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Egyptian Hieroglyphic Name-Ring, c. 1400 BC

Soleb Yhw Inscription

Also called Land of the Shasu of Yhw, Shasu of Yhw inscription, Soleb name-ring

On a column in an Egyptian temple deep in Nubia, one bound prisoner is captioned "the land of the Shasu of yhwa." If those signs spell the divine name, this is its oldest known occurrence anywhere - and whether they do is argued by specialists to this day.

Object
Hieroglyphic name-ring carved in relief above a bound-prisoner figure on a sandstone temple column, with a second occurrence on a fragmentary wall block
Found at
The temple of Amun-Ra at Soleb, Nubia (northern Sudan), west bank of the Nile south of the Third Cataract. Column IV N4 in the hypostyle hall of Sector IV, and wall block SB 69 from Sector III
Found in
Excavated from 1957; the hypostyle hall material recorded during the 1957-1963 campaigns
Found by
The Soleb expedition directed by Michela Schiff Giorgini, with Clement Robichon and Jean Leclant. The site itself had been noted by J. L. Burckhardt in 1813 and its prisoner reliefs recognised in 1829
Dates from
Reign of Amenhotep III. The temple was complete before his year-30 jubilee, so the conquest lists were carved somewhere in the range c. 1409-1385 BC Traditional dating
Now held at
The column remains in situ at Soleb. Wall block SB 69 was kept in Sudan and is understood to be held by the Sudanese antiquities authorities

A Caption On A Column At Soleb

Soleb lies on the west bank of the Nile in what is now Sudan, south of the Third Cataract - the southernmost temple the Egyptians built. It was raised for Amenhotep III of the Eighteenth Dynasty and dedicated to Amun-Ra and to the king himself as a god. The site was noted by J. L. Burckhardt in 1813 and its bound-prisoner reliefs were recognised as victory monuments as early as 1829, but the hypostyle hall was in ruins under sand until the excavations of 1957 to 1963 led by M. Schiff Giorgini, with C. Robichon and J. Leclant, whose Soleb volumes remain the official publication.

The columns of that hall carry reliefs of bound captives, each with a cartouche naming the group he stands for. On one - Column IV N4 in Sector IV - four of them are Shasu, the Egyptian word for the nomads of the southern Levant, and the four names read twr byl, yhwa, smt and bt an[t]. The yhwa cartouche is 42 centimetres long and 15 wide. The same phrase turns up on a fragmentary wall block from Sector III, the second court, and again, a century or more later, in a list of 104 names on a wall at Amara West - the version most publications actually quote, because it was found first and published more fully, and which may itself have been copied in part from Soleb. R. Giveon published the Soleb toponyms in 1964, J. Leclant wrote on the question of the divine name in Amenhotep III's period, and the argument has not stopped since.

"Yahweh Came From Sinai, And Rose From Seir"

The reason this small caption carries so much weight is that the Bible itself puts the disclosure of the divine name in the southern desert, and its oldest poetry pictures God coming up out of that country. "Yahweh came from Sinai, and rose from Seir to them. He shone from Mount Paran." "Yahweh, when you went out of Seir, when you marched out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled." Exodus sets the giving of the name at a mountain in the wilderness, to a man keeping the flock of a Midianite priest.

And the Shasu are exactly the people of that country. Egyptian texts from Ramesses II, Merneptah and Ramesses III place Shasu in the region the Egyptians called Edom; Papyrus Harris I calls them tent-dwellers; New Kingdom sources put them in Sinai, Edom, Moab and the Transjordan. So a group of tent-dwelling nomads, in precisely the region Deuteronomy 33 and Judges 5 name, labelled in an Egyptian king's list with a word that looks like the divine name five and a half centuries before the Mesha Stele - that is a convergence worth taking seriously, and this article does take it seriously. It is the kind of evidence that should make an evangelical reader sit up. It is also, for reasons the next section sets out, several steps short of proof, and the steps are the interesting part.

Four Steps, And Every One Of Them Argued

First, the signs themselves. The excavation report read the last hieroglyph in the cartouche as the quail chick, w. T. Kennedy, who photographed the column on site and published his results in 2019, argued that the sign is in fact the falcon that writes aleph, giving yhwa and matching the spelling at Amara West - and noted that the older reading was still being repeated in the literature as recently as 2017. When the transcription of a four-sign name is being corrected in the last decade, nobody should be quoting the inscription as settled.

Second, whether yhwa is the divine name at all. The Basel Egyptologists F. Adrom and M. Muller reviewed every Egyptian text that has ever been offered as evidence for the Tetragrammaton and gave the Soleb and Amara West lists especially close philological and tradition-historical scrutiny. Egyptian spellings of Semitic words are approximations by design, produced by copyists with no alphabet for foreign consonants, and the equation of yhwa with YHWH is an inference from those conventions rather than something a reader can simply lift off the stone. Competent specialists reading the same signs reach different conclusions, and that is the honest state of the question.

Third, even granting the name, what is it labelling? These are toponym lists, and S. Ahituv catalogued the entry among Canaanite place names. Kennedy argues the other way: there is no land determinative after the name, no site anywhere in the region is called anything like it, and the names beside it on the same column look like deities - twr byl for the Canaanite storm god, bt an[t] for a "house of Anat." But a district named after a god and a god named on a list of districts are extremely hard to tell apart inside a cartouche, which is why the argument runs on.

Fourth, even granting a divine name, these are not Israelites. The inscription says Shasu. The first Egyptian text to name Israel is the Merneptah Stele, roughly two centuries later, and it calls Israel a people rather than a place. If every earlier step holds, what Soleb establishes is that Egypt knew of a nomadic group in the southern Levant associated with the name - evidence about where the worship of the God of Israel was known early, which is a real and significant thing, and not the same as a photograph of the Hebrews.

And behind all four sits a larger dispute the caption is often enlisted to settle. Whether the worship of YHWH has a southern origin at all is contested: a substantial body of German scholarship argues instead for a northern, Syrian derivation, and a 2017 collection of essays set that case beside the classical southern one and described the debate as unresolved and fierce. Where the app stands is this: the Soleb caption is probably the divine name, it is genuinely important, and it sits well with what Deuteronomy 33 and Judges 5 already say. Anyone who tells you it proves the Bible has walked past four arguments without stopping - and the reader will meet all four eventually, from someone less friendly.

Scripture references

Sources

Reflect

An Egyptian king carved this name onto a captive he claimed to have conquered. What does it change to know that the God you pray to first appears in the record as somebody else's prisoner?

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