Who Was Buried in the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter?

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The Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter is one of Jerusalem’s most neglected sites, despite being one of the most complete, distinctive and magnificent First Temple period tombs in the city.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the City of David, the ridge south of the Temple Mount where the original city of Jerusalem was located. The imposing Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter sits in the village of Silwan, overlooking the City of David on the opposite hill to the east. But no one goes there.

Perhaps that is because the Silwan villagers are now, as they have been historically, an unfriendly lot. Many 19th-century scholars refrained from exploring the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter (or the cave tombs of Silwan) because of the attitude of the local inhabitants. Charles Warren, the famous 19th-century British surveyor of Jerusalem, described the people of Silwan as “a lawless set, credited with being the most unscrupulous ruffians in Palestine.” Another account from the same period tells us that the Silwan villagers are “a vicious, quarrelsome and 042 dishonest set of people, and noted for such propensities for centuries past.”^a

It was also a dirty place. Warren’s equally famous colleague Charles Wilson wrote that “the houses and streets of Siloam [another name for Silwan] are filthy in the extreme.” One of a number of First Temple tombs in Silwan, the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter was cleaned during a survey of the area after the 1967 Six-Day War.¹ Today, however, garbage is piling up around it once again. Hardly surprising that visitors to the site are rare.

The Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter was not built but rather hewn out of the rocky escarpment. It is a monolith, made of a single block of rock, disengaged on all sides except the base. A wide passageway encloses the back and two sides while the façade faces the City of David. The top of the façade is decorated with an Egyptian cornice, consisting of a projecting horizontal band faced with a convex molding known as an ovolo, topped by a carved concave band called a cavetto. Above the Egyptian cornice is a kind of architrave.

In a recent examination of the tomb, I was able to identify the indistinct remnants of incised, equilateral, upward-pointing triangles decorating the area just below the Egyptian cornice. This decoration is very shallow and hard to see; it is best viewed in the early dawn light. Earlier researchers did not notice this decoration because of the difficulty in seeing it; initially, I also took it for an illusion rather than the remnant of a real decoration. 043 But repeated visits under varying light conditions and close scrutiny of photographs of the façade revealed that these were indeed remnants of such ornamentation.

The façade of the tomb is beautifully worked. The rock face has been smoothed so well that even the chisel marks have been erased.

We may assume that the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter and its decorated façade were originally accentuated by various colors of paint, like the Egyptian temples from which the monument drew its inspiration. This is only an assumption, however, since no traces of paint remain today.

The tomb entrance leads to a small passageway chamber, which opens into a rectangular burial chamber in the heart of the monument. The ceiling of this chamber is gabled, like others found in burial caves hewn into the Silwan escarpment.

In the Byzantine period (fourth–sixth centuries C.E.), monks lived in the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter (and other Silwan caves). Unfortunately, they made “improvements,” including raising the height of the low rectangular entrance to the tomb. In so doing, they cut through and destroyed an inscription on a sunken panel above the original entrance. We know this because one-and-a-half letters from the inscription have survived on the left side.² One letter—the last in the inscription—is clear, the Hebrew letter resh. The next-to-last (Hebrew reads from right to left) has only been partially preserved. But it, too, looks like a resh.

Based on the size of the single wholly surviving letter (it is nearly 5 in tall), we can say that this inscription contained the largest letters of any known Hebrew inscription from the time of the Hebrew Bible.

I think we can even reconstruct the inscription’s message. It was inscribed on a specially recessed panel above the door. We know where the panel ended; we also know where it began because its right side is also preserved, although without any letters remaining. Based on the length of the panel and the size of the surviving letter, we can estimate that the inscription contained 20–22 letters.

If the last letter of the inscription ended with resh–resh, the word was probably ’RR (ארר), meaning “cursed.” This reconstruction conforms well with the wording of curse formulas against grave robbers known from other burial inscriptions discovered in the Silwan tombs. The inscription on the famous Tomb of the Royal Steward includes the words “cursed be the man who opens this.”³ The word “curse” appears in a number of other burial contexts in ancient Israel: in a burial cave at Khirbet el-Qom, in a cave at Khirbet Beit Lei and in a cave near En Gedi.⁴ In still another inscription nearby, the words “He who op[ens]…” seem to be the beginning of a curse. I would reconstruct it: “He who op[ens this be cursed.]” I think we are justified, therefore, in assuming that the inscription on the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter was a curse formula against anyone who might break into the tomb.

