastite Portal

Reflect

Rehoboam kept his city by emptying the temple. What have you paid out of something holy to keep something safe?