Pithome

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Pithom (also Pitom ) is a biblical place name that is mentioned in the 2nd book of Moses (Ex 1,11) next to Ramses as a city that the Israelites should have built (see Excerpt from Egypt ). It is the Hebrew form of the ancient Egyptian Pi-Tum (also Pi-Atum or Per-Atum , from pr-Jtm - "House of Atum "). This name first appears at the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom . The ancient Greek form Patumos has been handed down through Herodotus .

The place was definitely in Wadi Tumilat , a 50 km long valley in the eastern Nile Delta . It is disputed which archaeological site the name is associated with. There are Tell el-Maschuta or Tell er-Retaba in question.

Written evidence

The Egyptian pi-atum

The use of the word Pi or Per in place names is essential. It had extensive use in ancient Egyptian texts and is derived from pr "house". The expression referred to, among other things, the temple of a god and, in a larger context, the temple area or the domain of a god. In this sense, it covered a much larger area than the actual temple and could designate an entire city.

The Papyrus Anastasi VI, which dates to the time of Merenptah , mentions that Shasu- Bedouins from Edom were allowed to pass through the fortress "Merenptah-Hetephermaat". This enabled them to get to the lakes of Pi-Atum, which is in the Tjeku region, to feed their herds. Interestingly, the lakes that refer to Pi-Atum are not indicated by the Egyptian scribes with the Egyptian word, but with the Semitic loan word brkw.t in syllabic writing. Manfred Bietak assumes that an originally Egyptian name has been replaced by this idiomatic expression. The region must therefore have been inhabited by a Semitic-speaking population for a long time.

Among the finds from Tell el-Maschuta there are two objects that relate to Pi-Atum, all others use the term Tjeku. The statue of a scribe, dated to the reign of Osorkon II , mentions the "House of Atum" ( pr-Jtm ) as part of its title. The pithom stele from the time of Ptolemy II mentions the place name three times, in the 13th line as "Pi-Atum of Tjeku".

The place name Tjeku probably originally referred to the entire region of Wadi Tumilat . But it is also connected to the Tell el-Maschuta site. The Arabic name of today's village still contains the linguistic element ṯkw . The Hebrew Sukkot (Ex 12.37) is also traced back to the Egyptian Tjeku.

The Hebrew pitom

In the second book of Moses the events surrounding the exodus from Egypt are described (chapters 1–15). It says that the Israelites were used to labor to build the storage cities of Ramses and Pithom (Ex 1:11). The linguistic equation of Pitom with Pi-Atum is undisputed.

For Jan Assmann, however, the designation storage city ​​does not seem to fit the function of the city of Pi-Atum: "Storage cities" are stations that were set up with supplies to supply the army and with garrisons to secure the major campaign routes.

Other names

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus traveled to Egypt at the time of the first Persian rule (around 450 BC) and wrote about it in the second book of his histories. In it he mentions that the canal, which was started under Necho II and led from an arm of the Nile near Bubastis through the Wadi Tumliat to the Red Sea, flows past "the Arab city of Patumos". The equation of Patumos with Pi-Atum is also undisputed.

A Latin inscription was found in Tell el-Maschuta, which gives the place name "Ero (castra)". Apparently it is an equivalent of the Greek Heroonpolis. In the translation of the Septuagint (Gen 46:28) Heroonpolis stands for the Hebrew place name Gosen. The Coptic Bible translation (in the Bohairian dialect) in turn replaces Heroonpolis with Pethom.

Tell er-Retaba and Tell el-Maschuta

Ramses II kills an "Asian" before the god Atum ("Lord of Tjeku"); Redrawing a relief from Tell er-Retaba

The Tell er-Retaba site contains a fortress from the New Kingdom . Ramses II built a temple there for the cult of "Atum, Lord of Tjeku". A stele and a statue show him together with this god. Ramses III. strengthened the fortress and erected other monuments. During the New Kingdom (approx. 1550-1070 BC), the fortress city was the only larger town in Wadi Tumilat and only from 600 to 400 BC. Uninhabited.

In Tell el-Maschuta existed while in the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1650-1550 v. Chr.) A Hyksos -Siedlung, however, is for the period of the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1070 v. Chr.) And the Third Intermediate Period (approx. 1070–652 BC) no settlement found. Only in the 7th century BC The place was re-founded. During this time, Necho II. Between 610 and 605 BC. Create the Bubastis Canal to connect the Pelusian arm of the Nile to the Red Sea . The newly created site of Tell el-Maschuta initially served as a warehouse for the workers involved in building the canal. A short time later, Apis bulls were sacrificed there and facilities were built for the later Temple of Atum.

The older monuments of the Ramessid and Third Intermediate Period that were found in Tell el-Maschuta must therefore have been transported there later, probably from Tell er-Retaba. The archaeological evidence suggests that Tell el-Maschuta was the successor settlement of Tell er-Retaba and that it was re-established a little further east when Necho II had the canal built through Wadi Tumilat.