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Based on the size of its letters, the funerary inscription on the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter is one of the most magnificent ancient Hebrew inscriptions found in the Land of Israel.

Who was buried in the tomb? One thing is certain: It was only one person.

The Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter differs from most First Temple period cave tombs. The latter are family tombs with multiple burials. The Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter belongs to a small group of First Temple tombs consisting of above-ground architecture. The only known examples are in Jerusalem. Four of these monolithic above-ground tombs have been found in Silwan.⁵ The monolithic tombs were obviously for high-ranking state officials, most visible in the titular inscription “Royal Steward” on one of the monolithic tombs of Silwan.^b The Bible mentions the Tomb of Shebna, the royal steward in the days of Hezekiah. God asks Shebna why he “cut out a tomb here for yourself, cutting a tomb on the height, and carving a habitation for yourself in the rock?” (Isaiah 22:16). Shebna’s tomb is in a row of tombs located a short distance from the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter.

In the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter, the space for the body is marked by a rectangular indentation in the left wall of the burial chamber. David Ussishkin, who led the survey of the Silwan tombs after the Six-Day War, assumed that the remains of the deceased were laid on a rock shelf, which was severely damaged by alterations of the burial chamber during the Byzantine period. Burial shelves have been found in hundreds of First Temple period burial caves in Judah and Jerusalem and are generally raised about 3 feet off the ground. The burial shelves in Silwan are somewhat lower. In the case of the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter, the scant remains and analogies led Ussishkin to conclude that the burial shelf was only 6 inches above the floor. No other burial shelf in Judah has been found so close to the ground.

I believe this makes it highly unlikely that there was a burial shelf here. The remains of the raised space in the burial chamber of the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter indicate a sarcophagus—a coffin hewn out of the rock—rather than a burial shelf. The coffin was apparently cut out of the bedrock of the cave, with three chamber walls serving as its sides. On the open side, the coffin’s rock-cut wall was destroyed by the Byzantine monks. The bottom of the coffin was raised almost 6 inches, or two handbreadths, off the floor. Seven handbreadths, each equivalent to just under 3 inches, made up one common royal Egyptian cubit. The 29.5-inch width of the space is exactly equivalent to an ancient measurement of 10 handbreadths.

The remains of a similarly attached rock sarcophagus can be seen in another Silwan tomb nearby (No. 2 in Ussishkin’s survey). The plan of this cave tomb is identical to the internal structure of the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter. There, the coffin hewn out of the bedrock has 045 been preserved. It is bathtub-shaped, with one free-standing side fully carved out of the rock.

Two additional coffins carved out of bedrock were found in one of the tombs south of the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem’s western necropolis, and three other similar coffins were found in the innermost chamber of one of the caves of St. Étienne’s Monastery (the École Biblique) in Jerusalem’s northern necropolis.

Further evidence of a coffin in the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter comes from a fragment of a gabled coffin lid found in secondary use in the stone fence surrounding the tomb. The shape and finely worked stone justify Ussishkin’s assumption that it was part of a coffin lid, although Ussishkin did not attribute the stone to the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter, where he believed the deceased was laid on a low open surface. That a fragment of a coffin lid was found in such close proximity to the tomb supports the conclusion that the deceased in the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter was indeed interred in a stone coffin.

We have already looked at the most arresting external feature of the tomb—the Egyptian cornice. Other aspects are less obvious. There is no doubt that the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter was planned and hewn using the royal long Egyptian cubit, which was the accepted measurement in state-sponsored architecture during the Iron Age in Israel and Judah. This cubit measured just over 048 20 inches, and this standard conforms to the general measurements of the monument and its details, both outside and in the burial chamber, as already noted.

In 1954, my mentor Professor Nahman Avigad published his book on the ancient monuments of the Kidron Valley, containing the results of his fieldwork between 1945 and 1947.⁶ Avigad was the first to discern tangible remains of a pyramid on the roof of the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter (first proposed by Otto Puchstein; see sidebar). It is now universally accepted that the monument was topped with a pyramid. The pyramid was destroyed by quarrying for building stones, but some remnants have survived.

