The Bubastite Portal

On the southern exterior wall of the Bubastite Portal at the Karnak temple complex in Luxor, a vast hieroglyphic relief commissioned by Pharaoh Sheshonq I — the Shishak of the Hebrew Bible — preserves the most detailed Egyptian record of a campaign into the southern Levant. Sheshonq, founder of the Twenty-Second Dynasty and a Libyan by descent, commissioned the relief around 925 BC after his army returned from the north. The carving shows the king in the traditional smiting pose before Amun-Re, while ten registers of bound captive figures below list 154 cities and regions taken in the campaign. The Oriental Institute of Chicago published a full epigraphic copy of the relief in 1924; James Henry Breasted had transcribed portions earlier. The list is geographic. Many of the toponyms are securely identified — Beth-Horon, Aijalon, Megiddo, Taanach, Gibeon, Mahanaim, the Negev waystations along the road south. The route runs through territory held by both Rehoboam's Judah and Jeroboam's northern kingdom. 1 Kings 14:25–26 places Shishak's invasion in the fifth year of Rehoboam — five years after Solomon's death — and records that he carried away the treasures of Solomon's temple and the royal palace. 2 Chronicles 12 expands the account. The Karnak relief and the biblical narrative match in chronology, geography, and direction of march. The relief does not mention Jerusalem by name in a securely identifiable register, which has occasioned some scholarly debate; Kenneth Kitchen has argued the Jerusalem entry sits in a damaged section, while Yoel Levin and others have proposed alternative reconstructions of the campaign's southern arc. What is not in dispute is that an external Egyptian record of a Pharaoh named Sheshonq, dated to within a year of the biblical Shishak's invasion, names cities the biblical narrative places on his line of advance. The wealth Solomon had amassed at Jerusalem — and the geographic reach of the United Monarchy implied by the city list — both gain external footing here. The Bubastite Portal still stands at Karnak, weathered but legible, where Sheshonq had it cut nearly three thousand years ago. Sources: James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 4 (University of Chicago, 1906); The Epigraphic Survey, Reliefs and Inscriptions at Karnak III: The Bubastite Portal (Oriental Institute Publications 74, 1954, drawing on the 1924 fieldwork); Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003); James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, 1969); 1 Kings 14:25–26.