Execration Texts

Curses Written In Order To Be Broken

Execration was an Egyptian ritual of pre-emptive destruction, practised from at least the early Old Kingdom through to the Roman period. The names of potential enemies were written on cheap clay - red pots, or small figurines of bound prisoners - and the objects were then bound, smashed, stamped on, stabbed, spat upon, burned and buried, sometimes upside down. More than a thousand execration deposits are known, chiefly from cemeteries, at Semna, Uronarti, Mirgissa, Elephantine, Thebes, Balat, Abydos, Helwan, Saqqara and Giza. The most complete single find, from the Middle Kingdom fortress at Mirgissa in Lower Nubia, contained the remains of nearly 200 broken inscribed red vases, over 400 uninscribed ones, nearly 350 mud figurines, four limestone figures - and one human being, whose head had been severed and buried upside down as part of the rite.

Two groups of these texts made the ritual famous outside Egyptology, because of what they list. The first, inscribed on pottery sherds and now in Berlin, was published by K. Sethe in 1926 and names roughly twenty places in Canaan and Phoenicia together with more than thirty of their rulers. The second, written on clay figurines of bound captives found at Saqqara and now in Brussels, was published by G. Posener with B. van de Walle in 1940 and names sixty-four places, usually with one or two rulers apiece. Both belong to the Middle Kingdom, the Berlin group generally placed towards the end of the Twelfth Dynasty and the Brussels group a little later.

The First Time Jerusalem Is Written Down

Among the towns cursed are places a Bible reader knows: Ashkelon, Shechem, Hazor, Achshaph, Acre, Aphek, Laish - the city Judges 18 says the Danites took and renamed Dan - and, spelled out in Egyptian group-writing as something a modern reader would transcribe Rushalimum, Jerusalem. It is the oldest surviving occurrence of the name. Five centuries later the same city appears in the Amarna Letters as Urusalim, written by its own king to the Egyptian court; the Bible knows it as a Canaanite and then a Jebusite town long before David, with a king called Adoni-Zedek in Joshua 10 and a Jebusite population that Judah could not dislodge in Joshua 15:63.

The rulers cursed alongside the city bear West Semitic names - Amorite, the language family Hebrew belongs to. And there is now a physical date to set beside the text. A radiocarbon programme on Middle Bronze contexts along the eastern slopes of Jerusalem's ancient core, published in 2021, found that public architecture first appears there at the beginning of the nineteenth century BC, which is very close to the moment Egyptian officials were writing the city's name on pots in order to break them.

What A Curse List Cannot Tell You

The texts name places. They do not describe them. There is nothing in an execration list about a town's size, its walls, its buildings or its population, and no Egyptian ever visited most of them for the purpose of writing this. The grammar makes the point on its own: the victims are named for what they might do in future - who will rebel, who will conspire, who will think of speaking rebelliously - so a name on the list is not evidence that Egypt fought that town, ruled it, or had recent news of it. This is state magic against a world of possible trouble, and its geography is only as good as the information its writers had, which is not something the objects themselves can tell us.

The scale of Middle Bronze Jerusalem is a live archaeological argument, and the 2021 radiocarbon results complicate it in both directions: public building from the early nineteenth century BC, then a curious gap in occupation through the seventeenth, then resettlement in the sixteenth. Specialists differ over whether what stood on that ridge was a fortified town of consequence or something much smaller, and the execration texts do not settle it, because a name written on a pot in Egypt is compatible with either.

The last limit is the one worth saying most plainly, because it is the one most often blurred. These texts are eight or nine centuries older than David. They tell us that a place with Jerusalem's name existed, that Egypt knew of it, and that people with West Semitic names were in charge of it. They tell us nothing whatever about anything the Bible reports of the city later, and they were never going to. That is not a disappointment - it is the correct size of the claim, and an article that inflates it has borrowed against a reader's trust.

Scripture references

• Joshua 10:1 — Adoni-Zedek, a Canaanite king of Jerusalem, centuries after the execration texts
• Joshua 15:63 — The Jebusites still holding Jerusalem in Judah's own territory
• Genesis 12:6 — Shechem, another town on the Egyptian lists, with Canaanites in the land
• Judges 18:27-29 — Laish, cursed by name in Egypt, later taken and renamed Dan

Sources

• Holding institutionRoyal Museums of Art and History, Brussels: the Egyptian collection — Musees royaux d'Art et d'Histoire / Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis, Brussels · The holding museum of the Brussels group - about a hundred unbaked clay figurines of bound captives inscribed in hieratic - which it has published in its own Bulletin des Musees royaux d'Art et d'Histoire 87/88 (2016-2017), 5-29, on their conservation, pigments and digitisation. The museum's online catalogue, Carmentis, is script-driven and serves no stable object page to an automated request, so the collection page is linked insteadSupports: That the figurine group is held in Brussels, what the figurines are made of and roughly how many there are, and the museum's continuing work on them
• ScholarshipK. Muhlestein, Execration Ritual — Kerry Muhlestein, in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, ed. J. Dieleman and W. Wendrich · UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 1(1), 2008. Peer reviewed and open access; the full text is the PDF at escholarship.org/content/qt3f6268zf/qt3f6268zf.pdf, which the repository serves to browsers but rate-limits for automated requestsSupports: What the ritual was and how it was performed, the range of sites, the future-tense grammar of the curse formula, the Mirgissa inventory including the human victim, and the publication history of the Berlin, Brussels and Mirgissa groups
• ScholarshipJ. Regev et al., Middle Bronze Age Jerusalem: Recalculating Its Character and Chronology — Johanna Regev, Yuval Gadot, Helena Roth, Joe Uziel, Ortal Chalaf, Doron Ben-Ami, Eugenia Mintz, Lior Regev and Elisabetta Boaretto · Radiocarbon 63(3), 2021, 853-883; DOI 10.1017/RDC.2021.21Supports: Public architecture in Jerusalem from the beginning of the 19th century BC, the settlement gap in the 17th, and the resettlement in the 16th
• Primary textK. Sethe, Die Achtung feindlicher Fursten, Volker und Dinge auf altagyptischen Tongefassscherben des mittleren Reiches — Kurt Sethe · Abhandlungen der Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften Berlin 5. Berlin, 1926. The first publication of the Berlin bowl group, from the originals in the Berlin Museum. Print onlySupports: The Berlin group and its contents
• Primary textG. Posener and B. van de Walle, Princes et pays d'Asie et de Nubie — Georges Posener, with palaeographic remarks on the Berlin material by Baudouin van de Walle · Brussels: Fondation egyptologique reine Elisabeth, 1940. The publication of the Brussels figurine group. Print onlySupports: The Brussels group, its figurines and its list of sixty-four places
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Execration texts

Reflect

Egypt tried to control a world it could not reach by writing its enemies' names down and breaking them. Where are you managing a fear by performing a ritual over it rather than bringing it to God?