The tomb chamber also has a gabled roof, another feature that may be considered Egyptian. The general appearance of the tomb imitates the style of Egyptian chapels from the New Kingdom period (16th–11th centuries B.C.E.).

Several early explorers noted the resemblance of the monument to Egyptian temples. These authors sometimes described it as an Egyptian temple or an Egyptian altar. The details of the gabled ceiling, the Egyptian cornice and the pyramid on the roof are typically Egyptian. No other monument from the early Biblical period in the Land of Israel has such outstandingly Egyptian characteristics.

So who was buried in the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter?

It was inevitable that early researchers (and some modern Bible lovers) would suggest the obvious answer: King Solomon’s wife, of course. According to the Bible, “Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt; he took Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her into the city of David” (1 Kings 3:1). As a dowry for his daughter, Pharaoh gave the city of Gezer to Solomon (1 Kings 9:16).

So is this the tomb of Pharaoh’s daughter who married Solomon?

Alas, this is surely not the case. Any connection between the tomb’s Egyptian characteristics and its popular name is entirely coincidental.

The date of the tomb is well established in the latter part of the First Temple period, about the eighth–seventh centuries B.C.E. We know this for several reasons. For instance, the surviving letter resh can be dated paleographically to the end of the First Temple period, several hundred years too late for King Solomon. The nearby Tomb of the Royal Steward has a longer surviving inscription, which shares and confirms the paleographic date of the letter on the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter.

To date the tomb more precisely, we should try to identify a period in which such major Egyptian influence would have been visible in the Kingdom of Judah. The time of King Hezekiah (727–698 B.C.E.) seems the most likely period, historically 049 speaking, for the hewing of a monumental tomb of this type. Hezekiah’s rebellion against Assyria in the end of the eighth century B.C.E. could explain the penetration of Egyptian cultural influence into Jerusalem at the time. After the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., and after the takeover of the Nubian 25th Dynasty in Egypt, diplomatic ties between Judah and Egypt were strengthened. These Egyptian ties are clearly expressed by the prophet Isaiah (e.g., in Isaiah 30:1–5 and 31:1–3). The dating of the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter to the eighth century B.C.E., the time of King Hezekiah of Judah, is quite reasonable.

How then to explain the common popular name of the tomb?

Ancient monumental structures were often named after pharaohs simply because the king of Egypt was a greatly admired figure in the Arab tradition. That is how one of the temples in Petra from the Roman period came to be named Qasr bint Fira‘un, or “the Palace of Pharaoh’s Daughter.” The most magnificent of the tombs greeting visitors to Petra is named Khiznet Fira‘un, or “Pharaoh’s Treasury.” The Arabs dubbed the island south of Eilat Jezirat Fira‘un, or “Pharaoh’s Island,” a title that still stands today and marks the surviving medieval fortifications,

The tombs in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem also received “pharaonic” names. The Arabs called Absalom’s Pillar Tanturat Fira‘un, which means “Pharaoh’s Pointed Head Gear,” and the tomb of the priests of the House of Hezir became known as Diwan Fira‘un, or “Pharaoh’s Parlor.” The traditional tomb of Zechariah was called the tomb of Jawzat Fira‘un, or “Pharaoh’s Wife.” The Arabs called the part of the Kidron Valley at the foot of Silwan Wadi Fira‘un, or “Pharaoh’s Valley.” It should therefore come as no surprise that the monument in the village of Silwan was—and is still—called Kubr bint Fira‘un, or the “Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter.”

So who was buried in the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter? We don’t know his name, but he was undoubtedly a prominent public figure, obviously one of the leading officials of the Kingdom of Judah in the late First Temple period, earning him the privilege of such a distinctive funerary monument.⁷

The Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter is one of Jerusalem’s most neglected sites, despite being one of the most complete, distinctive and magnificent First Temple period tombs in the city. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the City of David, the ridge south of the Temple Mount where the original city of Jerusalem was located. The imposing Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter sits in the village of Silwan, overlooking the City of David on the opposite hill to the east. But no one goes there. Perhaps that is because the Silwan villagers are now, as they have been historically, […]