Kings reports that in the fifth year of Rehoboam — Solomon's son — the Egyptian king Shishak came up and carried off the treasures of Jerusalem's temple and palace. On a great wall at Karnak, the pharaoh Shoshenq I (the Shishak of the Bible) left his own record of that campaign: the god Amun hands him rows of bound captive towns, each labelled with a Palestinian place-name — well over a hundred of them, running from the Negev up into the north. A broken piece of a victory monument Shoshenq set up was even dug out of the ruins of Megiddo itself.
- What it is
- A triumphal relief and topographical town-list on the Bubastite Portal at the temple of Karnak, plus a fragment of a victory stela found at Megiddo
- Date of artifact
- c. 925 BC
- Discovered
- Karnak, Thebes, Egypt (relief); Megiddo, Israel (stela fragment), 1926 (the relief has long been known; the Megiddo fragment was found by the Oriental Institute expedition)
- Where it is now
- Relief in situ at Karnak; Megiddo fragment in museum collections
- Related to
- Pharaoh Shishak's invasion of Judah in the reign of Rehoboam
- Scripture
- 1 Kings 14:25–26 · 2 Chronicles 12:1–9
What this find showsAn Egyptian pharaoh, Shoshenq I, campaigned across Israel and Judah around 925 BC — an independent Egyptian record of the same king and raid that Kings dates to Rehoboam's reign, anchoring the chronology of the divided monarchy.
What it does not proveShoshenq's surviving list does not name Jerusalem, so the specific stripping of the temple rests on the biblical account; the two records overlap at the level of the campaign, not of every detail.
Sources & further reading