The Beni Hasan Tomb Paintings

In the cliffside necropolis of Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, about 150 miles south of modern Cairo, a row of rock-cut tombs honors the provincial nomarchs of the Sixteenth Nome under the Twelfth Dynasty. The tomb of Khnumhotep II, cut into the cliff around 1890 BC during the reign of Senusret II, preserves on its painted walls one of the most arresting images of the patriarchal world surviving from antiquity. On the north wall of the chapel, a register depicts a delegation of thirty-seven Asiatic Semites — men, women, children, donkeys, harps, weapons, and trade goods — being presented to Khnumhotep by the scribe Neferhotep. The hieroglyphic caption identifies the chief as Abisha, a heqa-khasut (ruler of foreign lands, the term later associated with the Hyksos). Percy Newberry published the wall paintings in Beni Hasan, vol. 1, in 1893. The figures are dressed in elaborately patterned, multi-colored striped tunics — long robes worked in red, blue, and white panels of woven design. The men wear sandals and pointed beards; the women carry children on their hips. Donkeys laden with bellows, weapons, and goods follow the procession. The scene is the earliest detailed Egyptian depiction of Semitic visitors entering Egypt, and the closest visual analogue to the multi-colored ketonet passim given to Joseph in Genesis 37:3. The painting does not depict any specific patriarch — Abisha is not Abraham, and the procession is not Jacob's family — but it shows precisely the world the patriarchs would have moved through. Genesis 12 records Abraham going down to Egypt during a famine; Genesis 37 records Joseph carried into Egypt by Ishmaelite traders; Genesis 46 records Jacob and his sons making the same descent. James Hoffmeier has shown that Asiatic movement into Egypt during periods of food scarcity is documented across the Middle Kingdom administrative record. The Beni Hasan procession is the visual register of that traffic. The tomb is open to visitors, and the painting — fragile but largely intact after thirty-eight centuries — remains in situ on the chapel wall. Sources: Percy E. Newberry, Beni Hasan, vol. 1 (Egypt Exploration Fund, 1893); James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford, 1996); James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 1 (University of Chicago, 1906); Genesis 37:3 and Genesis 46:5–7.