The Birth Certificate Issued as a Death Notice

There is a granite slab in Cairo, three metres high and black as a night sky, that contains the most gloriously backfired boast in three thousand years of recorded history. It was carved to announce that a people called Israel had been destroyed. Instead, it announced that Israel existed - and in doing so, handed that people the oldest written proof of their own name. The pharaoh who ordered it was called Merneptah. He probably thought he'd had the last word.

He hadn't, obviously. But you have to admire the irony of the thing: the first time the name Israel appears in any document, anywhere on earth, it appears in a sentence designed to erase it. That's not a footnote. That's the whole story in miniature - the empire in the headline, the tribe in the margin, and the tribe still here to read the headline three millennia later.

A pharaoh who wanted to be remembered

Merneptah was Ramesses the Great's thirteenth son, which is a difficult position to be in. His father reigned for sixty-six years and outlived twelve brothers ahead of him; by the time Merneptah finally took the throne, he was already in his sixties. He had a lot of catching up to do, and not much time to do it. So he did what pharaohs did: he fought, and he carved, and he made absolutely certain that stone would say what he needed it to say.

The stele is a victory hymn, composed around 1208 BCE to celebrate a military campaign in Canaan and Libya. It follows the conventions of the genre faithfully - a long recital of fallen enemies, each subdued and diminished in the formulaic language of Egyptian propaganda. City-states are mentioned by name: Ashkelon, Gezer, Yano'am. Then, in a single couplet near the end, comes the line that would make the whole monument famous three thousand years later: "Israel is laid waste, his seed is not."

Merneptah meant it as a flourish, a closing insult. The seed - the progeny, the harvest, the future - is declared gone. In the economy of Egyptian victory stelae, you couldn't say it more finally than that. He signed off, the stone was raised in the mortuary temple at Thebes, and presumably everyone got on with things.

The reverend who found it

It's 1896. Flinders Petrie is excavating at Thebes - an organised, meticulous excavation by the standards of the day, which were not especially high. He finds a large granite slab covered in hieroglyphs, and calls in his colleague Wilhelm Spiegelberg to help with the translation. Spiegelberg works through the text. Near the end, he pauses over a word he can't quite place. "I.si.ri.ar?" he reads, uncertain. Petrie looks over his shoulder and says: "Israel!"

Spiegelberg agrees that's right. And Petrie - surveyor, obsessive, absolutely not a religious man - looks up and says: "Won't the reverends be pleased?"

It's a perfect remark. The Victorian age had sent its clergymen and its funded polymaths to dig up the Holy Land looking for confirmation of the Bible, and here, in a single offhand comment from a dusty excavation tent, is Petrie's assessment of the whole enterprise: slightly amused, correctly predictive, not especially reverent. The reverends were, in fact, enormously pleased. Petrie noted at dinner that evening that the stele "will be better known in the world than anything else I have found." He was right about that too. It's the one thing most people, if pressed, know Petrie for. He found rather a lot of things.

What the hieroglyphs actually say

Here is the detail that turns a good story into a genuinely interesting one. In the list of Merneptah's defeated enemies, the city-states - Ashkelon, Gezer, Yano'am - are each marked with a specific hieroglyphic determinative: a sign indicating a fortified settlement, a place with walls and a citadel. When the scribe reached Israel, he used a different determinative entirely: a seated man and woman above three strokes, the sign for a people, a tribe, a group defined by descent rather than geography.

Egypt, in other words, knew that Israel wasn't a city. Israel was something else - a people, identified by lineage, existing somewhere in Canaan without the fixed infrastructure of a city-state. The scribe marked it correctly, which means Egypt had the category right. Whether that people was already on its way to becoming the kingdom the biblical narrative describes, or was still a highland farming culture with a shared identity, is a question the stele can't answer. But it can answer this: in 1208 BCE, from the Egyptian vantage point, Israel was real and identifiable enough to be worth naming. That's the birth certificate. That's what matters.

The stele also, incidentally, tells us something useful about what Egypt thought of Israel's military significance at the time: not much. The city-states get their own verb each. Israel gets a couplet, and the couplet's grammar is notably dismissive - "his seed is not" being the equivalent of a wave of the hand, a people too peripheral to require detailed treatment. Merneptah's scribe ranked Israel below Ashkelon. That ranking has not survived.

The longest footnote in history

The stele sat in its Cairo gallery for decades before the wider world caught up with what Petrie had found. It's different now. If you visit the Egyptian Museum today and find the room with the long black stone, you'll see it surrounded by people photographing a detail near the bottom of the inscription - a few signs among thousands, on a slab that spent most of its existence outdoors in Thebes being rained on by history. They're looking at line 27. You'd recognise it by where everyone stops.

There's something worth holding onto in the whole arrangement. Merneptah wanted permanence - the big stone, the mortuary temple, the victory hymn in the approved style. He got it, of a kind: his stone survived, his name is known. But the permanence he achieved isn't the permanence he intended. He's known almost entirely because of the people he said he'd destroyed. The monument to his victory is, three thousand years later, primarily evidence about those he defeated.

The tribe has read worse reviews. This one they frame.