On the southern wall of the great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, registered among the war reliefs Seti I commissioned in the early Nineteenth Dynasty, a large-scale geographic list names the Canaanite and Levantine cities the pharaoh's army took during his major Asiatic campaign of c. 1290 BC. The relief was published in epigraphic copy by William F. Edgerton and James A. Wilson in Historical Records of Ramses III and the related Karnak volumes; the campaign itself has been treated in detail by Donald Redford and James Hoffmeier. The cities named include Beth-Shean, Yenoam, Pehel, Hammath, Acco, Tyre, and others — a roster that traces the route of an Egyptian army moving up the Jordan Valley and along the coast. The Beit Shean stelae make the list concrete on the ground. In 1923 the University of Pennsylvania expedition to Beth-Shean recovered two large basalt victory stelae of Seti I from the Late Bronze city, set up to commemorate his pacification of the surrounding region — the Apiru harassments at Mount Yarmuth and the alliance against the city of Rehob. The stelae are now held at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. They are the physical signature of the campaign the Karnak relief lists. The Karnak roster matters for biblical history because the cities it names are the same cities Joshua 17 and Judges 1 record as Canaanite and Egyptian-controlled at the moment of the Israelite settlement. Joshua 17:11–13 records that Manasseh could not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-Shean, Taanach, Megiddo, and Dor; Judges 1:27 repeats the list. 1 Samuel 31 records the Philistines hanging Saul's body on the wall of Beth-Shean a quarter-millennium later. The Egyptian relief, dated to within a generation of the conventional Late Bronze settlement chronology, places those exact cities under Egyptian military authority — confirming both the geography and the political register the biblical text describes. The Hypostyle Hall reliefs remain in situ at Karnak, weathered but legible, where Seti's craftsmen cut them more than three thousand years ago. Sources: William F. Edgerton and James A. Wilson, Historical Records of Ramses III (University of Chicago, 1936), with related Epigraphic Survey volumes for the Seti I reliefs; Donald B. Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton, 1992); James K. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai (Oxford, 2005); Frances W. James, The Iron Age at Beth Shan (University Museum, 1966); Joshua 17:11–13.
Seti I's Karnak list, dated to c. 1290 BC, names Beth-Shean, Yenoam, and Pehel as Egyptian-controlled Canaanite cities precisely when Joshua and Judges record Israelite settlement encountering those same urban centers under foreign authority — anchoring the biblical political geography in contemporary Egyptian administrative and military documentation.