To curse their enemies, Egyptian ritualists would inscribe their names on bowls or clay figurines and smash them. The lists happen to preserve the oldest written mentions of several Canaanite cities — including Jerusalem, Shechem, Hazor and Ashkelon — while they were still Bronze Age towns, centuries before the events set in them.
- What it is
- Egyptian curse texts written on pottery bowls and clay captive-figurines, naming hostile foreign peoples and cities
- Date of artifact
- c. 20th–18th century BC
- Discovered
- Egypt (Saqqara, the Theban region and elsewhere) (published by Kurt Sethe and Georges Posener)
- Where it is now
- Museums in Cairo, Berlin and Brussels
- Related to
- The earliest written mentions of cities later central to the biblical story
- Scripture
- Genesis 14 · Joshua 10–11
What this find showsThat key cities of the biblical narrative already existed and were named in the patriarchal period — Jerusalem among them.
What it does not proveThey name no biblical person or event; they attest only that the cities were there.
Sources & further reading