ID

Kenneth A. Kitchen said that Tell er-Retaba (Pithom) and Tell el-Maschuta (Tjeku) coexisted in the New Kingdom. The ceramic findings, however, clearly contradict this assumption: the Wadi Tumilat project did not find a single one of the hundreds of thousands of ceramic shards dating to the 18th or 19th dynasty.

Jansen-Winkeln assumes that both Tell er-Retaba and the successor settlement Tell el-Maschuta were named Tjeku (in the narrower sense) and Per-Atum (Pitom), although the latter is only explicitly documented for Tell el-Maschuta is.

Redford advocates a clear identification of Pitom with Tell el-Maschuta. Rainer Albertz agrees with this view . On the basis that the settlement of Tell el-Maschuta was not until the 7th century BC. He assumes that the author of the final composition of the Exodus story named a city that was founded in his presence in the 6th century BC. Was widely known, but did not exist in the Ramesside period. Thus, in his opinion, the mention of the city of Pitom is an anachronism .

In contrast, Bietak clearly identifies the place name Pithom with Tell er-Retaba. The identification with Tell el-Maschuta could at best be interpreted as the relocation of the Temple of Pi-Atum from Tell er-Retaba to Tell el-Maschuta. So it seems certain that the temple in Tell er-Retaba was dedicated to the god Atum. That would mean that this was a pr-Jtm - "House of Atum" -.

literature

  • Alan H. Gardiner : The Delta Residence of the Ramessides. In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology. Volume 5, 1918, pp. 242-271.
  • John S. Holladay: Pithom. In: Donald B. Redford (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, pp. 50-53.
  • Eric P. Uphill: Pithom and Raamses. Their Location and Significance. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies . Volume 27, No. 4, 1968, pp. 291-316.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eric P. Uphill: Pithom and Raamses. Their Location and Significance. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies . Volume 27, Number 4, 1968, p. 291.
  2. ↑ On the vocalization of the Egyptian pr, see Donald B. Redford: The Pronunciation of Pr in Late Toponyms. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Volume 22, Number 2, 1963, pp. 119-122.
  3. ↑ Eric P. Uphill: Pithom and Raamses. Their Location and Significance. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Volume 27, Number 4, 1968, p. 292.
  4. ↑ Raphael Giveon: Les bedouins Shosou of documents égyptiens. Brill, Leiden 1971, pp. 131-134.
  5. ^ Manfred Bietak, On the Historicity of the Exodus: What Egyptology Today Can Contribute to Assessing the Biblical Account of the Sojourn in Egypt. In: Thomas E. Levy, Thomas Schneider, William HC Propp (Eds.): Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective. Text, Archeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer, Cham, u. a. 2015, p. 21.
  6. ↑ Eric P. Uphill: Pithom and Raamses. Their Location and Significance. In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Volume 27, Number 4, 1968, p. 291.
  7. ↑ Stephen O. Moshier, James K. Hoffmeier: Which Way Out of Egypt? Physical Geography Related to the Exodus Itinerary. In: Thomas E. Levy, Thomas Schneider, William HC Propp (Eds.): Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective. Text, Archeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer, Cham, u. a. 2015, p. 106.
  8. ↑ Jan Assmann: Exodus. The Old World Revolution. Beck, Munich 2015, p. 123.
  9. ↑ a b c d Karl Jansen-Winkeln: Pitom . In: www.bibelwissenschaft.de (created: March 2007; accessed: March 2016).
  10. ↑ WM Flinders Petrie: Hyksos and Israelite cities. Office of School of Archeology / Bernard Quaritch, London 1906 ( online ).
  11. ↑ John S. Holladay: Tell el-Maskhuta. Preliminary Report on the Wadi Tumilat Project 1978-1979. Undena, Malibu 1982.
  12. ↑ John S. Holladay: Tell el-Maskhuta. In: KA Bard (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Archeology of Ancient Egypt. Routledge, London / New York 1999, pp. 786-789.
  13. ↑ John S. Holladay: Pithom. In: DB Redford (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, pp. 50-53.
  14. ↑ Carol A. Redmount: On an Egyptian / Asiatic Frontier. An Archaeological History of the Wadi Tumilat. Dissertation, Chicago 1989.
  15. ↑ Kenneth A. Kitchen: On the Reliability of the Old Testament. Eerdmans, Cambridge 2003, pp. 256-259, note 35.
  16. ^ Karl Jansen-Winkeln: Pitom . In: www.bibelwissenschaft.de with reference to John S. Holladay: Pithom. In: DB Redford (Ed.): The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. Volume 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, p. 51.
  17. ^ Donald B. Redford: Pithom. In: Wolfgang Helck (Hrsg.): Lexikon der Ägyptologie (LÄ). Volume IV, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1982, ISBN 3-447-02262-0 , Sp. 1054-1058.
  18. ^ Rainer Albertz: Exodus 1-18. Theological Publishing House Zurich, Zurich 2012, p. 29.
  19. ^ Manfred Bietak, On the Historicity of the Exodus: What Egyptology Today Can Contribute to Assessing the Biblical Account of the Sojourn in Egypt. In: Thomas E. Levy, Thomas Schneider, William HC Propp: Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective. Springer, Cham u. a. 2015, pp. 25–26 and note 39.