When Pharaohs Ruled Jerusalem. By Peter van der Veen.

LADY IN RED. Dressed in a beaded wig and collar and holding a lotus scepter in her left hand, this rare 14-inch red granite statue of a Ramesside queen dates to the 19th Egyptian Dynasty (1280–1200 B.C.E.). Originally found by road pavers in Jerusalem in the 1920s, it gained interest when it resurfaced on a scholar’s bookshelf in Germany in 2006. R. Müller, Department of Prehistory, University of Mainz.

When Pharaohs Ruled Jerusalem. By Peter van der Veen. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (March/April 2013).

When Egyptian Pharaohs Ruled Bronze Age Jerusalem. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, February 25, 2013.

What’s an Egyptian Temple Doing in Jerusalem? By Gabriel Barkay. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May/June 2000). Also find it here.

A Late Bronze Age Temple in Jerusalem? By Gabriel Barkay. Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1/2 (1996).

Did Pharaoh Sheshonq Attack Jerusalem? By Yigal Levin. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 38, No. 4 (July/August 2012).

van der Veen:

Perhaps our most exciting find was recovered in Germany. One day in 2006, I received a telephone call from my colleague Alexander Schick. The previous day he had seen something quite remarkable on a bookshelf in the office of a senior scholar from northern Germany (who prefers to remain anonymous), namely the upper body of a statue of an Egyptian queen made of coarsely grained red granite, some 14 inches high.

How in the world did it get to Germany? In the 1920s, when Palestine was under the British Mandate, the father-in-law of the scholar on whose bookshelf the statue stood had served the German Lutheran church in an ecclesiastical capacity in Jerusalem. At that time some Arab workmen discovered the statue in the gravel underneath the road they were paving. As the clergyman’s house was nearest to the place of the statue’s discovery, it was brought to the clergyman, and it has remained in the family’s possession ever since.

The red granite statue has now been fully studied by Egyptologist Simone Burger-Robin of Brussels, an expert in Ramesside statuary, who confirms that it definitely depicts a queen. Although the face is damaged, the other details are very clear. The royal lady wears a heavy wig with elaborate beading, originally mounted by a vulture crown. Her dress is close fitting with a beaded collar. She holds a lotus scepter in her left hand. Although no inscription remains on the statue, Burger-Robin concludes from its style that the provenance most likely falls within the reign of Ramesses II or of his son Merneptah (c. 1280–1200 B.C.E.). This date is fully concordant with the other finds from Jerusalem.

While male pharaonic statues are rare in Israel, queens’ statues are almost unknown. The only other one found in the entire southern Levant (it was found in a survey near Ashdod, in a coastal area where the Egyptians were especially active) includes a small inscribed fragment; she is apparently the daughter of Ramesses II.

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All these finds seem to confirm American archaeologist Carolyn Higginbotham’s summary of the situation. The Ramesside pharaohs of the 19th Dynasty used local vassal rulers to run daily affairs in Jerusalem, as had their Amarna-period predecessors of the 18th Dynasty, but the pharaohs also sent out royal envoys to gather taxes and watch over the provinces.

From the next period—just prior to David’s conquest of Jerusalem in about 1000 B.C.E.—we have almost no evidence of an Egyptian presence here—perhaps a few sherds at most.

The tenth-century B.C.E. pharaohs who were contemporaries of Solomon and his son Rehoboam, however, seem to have reasserted their age-old claim on Jerusalem, now firmly in Israelite hands. As the Bible tells us, Pharaoh Shishak sent his army north in about 925 B.C.E., in year 5 of the reign of King Solomon’s son and successor Rehoboam (1 Kings 14:25). This is substantiated by Egyptian records: The Biblical Shishak, believed by most scholars to be the Libyan Pharaoh Sheshonq referred to in Egyptian texts, mounted a major attack into Canaan at this time. Although the Bible says he attacked Jerusalem, the Egyptian account does not include Jerusalem among the named cities he conquered. This may be because the name Jerusalem has not survived in the partially preserved Egyptian account. In any event, Sheshonq appears to have passed through the Jerusalem area when his army crossed over to the Jordan Valley.

In short, the Egyptians apparently ruled the area in the period before the Israelites consolidated their grip on the central highlands during Iron Age I (1200–1000 B.C.E.). The evidence of Egyptian dominance seems to have ended, however, at the time the Israelites fully settled the land in this period. But the Egyptians reasserted their power again in about 925 B.C.E. with Shishak/Sheshonq’s invasion of Canaan.

This certainly makes me wonder: Was David able to conquer Jerusalem (in about 1000 B.C.E.) because it was defended only by the Jebusite/Canaanites, without any Egyptian presence in the city?

Of course the absence of evidence—either textual or archaeological—of an Egyptian presence in Jerusalem in the period just before David’s conquest of the city or during his reign may be accidental. Or it may not be.