Story

The Beni Hasan Tomb Painting

c. 1900 BCE

Biblical Narrative

Genesis describes a world of West Semitic herdsmen with their flocks and donkeys, drifting between Canaan and Egypt as the seasons and the famines drove them. Abraham went down to Egypt during a famine; Isaac was warned not to; Jacob's sons went down twice for grain, and the second time the family followed and stayed. The picture is of a permeable border, of small clans bringing their livestock and a few possessions and presenting themselves before whatever Egyptian official held the frontier-fortress that day.

For most of the past two thousand years, that picture had to be taken on faith. Then, in 1893, the British Egyptologist Percy Newberry published the painted reliefs from a Middle Kingdom tomb in the cliffs above the Nile at Beni Hasan, two hundred kilometres south of Cairo. On the north wall of the second register of the tomb of the nomarch Khnumhotep II, dated by inscription to the sixth year of Pharaoh Senusret II — 1892 BCE — was a procession of thirty-seven Asiatic Semites, men women and children, leading donkeys laden with bellows and ibex, presenting themselves before a Beni Hasan official.

The leader of the group is named in the accompanying hieroglyphic legend: Abisha, hekau-khasut, 'ruler of foreign lands' — the technical term that Manetho would later transliterate into Greek as Hyksos. He carries a curved throw-stick over his shoulder. The men wear striped multicoloured tunics fastened on one shoulder. The women carry their children on their backs in slings. They have brought goods to trade — black eye-paint, dressed leather, ibex — and they are being received in friendly audience by the Egyptian governor.

It is the closest thing to a snapshot of patriarchal-era life that has ever been recovered. The Semites of Beni Hasan are not Israelites; the procession is a century or so before the date Genesis would assign to Abraham; they come from the eastern desert, not Canaan. But they are exactly the kind of people the patriarchal narratives describe — Asiatic Semitic clan-leaders bringing livestock down to Egypt — caught in the act of doing exactly what Genesis says they did, and painted in colours that, four thousand years later, are still bright on the limestone wall.

And the famine was sore in the land of Canaan. And it came to pass, when they had eaten up the corn which they had brought out of Egypt, their father said unto them, Go again, buy us a little food.Genesis 43:1-2

Archaeology · History · Genetics

Beni Hasan is a cliff necropolis on the east bank of the Nile, 23 km south of al-Minya, containing 39 rock-cut tombs of the Twelfth-Dynasty nomarchs of the Oryx Nome (the sixteenth Upper Egyptian nome). The tombs were cut into the limestone cliff during the reigns of Amenemhat I, Senusret I, Amenemhat II, and Senusret II — c. 1991-1878 BCE. Tomb 3, that of Khnumhotep II, is the largest and most elaborately decorated; the so-called 'Asiatic procession' occupies the upper register of the north wall.

The site was first systematically recorded by John Garstang and Percy Newberry on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund in the 1890s; Newberry's two-volume Beni Hasan (1893-1894) remains the foundational publication. The reliefs were re-recorded with modern photography by the Australian Centre for Egyptology under Naguib Kanawati from 1990, with the multi-volume Beni Hassan series superseding earlier facsimiles.

The hieroglyphic caption to the procession is short but legally precise: it identifies Abisha as a hekau-khasut, names the dignitary's group as 'thirty-seven', and lists the gifts they bring. The term hekau-khasut is the technical Egyptian designation for an Asiatic chieftain in the Middle Kingdom; centuries later Manetho preserved it in Greek as Hyksos, the dynasty-label of the Fifteenth-Dynasty Asiatic kings of Avaris. Abisha is therefore not an Israelite ancestor but an early documented case of the same socio-political category from which the later Hyksos pharaohs emerged.

Identifications of Abisha himself with biblical figures — popular in nineteenth-century devotional literature, where he was sometimes called 'the brother of Abraham' — have no scholarly basis. The personal name Abisha (ʾbiš) is West Semitic and well-attested in Bronze Age inscriptions; it is no more 'biblical' than 'Joseph' or 'Reuben' would be in a contemporary Levantine context. The historical value of the relief is not as a picture of any specific patriarch but as evidence of routine and substantial Semitic clan-mobility into Middle Kingdom Egypt — the exact migratory pattern Genesis presupposes.

The Beni Hasan procession is the single most important visual document we possess of West Semitic pastoralists in early second-millennium Egypt; without it the patriarchal narratives would have no pictorial corroboration.Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (2003)